Gunman kills seven in school shooting

A police officer leads a woman from Cole Hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, on Thursday. A man dressed in black opened fire with a shotgun and two handguns from the stage of a lecture hall before committing suicide. Seven people were killed and 15 injured, some critically. PHOTO: AP

A former student turned a lecture hall into a Valentine's Day massacre on Thursday, killing seven people and injuring 15 before turning a gun on himself, in the fifth US school shooting in a week, authorities said.

Armed with a shotgun and two handguns, he calmly stepped out from behind the curtain at the front of an auditorium just minutes before a geology class ended, officials and witnesses said.

Screams filled the hall as he sprayed a hail of bullets from the stage into the auditorium filled with dozens of students at Northern Illinois University, in a suburb of Chicago.

"It started and ended within a matter of seconds," university police chief Donald Grady said at a press conference.

Police were in the room within two minutes of getting the call but did not have time to fire a single shot as the gunman was already dead on the stage.

"We have no apparent motive at this time," Grady said.

Witnesses described the shooter as a white male dressed in black around 1.8m tall, who said nothing before he began firing.

"He was aiming towards the crowd but I don't think he was aiming at a specific person," a witness named Sheila told WBBM radio. "He was quiet. He just stood on the stage in front of everybody and just started shooting."

"I saw him holding the gun and it was huge. I thought it was fake and then I realized he was really shooting at people and I got down," she said. "I saw a lot of blood. I have blood all over my clothes."

"After he fired the first shot, everybody got down. A lot of people were screaming. Everybody started running for the door," another witness, Zach Seward, told CNN.

"I turned and I ran for the door. On my way out, I heard a couple more shots go off. I wasn't sure if one was going to hit me in the back. I ran as fast as I could to my dormitory. So it was just complete chaos, really," Seward said.

All of those shot were students, including the instructor, who is a graduate student, university president John Peters said.

The shooter was enrolled as a graduate student in sociology last year and then transferred, officials said.

"The information we have right now indicates he did not have any record of police contact or a prior arrest record," Peters told a press conference.

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that the man was an expert on prisons whose work had drawn notice in academic circles.

It said the 27-year-old helped write papers on self-injury in prison and on the role of religion in early US prisons, work that earned him a dean's award. The Tribune said he had since enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The shooter "by all accounts that we can tell right now was a very good student that the professors thoughts well of," school president John Peters said yesterday in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America.

"There is nothing in our system that he has had any counseling," he said.

"Motive is the one thing that we're trying to pin down at this point. I really at this point have no sense of that. There is no note or threat that I know of," he said.

The massacre follows shootings in Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee and California schools that killed five.

Northern Illinois University, chartered in 1895, is a teaching and research institution with a student enrollment of more than 25,000 and nearly 1,300 teachers.

It has 862 international students from 88 nations.