Oregon grad was in Cole Hall when gunman opened fire

Keep running, no matter what - that's what a 21-year-old Mount Morris man kept telling himself as he fled from the gunman in the Northern Illinois University lecture hall Thursday. "It was probably the fastest I'll ever run in my life. The thought that was running through my mind was to keep running, even if I got hit," Shane Pope said.

Pope, a junior at NIU, was attending the Cole Hall class when Steven Kazmierczak, 27, shot 21 students, killing five of them, then took his own life.

Pope was sitting in the back half of the lecture hall on the left side when Kazmierczak walked in through an emergency exit on the stage.

"I was facing the stage. He came in kind of casually with a shotgun and started firing at students, mainly in the front of the room," Pope said. "At first I thought it might be staged or something. It took a split second to realize what was going on, and that students were being hit.

"When I heard him cock the gun, I started running for the door," Pope said.

Students in the back half of the hall were trying to escape as Pope bent low and ran for safety.

"I was bending over and sprinting at the same time," he said.

Once outside, Pope ran across a bridge and headed for the nearby law building.

"I was going to go into the law building, but I thought better of it because I thought, 'What if there's more than one shooter?'" he said.

Pope saw several injured students outside Cole Hall who also escaped.

"It was traumatizing to see people who were bleeding," he said. "A girl wearing a blue sweatshirt was covered with blood - and she hadn't been hit."

Shortly after he got outside, the police started to arrive. "At least four police cars were there within three to five minutes," he said.

Alerted by a cell phone call, NIU campus police were the first to arrive on the scene, followed closely by city officers. Several police agencies, including the Illinois State Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, are involved in the investigation.

Pope praised the police. "You couldn't have handled the situation any better than they did," he said.

After the shooting, Pope joined a group of students standing outside Cole Hall and borrowed a cell phone from one of them to call his mother, Monica Pope, who works at the Ogle County Judicial Center.

"I called Mom at work as soon as I could. I told her there had been a shooting in my class and that I was OK," Pope said. "She hadn't heard about it yet. I asked her to call Dad and everybody and let them know I was OK."

Pope, a 2005 Oregon High School graduate, commutes to NIU. He said he can pinpoint the time the incident began because he was text-messaging a friend at the time.

"It was either 3:06 or 3:07. It was my last class of the day," he said.

The class was scheduled to dismiss at 3:15 p.m.

FBI officers took Pope's cell phone as evidence, he said, because it was either stepped on or spattered with blood in the lecture hall.

Pope said he is dealing with the incident.

"I'm handling it pretty well. I went back to work the next day to keep my mind off it. I didn't sleep until Friday afternoon," he said.

Pope has been interviewed by NBC Today Show host Matt Lauer, as well as a reporter from the Chicago Tribune.

Some of the intense media coverage has brought too much attention to Kazmierczak, he said.

"A lot of me doesn't like how the news people keep talking more about the shooter than the victims," said Pope, who didn't know any of the students who were killed or injured.

After they were questioned by investigators, he said students in the class talked about the incident and comforted each other.

"It's probably the scariest thing that will ever happen to me in my life," he said.