NIU shooter's girlfriend: No sign he was 'planning something'
CNN Special Investigations Unit
Jessica Baty said her boyfriend, Steve Kazmierczak, gave no warning of the terror he planned to unleash at NIU.
"He wasn't erratic. He wasn't delusional. He was Steve; he was normal," Jessica Baty tearfully said in an exclusive interview Sunday.
Baty, 28, dated Steven Kazmierczak off and on for two years and had most recently been living with him.
"He was a worrier," she said. He once told her he had "obsessive-compulsive tendencies" and that his parents committed him as a teen to a group home because he was "unruly" and used to cut himself.
He had been seeing a psychiatrist, Baty said, and was taking an anti-depressant. But Kazmierczak had stopped taking the medication three weeks ago, "because it made him feel like a zombie," she said.
"He wasn't acting erratic," she said. "He was just a little quicker to get annoyed."
She knew he had purchased at least two guns. He told her they were for home protection.
On Valentine's Day, Baty was in class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she and Kazmierczak were graduate students studying criminal justice. The students began to talk about a mass shooting taking place at Baty and Kazmierczak's alma mater, NIU in DeKalb.
She didn't think much of it, and her mind drifted to where her boyfriend told her he would be that day -- with his godfather in another town in Illinois.
Police say Kazmierczak burst into an NIU geology class and opened fire with at least a shotgun and two handguns, killing five students while hundreds fled for their lives. Authorities were on the scene within a few minutes but by the time they reached the classroom, Kazmierczak, 27, had shot himself to death.
"The person I knew was not the one who went into Cole Hall and did that," said Baty. "He was anything but a monster. He was probably the ... nicest, [most]caring person ever."
Either the day of the shooting or the day after, Baty received a package in the mail from Kazmierczak. It was a two textbooks with what she described as a "goodbye" note, and a new cell phone.
She has no idea why he sent her a new phone, but read the contents of the note to CNN.
"You've done so much for me," the note said. "You will make an excellent psychologist and social worker someday."
He sent her another package with a gun holster and ammunition in it, Baty said. She said she has no clue why he would have done that.
Baty is haunted by a phone call Kazmierczak made to her around midnight, the night before the slayings. "He called me at midnight and told me not to forget about him," she said.
Then, Baty said Kazmierczak told her, "Goodbye, Jessica."
Shaking and crying, her family at her side during the interview, Baty said she still loves the man she met in a hallway at NIU when they were both undergraduate students.
Like comments from teachers which have been widely reported, she said Kazmierczak was an achiever who always tried to get ahead in class and seemed committed to criminal justice issues. He planned to go to law school and she hoped to get her Phd.
"He never missed a class," she said. "He was always ahead."
Pictures of their relationship don't betray anything odd. They are scenes of the two of them smiling on Florida beaches, on golf courses and having fun at Disney World.
Police confiscated several items. Among them was a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Antichrist" which Kazmierczak sent to Baty after the shooting. The police also took Kazmierczak's copy of the "Encyclopedia of Serial Killers."
Teachers and others who knew Kazmierczak have said he was fascinated with prison culture. In 2006, when he was a student at NIU, police said, he worked on a graduate paper that described his interest in "corrections, political violence and peace and social justice."
The paper said Kazmierczak was "co-authoring a manuscript on the role of religion in the formation of early prisons in the United States."
"I didn't think he was crazy," said Baty, sobbing. "I still love him." E-mail to a friend 
CNN's Todd Schwartzchild contributed to this report.
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