What Jessica Baty-NIU gunman talk about him!
By on
February 17th, 2008
With a clever and gentle look, a promising future, it is unexplainable why Steven Kazmierczak became a mass murderer. Let’s see what people talked about him.
Jessica Baty, 28, dated Steven Kazmierczak off and on for two years and had most recently been living with him. She says the man with whom she was planning to spend her future “was anything but a monster”, and that she had “no indication he was planning something.”
She described him as “a worrier”. He once told her he had “obsessive-compulsive tendencies” and that his parents committed him as a teen to a group home because he was “unruly” and used to cut himself.
He had been seeing a psychiatrist, Baty said, and was taking an anti-depressant. But Kazmierczak had stopped taking the medication three weeks ago, “because it made him feel like a zombie,” she said.
“He wasn’t acting erratic,” she said. “He was just a little quicker to get annoyed.”
She knew he had purchased at least two guns. He told her they were for home protection.
On Valentine’s Day, Baty was in class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she and Kazmierczak were graduate students studying criminal justice. The students began to talk about a mass shooting taking place at Baty and Kazmierczak’s alma mater, NIU in DeKalb.
She didn’t think much of it, and her mind drifted to where her boyfriend told her he would be that day — with his godfather in another town in Illinois.
“The person I knew was not the one who went into Cole Hall and did that,” said Baty. “He was anything but a monster. He was probably the … nicest, [most]caring person ever.”
Either the day of the shooting or the day after, Baty received a package in the mail from Kazmierczak. It was a two textbooks with what she described as a “goodbye” note, and a new cell phone.
She has no idea why he sent her a new phone, but read the contents of the note to CNN.
“You’ve done so much for me,” the note said. “You will make an excellent psychologist and social worker someday.”
He sent her another package with a gun holster and ammunition in it, Baty said. She said she has no clue why he would have done that.
Baty is haunted by a phonecall Kazmierczak made to her around midnight, the night before the slayings. “He called me at midnight and told me not to forget about him,” she said.
Then, Baty said Kazmierczak told her, “Goodbye, Jessica.”
Shaking and crying, her family at her side during the interview, Baty said she still loves the man she met in a hallway at NIU when they were both undergraduate students.
Like comments from teachers which have been widely reported, she said Kazmierczak was an achiever who always tried to get ahead in class and seemed committed to criminal justice issues. He planned to go to law school and she hoped to get her Phd.
“He never missed a class,” she said. “He was always ahead.”
Teachers and others who knew Kazmierczak have said he was fascinated with prison culture. In 2006, when he was a student at NIU, police said, he worked on a graduate paper that described his interest in “corrections, political violence and peace and social justice.”
The paper said Kazmierczak was “co-authoring a manuscript on the role of religion in the formation of early prisons in the United States.”
“I didn’t think he was crazy,” said Baty, sobbing. “I still love him.”
“He wasn’t erratic. He wasn’t delusional. He was Steve; he was normal,” Baty said.
An NIU professor who befriended both Kazmierczak and Baty during their years on campus told The Associated Press earlier Sunday that she was upset by media reports of their relationship as rocky and abusive.
Jim Thomas, an emeritus professor of sociology and criminology at NIU, said Baty feels she and Kazmierczak were a typical young couple.
“They were two people in love with all the pains, joys, squabbles, ups/downs of any other relationship,” Thomas said.
With Jason Dunavan, a tattoo artist in Champaign, who spent hours as recently as last month creating tattoos for Kazmierczak, Kazmierczak was also timid and apologetic.
School websites described Kazmierczak as an award-winning sociology student who led a campus criminal justice group. Most students and professors on both campuses remembered him as a promising student.
University Police Chief Donald Grady said Kazmierczak was known widely as an “outstanding” student while at NIU.
“We had no indications at all this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity,” he added.
Popularity: 1% [?]
