IT HAPPENED HERE.

The shooter is a former Northern Illinois student who earned one of the deans' awards conferred for undergraduate work. He worked with criminologist Jim Thomas, a good man who should also be in your thoughts. In the ongoing press conference, Chief Grady has characterized the shooter as "a student revered by faculty and staff." The chief mentioned something about the shooter recently discontinuing some medications, but that he did not have the criminal background that would have disqualified him from purchasing the guns, which a representative of BATF notes were lawfully purchased in Champaign, "six days ago." He transported the weapons in a guitar case. This graphic of the Jameson Auditorium in Cole Hall shows the rear access door, stage right, that the shooter used for access to the room. The Chicago Sun-Times has obtained an interview with lecturer Joseph Peterson, an aspiring vertebrate paleontologist who was teaching Introduction to Ocean Sciences and was himself wounded by the shooter.

The recriminations are likely to begin soon, if the press questions are at all predictive. The shooter's use of mood-altering drugs will keep practitioners and ethicists busy. The university's emergency-response procedures worked as they were intended to. We have excellent assistance from security and counter-terrorism professionals on campus, and none of them found any failings in the procedures. The wireless communication infrastructure in DeKalb proved not to be robust enough for the traffic.

To prevent future occurrences is unlikely to be easy. As the Chicago Tribune editorialists remind readers,

Our thoughts go to the broader NIU diaspora as well. When the setting is a university, any assault, on one person or a hundred, is a siege against a community of thousands.

A campus is like the college experience itself -- the tempo is fluid, the atmosphere unconstrained. In factories or office towers, bosses sit here and workers toil there. On a campus, anyone can materialize virtually anywhere and instantly belong. Momentary fates mix and separate people. You skipped class to finish your project? Oh. You sat in on this one because you missed the prof's same lecture to his 10 o'clock section? Oh.

Campuses draw their energy from all these freedoms they enable. Freedoms an assailant can exploit. Not every corridor is locked, not every stranger is suspicious. To the contrary: Corridors are inviting, strangers are potential lifetime friends.This day we are left to mourn just how vicious that exploitation can become. Left to mourn people who, for multitudes of serious and rollicking reasons, followed their dreams to NIU.

Dean Dad notes you can't put the city in a bubble.

The editorial team at the Northern Star realizes what a challenge we face.

Kishwaukee Hospital updated its site at 9.35. Eighteen patients, seventeen by ambulance and one walk-in; one 22 year old male, deceased; seven critical patients transferred to hospitals in Rockford or nearer suburbs; one male patient remains in good condition and one female patient in fair condition; eight patients discharged.

That will be all until after sunset.