DEKALB, Illinois (Reuters) - A man who killed six students and then himself during a shooting spree at an Illinois college was an expert on prisons whose work had drawn notice in academic circles, one report said on Friday.
The unidentified 27-year-old man grew up in the Chicagosuburbs and was enrolled as a graduate student at another stateschool far removed from the site of Thursday's bloodbath atNorthern Illinois University, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Officials at Northern, a 25,000-student school 65 miles(104 km) west of Chicago, had confirmed earlier that the manwho suddenly appeared at the front of a lecture hall and turnedit into a shooting gallery had attended that school in 2007 asa graduate student in sociology.
The newspaper said the man had helped write papers onself-injury in prison and on the role of religion in early U.S.prisons, work that earned him a dean's award. The Tribune saidhe had since enrolled in graduate studies at the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign in the central part of the state.
The shooter "by all accounts that we can tell right now wasa very good student that the professors thoughts well of,"school president John Peters said on Friday in an interview onABC's "Good Morning America."
"There is nothing in our system that he has had anycounselling," he added. "Motive is the one thing that we'retrying to pin down at this point. I really at this point haveno sense of that. There is no note or threat that I know of."
The DeKalb County coroner's office which confirmed sixdeaths in addition to the shooter said the students who diedranged in age from 19 to 32, though only four of their nameshad been released.
In all 21 people were either killed or wounded by theshooter. Terrified and bleeding, students fled the hall beforethe gunman shot himself on the stage in the latest in a seriesof shootings at U.S. colleges and high schools.
Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, becamethe site of the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S.history in April when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.
Peters in a separate interview on CNN on Friday said theuniversity had reviewed and improved its emergency responseplans after the Virginia Tech shooting.
While universities traditionally have been "some of themost open institutions," he said, "events like this andVirginia Tech and others are forcing us to reconsider how we dothings. I think that is unfortunate but necessary."
President George W Bush said he had spoken to Peters andtold him "that a lot of folks today will be praying for thefamilies of the victims and for the Northern IllinoisUniversity community. Obviously a tragic situation on thatcampus and I ask our citizens to offer their blessings,blessings of comfort and blessing of strength."
(Reporting by Michael Conlon, Bill Trott and David Morgan;editing by Vicki Allen)
