Word: caspillan
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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...
...Kazmierczak ascended the steps, Santos and Caspillan threw themselves onto the ground, between the seats. Kazmierczak stopped just there, at Row 7, but apparently keeping his gaze, and aim, at the students who were attempting to leave. "If he'd have just turned around," Santos says, "he would've shot me. I wouldn't be here...
Santos and Caspillan headed down and rushed out through the bottom right exit doors, without ever looking at the stage. They believe they were the first students to leave the class. The time was 3:12. Santos remembers that detail because he called his dad exactly three minutes later. Kazmierczak, Santos recalls, "never yelled. He just came in, shot at us like we were cattle...
...Caspillan is trying to forget those six minutes in the lecture room. But they seem to be an eternity. Kazmierczak keeps appearing in her head, she says. "I couldn't sleep. The scene, it just kept going on and on," she says of the first night after. Says Santos, "We're still just so scared...
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