The man who gunned down five people and wounded 16 in an Illinois classroom rampage was a loner who preferred studying to partying and was obsessed with an ultra-violent video game, dormitory mates said yesterday.
Stephen Kazmierczak, 27, played the wildly popular game Counter-Strike while studying sociology at Northern Illinois University in 2003 and 2004.
“He played a lot of video games, especially Counter-Strike, really loud,” said dorm mate Ben Woloszyn, 24.
In the game, players use imaginary money to buy shotguns, pistols and other equipment they need to move around an imaginary world in which they’re constantly under threat of being killed by roving terrorists.
In real life, Kazmierczak – who had become “erratic” recently after shunning medication for an undisclosed illness – purchased weapons like those used in Counter-Strike, including a Glock handgun and a pump-action Remington shotgun, which he bought legally on Feb. 9.
He had two other pistols that cops said were also bought legally, though they weren’t sure when.
Police wouldn’t say why Kazmierczak stopped taking his medication, or what is was for.
Though a loner, Kazmierczak wasn’t antisocial, said acquaintances. He had been an officer in the campus chapter of the American Correctional Association.
He worked briefly as a full-time correction officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Indiana, but his tenure there lasted only from Sept. 24 to Oct. 9, after which Indiana prisons spokesman Doug Garrison said “he just didn’t show up one day.”
Kazmierczak also had a short-lived stint in the Army. He enlisted in the Army in September 2001, but was discharged in February 2002 for an “unspecified” reason, said an Army spokesman.
He got his undergraduate degree in 2006, and was enrolled in Northern Illinois’ graduate school last spring. More recently, he’d enrolled in grad school at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
“He was a really quiet guy. Something about him wasn’t quite right – he was kind of off,” said Jarrod Rice, 23, another dorm mate.
At around 3 p.m. Thursday, Kazmierczak shot up a class containing between 70 and 100 students before killing himself.
“He had a blank look on his face. He was there to kill,” said witness Sam Brunell, 18. “Anyone that could walk into a room and just start shooting has no emotions.”