I was at my boyfriend’s house.  It was around 3:15 that I received a call from my mother telling me there was a shooting at my sister’s school.  Now, NIU is 45 minutes away from my house and a lot of my friends from high school started attending there in the Fall of that year.  I panicked.  We couldn’t reach her cell.  About half an hour later my mom got the “I’m okay” phone call from my sister.  Her roommate, Gayle, was one of the victims.  I know my sister lost a piece of herself when she found out Gayle didn’t make it.  And the reality that I could’ve lost my sister or classmates that day stands out now more than ever for me.  

Here’s the Time U.S. article first bit of it:

“The first thing Lhee Santos remembers of the worst afternoon of his life was the tall, thin man kicking open the door on the lecture hall’s right side. It was 3:06 p.m. and the intruder walked onto the stage, startling the professor, Joseph Peterson. The unannounced visitor bore several weapons, including a 12-gauge shotgun, a 9-mm Glock pistol and two other pistols. He wore jeans and a t-shirt and carried a guitar case. The 150 or so students in the introductory geology class thought it was all just a joke. That is, until the gunfire started. The first body down was the professor’s.

Santos, 20, was sitting on Row 7 of the Cole Hall lecture room at Northern Illinois University, not far from his girlfriend of five months, Monique Caspillan, 19. It was Valentine’s Day, and they were to celebrate later that evening. Instead, they became witnesses to a St. Valentine’s Day massacre in this campus of 25,000 students in DeKalb, about an hour’s drive west of Chicago. Five students were killed. The sixth fatality was the gunman, identified as Steven P. Kazmierczak, 27, who apparently took his own life on the lecture hall stage. Many others were shot or injured, including Peterson, who survived the rampage. It had been a week full of shootings on a number of high school campuses but the deadly six-minute long incident at NIU was by far the most reminiscent of last year’s horrendous Virginia Tech massacre where a lone gunman killed 32 people before committing suicide.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1714069,00.html#ixzz1mHvKx4YM