DEKALB Ill.
A man dressed in black opened fire with a shotgun and two handguns from the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday, killing five students and injuring 16 others before committing suicide, authorities said.
The gunman fatally shot four women and a man in a “brief, rapid-fire assault” that sent terrified students running for cover, university President John Peters said. Four of the six total dead died at the scene, and the other two died at a hospital, he said.
Witnesses in the geology class said “someone dressed in black came out from behind a screen in front of the classroom and opened fire with a shotgun,” Peters said.
Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row of the lecture hall around 3 p.m. when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.
“I personally Army-crawled halfway up the aisle,” said Carr, a 20-year-old sophomore. “I said I could get up and run or I could die here.”
She said a student in front of her was bleeding, “but he just kept running.”
