THE TOWERLIGHT - Baltimore Student Media

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The Towerlight February 18, 2008 10 Lindsey Tanner Caryn Rousseau Associated Press Beyond Baltimore Residents mourn students’ death Authorities have not been able to determine motive behind shootings CICERO, Ill. (AP) _ The middleclass Chicago suburbs that send their sons and daughters to Northern Illinois University struggled Sunday with the closeness of the country's latest massacre — this time the gunman grew up among them, in a community some consider "Mayberry." Thousands mourned in church services across the region, including some in DeKalb, the university town where residents have taken to wearing the red and black of the NIU Huskies since five people were murdered in the middle of a science lecture Thursday. Parishioners at Our Lady of the Mount Catholic Church in blue-collar Cicero, on Chicago's southern fringe, prepared for the funeral of Catalina Garcia, the youngest of four children of parents originally from Guadalajara, Mexico. They're longtime parishioners at Our Lady of the Mount, a tight-knit group of low and middle-income families, many of them young, with some older Czech and other immigrants. "Their parents are making all sorts of sacrifices to make sure the kids get into colleges. They're selling things, they're taking out second mortgages on their homes," the Rev. Lawrence Collins said at the church. Garcia, 20, followed a brother, Jaime, to NIU, choice of many working-class Chicago-area families. She was studying to be a teacher, and had talked about coming back to Cicero to teach first grade. Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press A lone mourner at Northern Illinois University places flowers at a memorial for the five victims of the Valentines Day shooting on the campus of NIU in DeKalb, Ill., Sunday, Feb. 17. "It hits really close to home," Collins said. The Garcias were the "typical Mexican-American family," working low-wage jobs to help put their children through school, Jaime Garcia said Sunday on the porch of the family's two-story red brick home. "My parents came here to better their lives," he said. They worried more about their children getting caught in gang crossfire at home than away at college "in the cornfields" of DeKalb. "It's like the all-American dream cut short," he said. Investigators still haven't determined what set off 27-year-old shooter Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five students and injured more than a dozen other people with a shotgun and pistols and took his own life, Kazmierczak grew up to the west, Associated Press Northern Illinois University student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, shot and killed five students during a science lecture Feb. 14, before committing suicide. in Elk Grove Village, and played saxophone in the school band. He spent time in a mental health facility in his late teens, and police have said without elaboration that he had stopped taking some kind of medication in the days or weeks before the shooting. His family has moved away, but the shooting still echoed in the Elk Grove Village, near O'Hare International Airport. Resident Pat Egan, a heating and cooling repair man whose son goes to NIU, described the suburb as "Mayberry." People there seemed to feel a sense of disbelief and confusion over the attack that thrust their community into the news, said the Rev. Hwa Young Chong at the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church. "I couldn't believe coming from a place like Elk Grove he could do that," said Judy Glomski, who has lived in Elk Grove Village for 39 years. "It's just a friendly town. I guess there are sick people everywhere." Kazmierczak attended NIU, studying sociology. Three semesters back, he transferred across state to the more prestigious University of Illinois in Champaign. Most students and professors on both campuses remembered him as a promising student. Yet he'd begun assembling an arsenal in August, buying a shotgun and three menacing handguns from a small Champaign gun shop. He added oversized ammunition clips in an Internet purchase from the same dealer that sold the Virginia Tech gunman a weapon. Kazmierczak had also begun the long process of having his arms blanketed with disturbing tattoos, including a skull pierced by a knife, a pentagram and the macabre clown from the "Saw" horror movies, superimposed on images of bleeding slashes across his forearm. Some NIU parents took the shootings as a call to action, speaking out for stricter gun control in hopes the tragedy would propel the issue into the presidential campaign. Connie Catellani, a Skokie physician whose 22-year-old son is an NIU senior, helped organize a weekend news conference with other NIU parents. "It's sickening. What are we supposed to do, surround college campuses with barbed wire and metal detectors?" Catellani said Sunday. "If somebody had walked into that classroom with a hand grenade, there would be outrage, yet when someone walked in with a handgun that's capable of firing off 30 or 50 rounds in a minute, there's not the same sense of urgency," she said. Her son, Tony Skelton, was in art class when the shootings occurred. Catellani heard about the shootings from a friend, but was unable to reach her son for more than an hour. "It felt eternal," she said. "And at the end of it, I was overjoyed to hear from him and all I could think was a lot of parents are not going to get this kind of phone