A gunman shot 21 people, killing six, inside a lecture hall Thursday at Northern Illinois University's DeKalb campus, authorities said. The shooter killed himself after the spree, according to police.

Around 3 p.m. CT, the gunman walked out from behind a screen on the stage of the 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire, NIU President John Peter told CNN. The gunman was armed with a shotgun and two handguns and was dressed in all black, DeKalb Police Chief Donald Grady said. "It started, and it stopped very quickly," Grady reportedly said.

CNN identified the man as Steven Kazmierczak, 27, according to a law enforcement officer familiar with the investigation. He had no police record, and Grady said they do not yet have a motive. As recently as spring 2007, the gunman had been a graduate student in sociology at the DeKalb campus, located just outside Chicago, according to Peters.

On Friday, the Chicago Tribune reported that just two years ago, NIU had honored Kazmierczak identified as the shooter with a dean's award for his sociology work. He was noted for having co-authored a manuscript on self-injury in prison and the role of religion in the formation of early prisons in the United States. He was also the past vice president of the Academic Criminal Justice Association chapter at NIU, a student group that works to educate the local community "about ... all areas of the criminal justice system, especially corrections and juvenile justice." Another source identified the gunman as a current graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Tribune identified four of the victims, all Illinois natives: Daniel Parmenter, 20; Catalina Garcia, 20; Ryanne Mace, 19; and Julianna Gehant, 32.

According to CBS station WBBM-TV, the NIU campus went on lockdown soon after the initial reports of shots being fired at the school. The station reported that several ambulances responded soon after the incident. According to CNN, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich later declared a state of emergency, enabling him to use the governor's disaster fund to reimburse local government entities for "extraordinary expenses related to the response in NIU DeKalb." The move will also reportedly allow the state Emergency Management Agency to provide assistance as well.

One student, George Gaynor, told the campus paper, the Northern Star, that the shooter was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on." He described the scene outside Cole Hall as chaotic. "Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor told the student paper. "It was like five minutes before class ended too."

[This story was originally published at 5:35 p.m. ET on 2.14.2008]