NIU shooting, as many as 15 people injured
Published by Fred Soto• February 14th, 2008
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Shooting at Northern Illinois University
A gunman opened fire Thursday in a lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University, injuring as many as 15 people.
The gunman is dead
The gunman who opened fire in a lecture hall is dead according to DeKalb police, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting. The lecture hall is Cole Hall, reports say. The shooting occured shortly after 3 p.m. ET. A local hospital tells CNN affiliate CLTV that it expects to receive 15 patients and have so far treated at least two. The University has ordered its student body to seek shelter and canceled classes Thursday.
“Several people shot at Northern Illinois University”
The campus website had the following notice:
“Its has been confirmed that there has been a shooting on campus and several people have been taken away by ambulance [...] All classes are canceled on the DeKalb campus. People are urged not to come to campus.”
I’m at a loss for words, I’ll update this post if any important details come to light. It’s Valentine’s Day, go hug a loved one and pray for the swift recovery of the victims.
UPDATE: CNN is reporting that six people are dead as a result of the shooting and others are being cared for at the hospital.
tags:education, National, News
Fred Soto is an Attorney and Entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley.
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Many people in the news tonight are calling DeKalb a small rural community. That may be true when NIU is not in session, but when school is in, it’s a well-populated community with great diversity, pulling in students from all over, but many from Chicago and vicinity. It just isn’t the isolated rural campus that the news has been portraying it as. However, these things can happen anywhere.
I know that current thinking seems to be that we can’t monitor the activity around an open college campus the way we can other schools, but I feel it’s time we make a change in that thinking. There is no reason that metal detectors and security personnel couldn’t be implemented at a entrance to this lecture hall, and the other buildings on campus. Our students must be protected from behavior that seems to be becoming more common. Students in a large classroom are much too easy a target for someone that can walk in the building with a weapon. If these were downtown office buildings and there had been threats regarding this type of incident a few months ago, the security would have happened. Our young students deserve the same.
My son’s fiancée attends NIU. We got text messages from her, but the cells were too busy to get an actual call through for quite a while this evening. She and my son are visibly shaken, we all are.
Ann: This is a tragic event that we need to look closely at and of course we’ll all have the victims, students and their families in our thoughts.
Security measures will likely be kicked up a notch as a result. However, it’s impossible to predict how, when and where someone is going to crack. Step up security at the University and that shooting happens in the court yard, the park, a movie theater, you name it.
While I am not privy to any information related to the shooter’s motives, I can’t see how this can be anything but a mentally ill person who carried out the shooting. Mental health issues are often overlooked because it’s not something that’s easily spotted. I don’t know what the answer is, hopefully we can all get together and come up with a solution that works and prevents this sort of thing in the future.