call." College town feels affects of shooting Community members reflect after NIU deaths Ashley M. Heher Associated Press DEKALB, Ill. - Northern Illinois University is a beacon among the cornfields to young people from surrounding communities that stretch into the outskirts of Chicago, about 60 miles east. Familiar faces are many on the campus of 25,000, where students who have followed the paths of high school classmates before them travel home with friends on weekends. The proximity amplifies the sorrow felt beyond DeKalb, a farm town fast becoming a bedroom community, after a shooting rampage Thursday by a gunman who killed five students and wounded 16 others before committing suicide. "It's a personal attack on anyone who's ever been affiliated with Northern," said Elaine Goodwin, a retired professor who wiped tears from her eyes after a church service Sunday. "There's a loyalty. There's a pride in being part of NIU." Such solidarity in the face of tragedy has become one of the few, and unfortunate, traits shared by the Illinois university and Virginia Tech, where student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people last April before killing himself. Virginia Tech's sprawling Blacksburg campus is more than three times NIU's size, covering about 2,600 acres, and about 75 percent of the 23,000 undergraduates hail from Virginia. More than 90 percent of NIU students are Illinois residents — many from suburban Chicago — and nearly 40 percent of undergrads leave the 755-acre campus for home each weekend. Still, the two campuses are now indelibly linked and reaching out to one another for help. After the Virginia Tech shootings, NIU students spent hours stringing together rosary beads for students in Blacksburg, Monsignor Glenn Nelson, director of the NIU Newman Catholic Student Center, said at a service Friday.
Web site chronicles students’ sex-lives Some are calling for a ban on new college-based networking site Justin Pope Associated Press The Cornell University junior was in his dorm between classs when the text message came n from a friend. Check out JuicyCampus.com, it said. The student found his name on he Web site beside a rambling, ilthy passage about his sexual xploits, posted by an anonymous tudent on campus. The young an could only hope the comentary was so ridiculous nobody would believe it. "I thought, `Is this going to affect my job employment? Is this going to make people on campus look at me? Are people going to talk about me behind my back?" said the student, who asked not to be identified. He also wondered about his 11-year-old sister, who is spending ore time on the nternet. "What if he Googles me? hat will she hink about her ig brother?" he aid. JuicyCampus' ndless threads f anonymous nnuendo have een a popular eb destination n the seven ollege campuses where the site aunched last fall, including Duke, CLA and Loyola Marymount. It ecently expanded to 50 more, nd many of the postings show hey've been viewed hundreds nd even thousands of times. But JuicyCampus has proved o poisonous there are signs of a acklash. In campus debates over nternet freedom, students norally take the side of openness nd access. This time, however, tudent leaders, newspaper ediorials and posters on the site re fighting back — with some ven asking administrators to ban JuicyCampus. It's a kind of plea to ave the students, or at least their eputations, from themselves. "It is an expression from our tudent body that we don't want his junk in our community," said Andy Canales, leader of the stuent government at Pepperdine, which recently voted 23-5 to ask or a ban. The vote came after a long and motional debate on the limits f free speech, and was swayed y stories from students such as aley Frazier, a junior residential College students stud are clever and ffun-loving, and we wanted wa to create a space where they can share their stories. adviser. She had recently come across a teary transfer student who had been humiliated on the site barely a week after arriving on campus. "I can't imagine the disgust she must have for Pepperdine if that's what (students) say," Frazier said. College administrators say they are appalled by the site but have no control over it since students can see it outside the campus computer network. They say all they can do is urge students not to post items or troll for malicious gossip — and hope that in the process they learn about how to get along. That tactic may be having an effect. At a number of campuses where JuicyCampus was a hot topic even just a few weeks ago, students and administrators say use and complaints have tapered off sharply. That's hard to confirm; Internet tracker comScore Inc. says the site's visitor numbers are too low to be counted by its system. But more and more postings criticize the site, with comments like, "let's Matt Ivester Founder, JuicyCampus.com not ruin each other's lives," and, "If you can't personalize any of the stuff you read or write here, imagine it happening to your sister or your best friend." "People have gotten just extremely sick of hearing all this stuff," said Rachelle Palisoc, a freshman at Loyola Marymount in California, who joined a Facebook group called "Ban Juicycampus!!!!" that has about 850 members. Free to use and supported by advertising, JuicyCampus is a simple conduit urging users to post gossip and promising them total anonymity. There are threads on campus hook-ups, who's popular and who's overweight. "Top ten freshman sluts" reads one typical