Blue-collar suburbs mourn NIU victims

Blue-collar suburbs mourn NIU victims
By LINDSEY TANNER and CARYN ROUSSEAU

CICERO, Ill. - The middle-class 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."


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.

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, 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.

"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.

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.

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."

At least six people remained hospitalized Sunday, with three in serious condition. The other three were in fair condition. A seventh patient, who had been upgraded from serious to fair condition Saturday, was transferred from Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, spokeswoman Laura Taylor said Sunday.

In addition to Garcia, the dead were Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester, Ill., Ryanne Mace, age 19, of Carpentersville, Ill., Julianna Gehant, 32, of Mendota, Ill., and Gayle Dubowski, age 20, last of Carol Stream, Ill.
Parmenter stood six-feet-plus and played rugby and football. He also was quiet, studious and introspective, recalled Joe Morgan, who served as his confirmation mentor at Christ Church in Oak Brook for nine months when Parmenter was a high school freshman.
"He was a big kid who was gentle," Morgan said.

The shooting recalled another senseless modern tragedy that struck the congregation, who arrived for services in the soaring, modern sanctuary Sunday under steady rain and a driving wind. One of the church's pastors, Jeff Mladenik, was a passenger on one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center by terrorists on Sept. 11, said the Rev. Daniel Meyer, senior pastor.
"You're not meant to offer platitudes, you simply offer love," Meyer said.

At First Baptist Church in DeKalb, members passed pinned-on red ribbons for a morning service.

The Rev. Joe Sanders prayed for the NIU community and the victims' families and asked God to help Kazmierczak's family cope with the attack and their own grief of losing a son: "We want God to be merciful and gracious to them."