DEKALB, Ill. — Word of the ambush attack inside a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday sent panic throughout the sprawling campus.
Senior Ashley Dallman said she was in an acting class in a neighboring building when several students from Cole Hall came running in. Her professors locked the doors, and they listened to news reports on the radio for about an hour before school officials told them it was OK to leave.
“We all started crying,” she said. “We didn’t know what to do.”
Authorities said the gunman, wielding a shotgun and two handguns, jumped out from behind a screen or curtain in a geology class and opened fire, fatally wounding five students and injuring 16 before killing himself.
Alan Edrinn, 21, a journalism major from Matteson, Ill., arrived at the scene outside Cole Hall around 3:30 p.m. — minutes after the attack.
“It was very chaotic. People were definitely in a panic,” Edrinn said. “I saw bodies on the sidewalk, it looked like two, people were attending to them.
“Police were trying to get people back; there were people crying.”
Tracy Knuth, a 23-year-old senior at NIU, saw dozens of ambulances from her home across the street from campus.
“Everyone is completely and utterly freaked out,” Knuth said by phone from her apartment. “It’s eerie. Now, nobody’s outside. They told us to stay in.”
Knuth said a large number of courses are taught at Cole Hall, from undergraduate math and science to liberal-arts courses; she said the hall has two or three large lecture auditoriums that can each accommodate about 500 students.
“Everyone is scared to go to classes next week,” she said.
Officials said the campus will be closed today and that students could go to residence halls for counseling. Northern Illinois University has about 25,000 students.
Donald Grady, the campus police chief, said police had found no credible threats to campus safety before the shooting and that the incident appeared to be confined to Cole Hall, though police will continue to investigate it.
“It started and it stopped very, very quickly,” he said. “This thing started and ended within a matter of seconds.”
John Peters, the university president, told reporters: “This is a campus, and like most campuses, it’s fairly open. We’ve put in place so many security measures, and we’re reviewing them all the time.
“Unless you locked every door, I don’t know how you real ly keep people out. I don’t know of any plan that can prevent this kind of tragedy.”
The Washington Post contributed to this report.
