Update: Thank so much for the sympathy and support! I have a friend coming over in about a half an hour. She's meeting me at my apartment, and we are going to the "Protect NIU from Westboro" meeting. I'll let you all know how it goes.
Update #2: It turns out the meeting was to build the tarps. Westboro is going to be protesting at at least 2 of the victims funerals, and, since they will be in the area, they are also stopping at a soldier's funeral in the area. The tarps are for all of those.
My friend and I took a walk down to Cole Hall and to the MLK Commons while we were on campus. It was so odd to see Cole Hall... it looked completely normal except for the policeman standing guard and the line of police tape. It was the exact same Cole Hall I walked through almost every day when I was a student. I don't know what I expected to see... but the complete normalcy was not it. There are 6 crosses for memorials by the Commons, 5 with the victims names on them and one for the shooter. I was heartened to see that there was a memorial there for him and that there were almost as many flowers and candles by his as by the others. Also in the commons were 4 humongous pieces of white plywood for people to sign. I was incredibly heartened to see no violent messages, and many of the signatures had comments urging peace and healing. Everything still feels very surreal, but our walk tonight and my act of signing the board brought a bit of closure for me.
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I graduated from NIU last May. I didn't realize how much I love that school until Thursday.
My husband still drives the buses that go around campus. He was driving when the shooting happened.
Of course, the media has been swarming, and so has Westboro, courtesy of Fred Phelps.
The following are my reflections of the events.
The shooting happened as I was on my way to work at an elementary school across town. I left my cell in my car, because the battery was almost dead, and I'm not supposed to use it at work anyways. I walked into work, and my coworker asked if I had heard what happened. She told me there had been a shooting at NIU. My first thought was that I had left the apartment angry at my husband that morning... what if something had happened to him and the last thing he heard from me was angry words? My response to her was, "Give me your phone, I have to call Jared." It took 4 tries to get through to him... the cell towers were already getting overloaded.
He picked up on the first ring once I finally got through. The police had corralled all the buses and their passengers at a building across campus until they could be sure all was safe. Then I called my parents to let them know all was well with us, and asked them to call my grandparents.
Then the rumors started. So many rumors and so much inaccurate information was flying around... not helped by the media at all.
What brought home the reality and severity of the situation for me happened around 7:30 that night. It was all so surreal before that. I live right next to campus, so I had to drive past on my way home that night. One of the roads into campus was being blocked off by an Illinois State Trooper. As I drove by, he was facing campus, his back to the main road. I had a fleeting thought of how nice it was that all the different law enforcement groups were cooperating with each other and helping each other out... and then he turned around, and he was holding some sort of machine gun or automatic rifle. That's when it hit me. I had never seen one of those guns in real life before. I'd always seen them on TV, held by men in army uniforms in other countries, sometimes in other states. Never here, and never our State Troopers. My dad was in law enforcement, I grew up around State Troopers. They were always the good guys with the cool hats. Never the guys with the big scary automatic weapons. They just weren't needed in my state, right?
Speaking of media, within an hour of the shootings, we started hearing helicopters. Remember, I was across town from where it happened, and I could still hear them. I think there were five of them hovering over the area at one point.
The media were and are acting like absolute vultures. There have been plenty of pictures of the victims being carried away on their stretchers. I was not able to make it to the vigil last night, but a friend who did said that the media was there, asking very insensitive questions, getting in people's faces as they were crying and praying, etc. etc. Another friend of mine works as a supervisor at the hospital, and the media kept calling and asking questions over and over that they knew very well she could not answer.
And then, yesterday, Fred Phelps arrived. Luckily, I didn't see it. I found out about it later that night. A local hardware store donated tarps for the group "Protect NIU from Westboro" to hold up in front of the Westboro group so that they could not be seen. That group is meeting later tonight... I think I will go, if I can find a friend to go with me. They're meeting in a building very close to the hall it happened in... I don't want to go by myself.
The biggest thing I have been feeling today is anger. I'm angry at the press, I'm angry at Westboro Baptist, I'm angry that this even happened.
If you are coming to offer sympathy or help or to pay your respects, we will welcome you with open arms. But if you are coming to insensitively mine for irrelevant facts, or to get pictures of the victims being carried away, or to get pictures of people mourning, or to cause more pain or fear, or to somehow insinuate that this could have been prevented or that it's somehow our fault, then PLEASE just get off my campus and leave us alone.