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Illinois mass murderer had gone off his meds—as a VFR reader suggested would be the case
The murderer at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, Steven Kazmierczak, 27, had not, according to the New York Times, shown any of the obvious signs of the troubled loner. He had been a successful undergraduate student at NIU, where he had been “revered” by his professors, and an exemplary graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 130 miles from DeKalb, where he was getting a master’s degree in social work, had a particular interest in prison issues and the problems of prisoners returning to society, and had described himself as committed to social justice. There was no history of violence or threats of violence. He left no note. The only definite hint of something wrong was that
Family members told the authorities that Mr. Kazmierczak had stopped taking his medication. Law enforcement authorities would not say what the medication was for, but said Mr. Kazmierczak had grown erratic, according to his family, in the days after he quit taking the drugs.Isn’t there something weird about this, that a person described as “successful” and “revered” is in such bad mental shape that he needs to be constantly taking psycho-active drugs for his whole life in order to be functional, and becomes erratic the moment he stops taking them? Yesterday, in VFR’s discussion about the mass murder, before anything was known about the killer, reader N. described the pattern which, it now turns out, Kazmierczak fit to a “T.” N. wrote:
Virtually every school shooter that I have read about was on one or more psychotropic drugs. The mental health system is due for an overhaul, and one thing we are going to have to face is the fact that some mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, cannot always be treated with drugs. In some cases people are going to have to be cared for in a controlled environment, because left to their own devices they quit taking their medication and become very, very ill. Often they take their own life, but sometimes they take others with them. Also, in graduate school, according to the Times, Kazmierczak
had campaigned for a leadership post in a student group that studied the failings of the prison system, an issue he was passionately concerned about, and had apparently won. He was a co-author of an academic paper called “Self-Injury in Correctional Settings: ‘Pathology’ of Prisons or of Prisoners?” which examined why inmates might hurt themselves with behaviors like cutting their skin.It may not mean anything, but it strikes me as an odd subject for a young man to become passionately interested in—prisoners injuring themselves.
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