With minutes left in a class at Northern Illinois University on Thursday afternoon, a man in black stepped out from behind a curtain on the lecture hall stage, said nothing, and opened fire with a shotgun, killing six students.
The man, tall and skinny,  shot again and again, witnesses said, perhaps 20 times or more. Students in the large lecture hall, stunned and screaming, dropped to the floor. They crouched behind anything they could find, even an overhead projector. They scattered, the blood of victims spattering, some said, on those who escaped injury.
Six people, all of them students, were killed, John G Peters, the president of Northern Illinois University, said at a news conference late Thursday evening.

No Indian casualties were reported.

Sixteen others were wounded, two of them critically, Peters said. Hospital officials said several of the students had been shot in the head.

The gunman, whom the authorities did not identify, also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Peters said. The gunman, he said, had been a graduate student in sociology at the university in 2007, but was no longer enrolled here.
Records suggested that the man, who had more recently attended a different state school, had no previous police contact, the authorities said.

Weapons recovered
Police officers from the campus, which sits in a snow-covered community 65 miles west of Chicago, said three weapons had been found with the man’s body: two handguns, including a Glock, and the shotgun, police said.
Kevin McEnery, 19, one of the public university’s more than 25,000 students, was seated in the third row of the class when the man stormed in and “just came out and started shooting.” McEnery dived for the floor, he said, and began crawling as far as he could from the gunman, trying to get near an exit. He found himself huddled beside a female student he did not know.

“I just thought if he gets up there, this is it — I’m about to die,” McEnery remembered thinking. “Because I knew if he shot long enough he would find us.”

When the gunman first burst in, McEnery said, the classroom turned loud and chaotic with some students shouting, “He has a gun!” and “Call 911!”

Then came an eerie silence, but for the bullets.

“Once he settled in and started shooting people, pretty much everyone was quiet,” he said.
In the moments after the shooting, university officials put into action a detailed security plan created for just such an incident, Peters said.

The class in Cole Hall had been an introductory offering, and most of the 162 students registered for the course were probably freshmen or sophomores, said Jonathan Berg, chairman of the department of geology and environmental geosciences.

Outside the dormitories on Thursday evening, it looked like the last day of school. Students streamed out of dorms carrying backpacks and luggage.

A caravan of parents made its way onto campus to meet them, and many waited for their children in idling cars.

‘No Indian victims’

Meanwhile, Ravi Kiran Mudumura, the president of the Indian Students Association of the university, said that the identities of the victims had not been revealed so far. “To my knowledge I don’t think there are any Indians in an undergraduate geology class,” he said.