THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT. Chicago Tribune reporters Jodi S. Cohen and Stacy St. Clair have obtained Steven Kazmierczak's graduate school application essays.

Well before his murderous rampage at Northern Illinois University, Steven Kazmierczak described himself as a victim who had overcome hard times.

In graduate school applications, reviewed exclusively by the Chicago Tribune, Kazmierczak wrote that his own mental-health struggles would one day enable him to help others—a vision that tragically imploded Feb. 14 in one of the deadliest campus shootings in U.S. history.

"For as long as I can remember, I have always been an extremely sensitive individual, and feel as though I am able to empathize with other people's emotional and social needs," he wrote. "However, some of my peers were not very understanding or accepting, and I feel as though I was victimized to a certain degree during my adolescent years."

There's nothing unusual about feeling victimized. I suspect that the Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown admits to feeling out of place on earth appeals to a lot of adolescents. It certainly did to me.

Claiming some special insight into the minds of others, however, is a bit much, particularly in a youngster. The faddish preference of many admission committees for essays that cross the line into pity-parties (all in the name of demonstrating that the applicant is a striver, or has been oppressed in some way) is likely to induce tales of woe, such as the above, that are not going to be received in the way the reporters suggest.

The essays offer unprecedented and chilling insight into the mental-health troubles of the 27-year-old graduate student who two months ago fatally shot five students at Northern Illinois University, wounded 16 others and then killed himself.

Before doing so, Kazmierczak went to great lengths to hide his past. He removed the hard drive from his computer, tossed out his cell phone's memory card and left no suicide note.

And so the voice of the killer has been absent as people have tried to understand what happened.

Or to confirm their own priors?

But in four personal statements he submitted to NIU and University of Illinois graduate schools, Kazmierczak lays out in his own words the history of his emotional troubles.

The records, accessed under the Freedom of Information Act, show an intelligent man determined to reinvent himself after a troubled adolescence. They relate the alienation he felt as a high school student, his parents' decision to place him in a group home and the help he got from an inspirational social worker.

Perhaps so. But perhaps here is somebody who makes too much of the usual adolescent hassles. Consider this quote, which a reader could interpret as somebody saying "There's nothing wrong with me, the world is messed up." Perhaps a bit of that Garrison Keillor Minnesota wisdom, applied at the right time, might have served him better than the therapeutic establishment.

"In hindsight, I feel that this was largely a result of the sensitivity that I often exhibited toward other classmates, which was not necessarily accepted by others," he wrote in his personal statement to U. of I., the essay in which he most thoroughly writes about his troubled past.

Kazmierczak wasn't without friends, though. In high school, he often hung out with the "anti-clique," a group whose members wanted to show they didn't care if they weren't popular.

"He felt lost and disconnected in spite of his friends," former classmate Justin Hammang said.

Kazmierczak wrote that he learned techniques for dealing with stress during counseling sessions with social workers, but he still "felt profoundly lost."

Let's face it, middle and high school can be a real downer, even for people who are in the favored cliques. Add to that the relatively recent phenomenon of young people with incomplete productive skills and the prosperity to enjoy a lot of leisure time, and there will be troubled people. Being stressed, however, is different from being lost. Being stressed to no purpose is yet another matter. The article suggests, however, that Mr Kazmierczak's parents did not apply the inordinate pressure to Be Somebody (preferably a lawyer or hedge fund manager) that contributes to more than a few unhappy students and the midlife crises to come. But he was searching.

On Sept. 7, 2001, he enlisted in the Army, according to the Pentagon.

Kazmierczak told friends he was kicked out of the Army after military officials discovered his past psychiatric problems. He received an administrative discharge on Feb. 13, 2002.

On his undergraduate application to NIU, dated Feb. 21, Kazmierczak listed himself as a veteran. However, when he applied to the U. of I. four years later, he wrote that he had never been in the military. It was an equivocation perhaps done to avoid answering the next question: "If yes, did you receive a less than honorable discharge?"

Again, Kazmierczak answered, "No."

That lie is not his greatest crime.The greater crime is that somewhere he was led to believe that acting for the common good was something desirable, a belief that admissions committees abetted. Let me quote Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Ch. 11: "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

"I truly do feel as though I would be an altruistic social worker, mainly due to my past experiences, because I view myself as being able to relate to those segments of society that are in need of direction," he wrote.

Despite the essays' sincere tone, admissions officers and mental-health experts can glean little from such statements, said Jerald Kay, chair of the American Psychiatric Association's committee on college mental health.

Most applicants, Kay said, paint themselves in a positive light, and unless the writings are incoherent or threatening, they do not have enough depth to raise red flags.

"You have to give the student the benefit of the doubt," Kay said.

Higher education, United States style, is generous with second (and third and further) chances, and Mr Kazmierczak did well at Northern Illinois. There is a lot of benefit in being in a new setting where whatever preconceptions others had of you from high school or earlier no longer matter. On the other hand, there is a danger in selling the idea of "making a difference" as the purpose of university. (I leave for another day whether an applicant who is skeptical of some notions of "social justice" -- by definition, all justice systems are social -- or of preferred "dispositions" will admit to such things on an application form.)

Kazmierczak's father confirmed his son's desire to "make a difference in the lives of those of whom I am able to connect with."

"My son always wanted to help people," he said. "He had a lot of support growing up. He wanted to make sure others had that same kind of support."

Until something went terribly wrong.

There's still no known motive for his killing spree, and it is unknown why he chose his alma mater, a campus he wrote about with such gratitude. His final, brutal act couldn't have been further from the goals he espoused in his applications.

"I feel as though I needed to genuinely express myself so that those who read this statement can understand my strong desire to give back [sic] those in need of guidance and a helping hand," he wrote. "Everyone, regardless of where they come from, may need someone to rely on in their time of need."

Mr Kazmeierczak leaves his father with unanswered questions.

Robert Kazmierczak, a 66-year-old retired letter carrier, said he regrets that he may never know what prompted his only son to take such a violent turn.

He struggles with some aspects of the case, the minor details that suggest his son underwent a radical transformation before the shootings. For example, he said Steven didn't smoke but police found cigarettes in his hotel room and nicotine in his system. "I don't know what happened," Robert Kazmierczak said, his voice cracking with emotion. "I wish I did. I wish I could find out the answers."

As do I. Sometimes a dad does all that he is capable of, and the son disappoints.

Meanwhile, this was another difficult weekend in Chicago. The police define weekend differently from the press, but the count of dead and injured exceeds that for one bad afternoon at Northern Illinois.