Memories Solidified

By Ross Boettcher
DEKALB, Ill. — It doesn’t matter that Evan D’Orazio wasn’t in the room when it happened. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t see the shooter open fire on a lecture hall full of his Northern Illinois University classmates. It doesn’t matter that D’Orazio feels lost in the emotions coming from the six deaths that took place as he watched from a safe distance — from this day forward, those feelings may never change.

At 3:05 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 14, D’Orazio, a 24-year-old junior at NIU, stepped out of his parked car, flicked the butt of his cigarette and started walking to his class in DuSable Hall. As he made the short trek from the parking lot to his fourth-floor classroom, small groups of students stood paralyzed around Cole Hall with faces full of shock and disbelief. Until he found out exactly what was going on, D’Orazio could have sworn he was walking through a dream.

When he finally asked what had happened, the blank face of a female bystander delivered the news that immediately etched itself into his memory bank.
“Some guy just came into our classroom and started firing a shotgun,” she said.
At that point, hysteria normally takes the place of D’Orazio’s paranoid demeanor, but not this time. This time was different.

After shaking the freeze that immediately took over his body, D’Orazio left the scene and walked to DuSable Hall where he spread the word about what had taken place.

“I walk in and head up to the fourth floor of DuSable and all these students are coming out, two to three hundred students just getting out of class, so obviously they have no idea what’s going on,” D’Orazio said. “I literally just stopped all of them…everyone just kind of paused with open faces, shocked looks.”

Naturally, there were skeptics.

“Some of them [students] were like “yeah right” telling me flat out like “whatever, man I don’t believe you,” he said.

The next person to doubt D’Orazio wasn’t a student, but the professor of his next scheduled class. When he got to the classroom, he sat down with his professor and showed her the NIU homepage. Her reaction immediately solidified what had happened.

“She looked like she was going to cry, it got very serious very quickly,” D’Orazio said.
“This whole time, everything got so surreal, I can’t say that enough. I was in a dream world the way I was thinking about it at that point.”

As the news raced by word of mouth around campus, the thoughts of what had happened begin to pace through D’Orazio’s mind.

“I remember mumbling to myself the whole time, “this world is so f- - -ked up” this is not happening. What’s wrong with people that they have to fight with other people?”
Since Thursday, D’Orazio has mulled over the what-ifs, even when it’s against his will.

During his drive home from campus that day, the world seemed to change. A certain grey energy, he said, has cast a looming shadow over not just over D’Orazio’s life, but also on the communities of DeKalb and Sycamore.

To get his mind off of what had happened, D’Orazio spent his first night alone watching movies and television to get his mind off of the “war zone” he had experienced. Even then, the thoughts of death and the violence that had taken place permeated his every thought.

“Every 5 minutes it just kept coming back, even though my mind was trying so hard to block it out and what not.”

The continuous thought of the attacks had D’Orazio torn as to what actions he wanted to take. After seeing his first bullet wound on Thursday afternoon, the severity of the event began to take its toll.

“It wasn’t very serious but it was enough to be like oh my god, ‘this is really real,’” he said. “At that point I was, I don’t know, part of me was like, ‘I don’t want to be here anymore,’ another part of me was like, ‘I should be around my fellow students’ but the subconscious part of my brain was like ‘leave, you have to go, just try to forget about this.’”

On Monday, Feb. 25, the memories of death and tragedy will no longer be memories as D’Orazio and the rest of the NIU student body will reluctantly go back to class and face the reality of what took place.

Since NIU officials have closed Cole Hall for the rest of the semester, D’Orazio won’t be walking into Cole 101 to take notes and listen to lectures every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Instead he will be battling the photographic memory that has allowed the events of Thursday, Feb. 14 to be embedded in his mind.

“Personally for me, just knowing I have this class and already having a visual type of memory…I knew exactly what the setup of the room is like, the smell of the building, the color of the seats, everything, so vividly. And just imagining putting myself in those peoples shoes…just imagining that someone else was going to come in during this moment and without even saying a word just unloading.”

Though he said the effects haven’t yet set in, time will only tell what the future hold for D’Orazio and NIU.

“I guess reality hasn’t exactly hasn’t set in yet, I don’t know, it’s so odd how the brain works, even when you watch these things on the news you’re just like “that’s my school.” I know I’ve got memory burn from this, years and years from now it’s always going to remind me that, like, you were there and let alone, that close, during all of this chaos.”