Couldn’t sleep …

February 15th, 2008 at 08:46am Collin Quick

In the everyday hustle and bustle of a college campus, Cole Hall easily got lost as a building at Northern Illinois University.

It was the type of building that you walked past, ever going in unless you had a lecture in one of the two large auditoriums or needed to do something in the computer lab in the basement of the building.

During my three years at NIU, I had three classes in Cole.

One was a math class that met in one of the auditoriums two days a week; the second, a photojournalism class that met once a week in the basement; and a third, an English class that met in the viewing room behind the auditorium.

The more I think about it, I’m pretty sure I know how the gunman got on the stage. It was the back staircase.

Cole Hall is an old building. It smelled like an old building, it was concrete everything and it was built around the same time as other surrounding buildings – Reavis Hall, DuSable Hall, Zulof Hall.

Even if I didn’t have a class in the building, I cut through it all the time on my way to class. It was easier to walking through a sea of bodies waiting to enter the auditoriums than going around the buildings on the broken-down dirt paths.

In the cold winter months, my friends and I would use as many “warm cuts” as possible – a way to cut through as many buildings on your way to class. Cole was perfect for that.

I can only imagine students running for those doors to get out of class. Cole is set up that you enter and exit from the same location. When you came in, you walked down a gradual slope and found where you wanted to sit. To leave, you got up, turned around and walked out the same way you came in.

I always sat in the back of the class, towards the doors, for my math course (that’s probably why I did so bad in retrospect) so that I wouldn’t have to wait and trudge up incline to get out of class at the end.

Sitting under the auditorium for my photojournalism class, you could hear collapsible desk arms falling to the side of seats and people walking above and the big, black metal doors slamming shut.

To sit under those sounds on Feb. 14, coupled with the gunfire and screaming … that’s a sound I never want to imagine.

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