Chicago's Suburbs Grieve NIU Victims

CICERO, Ill. -- The sprawling Chicago suburbs that send their sons and daughters to Northern Illinois University struggled Sunday with the closeness of the country's latest massacre _ this time the gunman grew up among them.

The tragedy hung over church services throughout the region, from the university's home in DeKalb on Chicago's western exurban edge, to Elk Grove Village, where the gunman grew up in what one resident called "Mayberry," to blue-collar Cicero bordering Chicago.

Parishioners at Our Lady of the Mount Catholic Church in Cicero prepared for the funeral of Catalina Garcia, the youngest of four children of parents originally from Guadalajara, Mexico. They're longtime parishioners at Our Lady of the Mount, a tight-knit group of low- and middle-income families, many of them young, with some older Czech and other immigrants.

"Their parents are making all sorts of sacrifices to make sure the kids get into colleges. They're selling things, they're taking out second mortgages on their homes," the Rev. Lawrence Collins said at the church.

Garcia, 20, followed a brother, Jaime, to NIU, choice of many working-class Chicago-area families. She was studying to be a teacher and had talked about returning to Cicero to teach first grade.

"It hits really close to home," Collins said.

The Garcias were the "typical Mexican-American family," working low-wage jobs to help put their children through school, Jaime Garcia said Sunday on the porch of the family's two-story red brick home.

"My parents came here to better their lives," he said. They worried more about their children getting caught in gang crossfire at home than away at college "in the cornfields" of DeKalb.

"It's like the all-American dream cut short," he said.

Investigators still haven't determined what set off 27-year-old shooter Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five students and injured more than a dozen other people with a shotgun and pistols during a science lecture, then committed suicide.

Kazmierczak grew up northwest of Chicago, in Elk Grove Village, and played saxophone in the school band. He spent time in a mental health center in his late teens, and police have said without elaboration that he had stopped taking some kind of medication in the days or weeks before the shooting.

His girlfriend, Jessica Baty, told CNN on Sunday that he had stopped taking an antidepressant about three weeks ago because "it made him feel like a zombie."