Parent of NIU shooting victim living in shadow of his daughter

Joseph Dubowski walks in the shadow of his daughter.

Gayle Dubowski was quiet, but not shy, said Joseph, her father. She could be stubborn. She loved music, and would sing show tunes around the house. She played the piano. She had a mischievous streak. She embraced her faith with a devotion that inspired her father, and was known to do cartwheels in the rain.

In February 2008, Gayle had just decided to pursue a degree in anthropology at Northern Illinois University, a place she started referring to as home just a week into her freshman year in the fall of 2006.

Gayle was 20 on Feb. 14, 2008, when she went to her afternoon oceanography class at Cole Hall. Gayle – along with Catalina Garcia, 20; Julianna Gehant, 32; Ryanne Mace, 19; and Daniel Parmenter, 20 – were killed when a former NIU student walked into the lecture hall shortly after 3 p.m. and started shooting.

Another 21 were injured, and the gunman, Steven Kazmierczak, took his own life.

Now, three years later, Joseph Dubowski, 54, walks the NIU campus as a student.

He started there in the fall as a student in the College of Health and Human Sciences, pursuing a master's degree in Applied Family and Child Studies, with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy.

He was impressed by the program, Dubowski said when asked why he chose to attend NIU.

But Dubowski's decision was based on more than that.

"I have to give credit to the Huskie community and the way they reached out to us and loved us after Gayle was killed," Dubowski said. "From [NIU President John] Peters to the janitors in the hallway, they took care of us in so many ways. I felt welcome, and I felt like I was a part of things.

"In a sense, I'm finishing what my daughter started in getting a degree from NIU," Dubowksi said. "I didn't know what it was like to walk through the hallways of NIU and walk across campus like my daughter did. Now I know. I'm kind of walking in her shadow, in her tiny footsteps."

Three years ago

Dubowski was on the Internet shortly after 3 p.m. Feb. 14, 2008, working on his job search. He was about to log out when he got an e-mail alert from a media outlet regarding the shooting at NIU.

Dubowski started searching for information about the incident, but it had just happened.

There were few details. He began following the news, and placed calls to Gayle’s cell phone. He couldn’t reach her, but figured she didn’t have her phone with her. He wasn’t sure of her schedule, and didn’t even know if she had a class at 3 p.m. Thursdays.

The minister at the DeKalb church Gayle attended went to her apartment and found her class schedule. He then called the Dubowskis to say Gayle was in the Cole Hall classroom where the shooting took place.

The family – Joseph, his wife, Laurel, and son, Ryan – headed to DeKalb that Thursday evening. They eventually wound up at Kishwaukee Community Hospital, where parents who could not locate their children attending NIU were told to go.

They got the news at 10:45 p.m. A woman matching Gayle’s description, who had been airlifted shortly after the shooting to OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, was dead. Accompanied by family and close friends, the Dubowskis went to Rockford to identify her.

“We wanted to be the ones to identify her,” Dubowski said. “We wouldn’t believe it if we didn’t see it ourselves. ... Even after seeing her, it was hard to believe.

“We didn’t want to believe.”

A new reality

Six months before Gayle died, Joseph Dubowski already was thinking of writing an inspirational book. He has always loved to read and write, and so did Gayle.

“If you wanted to make Gayle and I happy, take us to a library or Barnes & Noble and we’d be like, ‘Candy store,’ ” he said, spreading his arms wide as he grinned.

Dubowski had a working title and had a rough outline for his book. But he knew the night his daughter died that his book would change directions. Six months after the shooting, he began to write.

Cartwheels in the Rain” was finished in April; it was published in September. A few hours after he received his copy of the book, his granddaughter, Savannah, was born, the daughter of his son, Ryan, and his wife, Brittany.

The book details his memories of the day Gayle died, including the growing uneasiness that slowly built as the Dubowski family realized it could not locate her. How he burst into tears and buried his face in the sheets around Gayle’s legs when they identified her. How the family made it through breaking the news to other family members, planning her funeral, attending the public memorial service.

It then delves into the time after that, of living a life without his daughter. He talks about writing letters to his daughter to tell her how he felt, of realizing that there were others out there who also lived through tragedies of learning how to deal with his grief.

But there are also his memories of Gayle: Of taking her out in the snow for the first time, attending daddy-daughter dances, going on service trips to the Appalachian Mountains with her, conversations about their faith in God.

Dubowski said he learned many things about his daughter after she died. From her friends in DeKalb, he learned what a “God-loving and spiritual woman she was, more than her mother and I knew about. She sought God in her heart and wanted to please him.”

He discovered new music to love while listening to Gayle’s MP3 player after she died, which was full of songs from the musicals she adored. He read her journals, which were filled with page after page of prayers. Several of her entries are included in his book.

“It was just her talking to God, confessing her sins to him, thanking him for the blessings in her life,” Dubowski said of his daughter’s journal entries. “She wanted to make him happy and do great things for him.”

“Cartwheels in the Rain” is a tribute to Gayle, he said, with an aim of showing people what it’s like to go through a tragedy of the magnitude his family went through. It also is a study of the faith of a man tested by tragedy. Many people ask where God is when tragedy happens, he said, and question how they can have faith when they feel as though God let them down.

“He’s there,” Dubowski said. “”He sees the whole story, from start to finish – now. We are only privy to what he wants us to see right now. In the end, it will make sense.”

Attending NIU

Dubowski realizes that, in many ways, NIU could be a perfect hiding place for a parent who lost a child in the campus shooting. It would be, he conceded, the last place many would ever go.

But right before he started writing his book, Dubowski reflected on his life and thought about dreams he had set aside. He said he’s had a long-standing interest in psychology and helping people. He wants to give back and help as many people as possible. And he said his experiences throughout his life, not just since the shooting, can be used to help others.

Life is too short, he decided, to settle for something less than his dreams.

So he commutes from Carol Stream to DeKalb most weekdays. He is set to graduate in May 2012. Most of his classes are in Wirtz Hall, although he occasionally stops in the library or the Holmes Student Center. There are “moments” when being on campus is difficult, but they are rare, random and fleeting, Dubowski said.

Many of the people Dubowski encounters on campus aren’t aware he lost his daughter in the shooting. But, he noted, that part of his history does not define who he is. It only affects it.

"I am living my own college experience, not my daughter’s,” Dubowski said. “I don’t go around introducing myself as someone whose child was murdered on campus, and so few people associate me with that fact, and I share it when I feel it appropriate and don’t mind discussing it.”