thread, and "The Jews ruin this school" another. Homophobia is common. Many postings combine the cruelty of a middle school playground, the tight social dynamics of a college campus and the alarming global reach of the Internet. JuicyCampus pledges that it blocks its discussion boards from being indexed by search sites like Google, and that appears to be true. "College students are clever and fun-loving, and we wanted to create a place where they could share their stories," said Matt Ivester, the site's founder, who agreed to answer questions by e-mail. Beyond Baltimore Eight dead after car crash A white Ford Crown Victoria struck and killed several people watching an illegal street-race in southern Maryland Saturday Haraz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press Vehicles are driven on Indian Head Highway past a memorial, Sunday, Feb. 17. Seven people were pronounced dead at the scene, and an eighth died later at a hospital following a street race. Stephen Manning Associated Press ACCOKEEK, Md. (AP) - A car plowed into a group of street-racing fans obscured by a cloud of tire smoke on a highway Saturday, killing eight people and scattering bodies in the early morning darkness. At least five others were injured in the gruesome wreck along a flat, isolated stretch of highway about 20 miles south of Washington known for illegal races. About 50 people were gathered before dawn along Route 210 as two cars spun their wheels, kicked up smoke and sped off, said Prince George's County police Cpl. Clinton Copeland. Fans had spilled onto the smoky, dark road to watch the cars drive away when a white Ford Crown Victoria unexpectedly came up from behind and smashed into them. "There were just bodies everywhere; it was horrible," said Crystal Gaines, 27, of Indian Head, whose father was killed. Police interviewed the Crown Victoria driver, but no charges were pending, Copeland said. Authorities were looking for the drivers of the two cars involved in the race. The combination of the smoke and the dark morning likely meant the unsuspecting driver could not see the crowd, police said. A tractortrailer that came by shortly afterward may also have struck someone on the roadside as it tried to avoid the crash scene, according to investigators. The Crown Victoria, which had a crumpled hood and a partially collapsed roof, ended up down an embankment with one of the victims lodged inside. Bodies covered by white sheets lay in the road and on the shoulder across a 50-foot stretch of the road later Saturday morning before they were removed by the medical examiner. Shoes were strewn about in the grass, and a pair of dark skid marks scarred the highway. "It's probably one of the worst scenes I've seen," Copeland said. "This is a situation that could have been avoided, and it's a very tragic situation." About 50 people were watching the race, Gaines said, and she saw the Crown Victoria approach without its lights on. She grabbed her daughter, pulling the girl to safety. But her father, William Gaines Sr., 61, had a broken leg, and was not able to get away in time. Afterward, she found his body on the road. "He wasn't breathing; he wasn't moving," Gaines said. "His body was in pieces." Her brother, William Gaines Jr., was also there. The car came through so fast that "it just ripped people apart," he said. "I didn't even see the car. All I heard was stuff breaking," he said. Police could not confirm whether the car that struck the crowd had its lights on. The victims' ages ranged from their 20s to 60s, police said. Seven people were pronounced dead at the scene, and an eighth died later at a hospital. Police said a body found in the car was one of the spectators and not a passenger, as they had previously assumed. Route 210 is a thoroughfare with two lanes in each direction and few traffic lights along the stretch where the accident occurred. The road is flanked by some businesses but has little traffic in the early morning, Copeland said. The speed limit is 55 miles per hour. John Courtney said his brother, Mark, 33, of St. Mary's County, also was among the dead. He identified his brother from a digital image police had taken. "He liked going to the race track, watching races," Courtney said. "It's going to take a toll on my family for a long time." Marion Neal feared her 42-year-old brother was among the dead and was awaiting images from the police. "It's a tragedy," she said. "I don't like racing, but that was his hobby." Police said that street races are not uncommon on the stretch of road, but that most occur in the summer and involve motorcycles. But relatives said some of the victims often went to see races held late at night on isolated stretches of road. 11 The Towerlight February 18, 2008
Page 1 and 2: Alex Plimack Arts Editor Nick DiMar
Page 3 and 4: THIS WEEK @ TU campus calendar www.
Page 5 and 6: The writer’s strike is over, Bara
Page 7 and 8: Andrew Fortier taff Writer As anoth
Page 9: PAW PRINTS Forty bins added to Towe
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Page 16 and 17: The Towerlight February 18, 2008 LE
Page 18 and 19: SOFTBALL ignore the individual abil
Page 20 and 21: NOT JUST FOR ATHLETES...!!! Please
Page 22 and 23: life AWARD: Magazine honors student
Page 24 and 25: m u Jack Johnson Sleep Through the
Page 26 and 27: elations, Anne’s prowess at manip
Page 28 and 29: BABYSITTER NEEDED Seeking reliable
Page 30 and 31: MEN’S BASKETBALL NOTES TU knocks

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