DEKALB, United States (AFP) — The gunman who shot dead five people at a university here was identified Friday as Stephen Kazmierczak, 27, described as an "outstanding" graduate student with no signs of a troubled mind.
Donald Grady, police chief at Northern Illinois University, said that "there were no red flags" to predict the carnage unleahed by Kazmierczak in a crowded lecture hall Thursday before he took his own life.
Officials said Kazmierczak, was enrolled at Northern Illinois last year but was a graduate student in social work at another area school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at the time of the shooting.
"He was an outstanding student," Grady said. "We had no indication at all that this would be the type of person to engage in this type of activity."
"He was a fairly normal, unstressed person," the police official said.
Grady added, however, that Kazmierczak had been on some unspecified medication and stopped taking it, becoming erratic in recent weeks.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
