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Campus Shooting: Saved by love? NIU student skipped class to be with boyfriend

Posted February 15, 2008 10:00 pm

Kelsea Gurski

Robin Waters never misses her oceanic geology class at Northern Illinois University.

But the fact that Thursday was Valentine's Day may have saved her life.

Robin, an honor student, has been in class every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon - "front and center" in the third row of the classroom in Cole Hall - taking notes for what she says is her favorite course.

But a canceled Thursday morning class and a desire to surprise her boyfriend in Springfield for Valentine's Day led Waters, a 2007 Pleasant Plains High School graduate and a freshman at NIU, to skip geology for the first time ever.

She's never been more thankful.

Thursday afternoon, home in Springfield, Robin learned from an NIU classmate that a gunman had opened fire in the class she had skipped, killing six people, including himself, and wounding more than a dozen others. She turned on the television to see cameras pointed at the building in which her course took place, and her professor - a doctoral student - being wheeled to an ambulance on a stretcher.

"When I heard it was my class, I couldn't take it," she said Friday. "I just got the chills. I was in shock and started crying. It was such a coincidence that I wasn't there. I was picturing myself sitting there - for me to place myself in that situation was too much."

Robin said she knows three other students in the geology class, all of whom escaped the room unharmed. What jarred her the most, she said, was realizing how far she would have been from the back entrance, through which many students escaped.

For whatever reason, the stars aligned to keep Robin away from campus Thursday, said her mother, Renee Alonso, who was with Robin when she got the call about the shooting.

"It wasn't meant for her to be there," Alonso said.

Robin said she credits her year-and-a-half-long relationship with her boyfriend, Joseph Myren of Springfield, for saving her life. Had they not been dating, she wouldn't have left campus so early to come home, she said.

"I keep telling him he saved my life," she said. "If it wasn't for him, I would have been there."

Though Myren isn't keen on his girlfriend returning to campus, Robin said she plans to complete the semester. She has yet to hear when classes will resume, but said she "can't imagine" the geology course resuming, at least with any kind of normalcy.

She expects the atmosphere to be very emotional when she returns to school, but her mother said Robin can handle it.

"I thinks she's a very strong person," Alonso said. "She'll go up there and be a comfort to other people and have no qualms about it. I'm sure it will be emotionally difficult, but she has the strength for it. She'll be ready."

Kelsea Gurski can be reached at (217) 788-1526.

BREAKOUT

For Robin Waters' life to be saved because of Valentine's Day means even more to her mother, Renee Alonso said Friday.

Alonso learned she was pregnant with Robin the day before her husband was killed in an automobile accident in December 1988.

For all of Robin's 18 years, her mother has considered her a Valentine's gift - the last one her husband was able to give her.

When Robin was born in July 1989, Alonso gave her the middle name Valentina.

"To me, she's my Valentine," she said. "Oh my gosh, I couldn't have lost my little Valentine on Valentine's Day."

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