Word of the fatal shootings on the Northern Illinois University campus spread quickly from student to student, even before information from school officials reached them, many said.

Students phoned each other and sent text messages in the minutes after the shooting, which occurred shortly after 3 p.m. An e-mail from the university went out a little more than one hour after the shootings, a student said.

Drew Creal, a sophomore from St. Charles, was in a building next to Cole Hall when students around him began receiving text messages from other students that read, "There's shooting in Cole Hall" and "Get off campus," he said.

In disbelief, they ran to a window, only to see students running in terror from Cole Hall; as he ran downstairs himself, he saw an injured student carried in, bleeding from the leg.

At a building farther away, senior Christian Crum said he also got word of the shooting via student-to-student text messages.

"I had my cell phone with me," he said. "But I never got a text message from the university."

Crum got to his off-campus home by 3:20 p.m., and received a warning from the university on his computer e-mail about 50 minutes later — more than an hour after the shooting began, he said. He said the "received time" on e-mail was 4:11 p.m.

"The e-mail wouldn't have been that helpful," Crum said.

University President John Peters said the school responded quickly.

Within 20 minutes of the shooting, officials posted a message on NIU's Web site saying there was a report of a possible gunman on campus and warning students to "get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear."

By 3:40 p.m. NIU officials canceled classes and closed the campus.

"This is a tragedy, but from all indications we did everything we could when we found out," Peters said.

Joe Astolfi, 22, a junior at the school from Norwalk, Ohio, went to a 3:30 p.m. math class in DuSable Hall, near Cole Hall, and found only five other students and no teacher. He got a text message from a friend that said, "What's going on?"

"I got the heck out of there," Astolfi said. "It's scary as hell."

He made it back to his house and started trying to reach family and friends.

Michael Gentile, a media studies instructor who was meeting with students directly beneath the lecture hall when the shootings occurred, said his Internet service was down but he followed events through phone calls to a secretary in the building.

He doubts campus police or administration could have done more than they did to alert students and others on campus.

"Knowing that the campus, maybe it was within 20 minutes, was in lockdown," he said. "Information can only travel so fast..... I think Northern's response was as good as any institution could be when somebody decides to shoot up a classroom."

Meanwhile, the staff of the Northern Star, the daily campus newspaper for Northern Illinois University, sprang into action when they heard on a police scanner there had been a shooting on campus.

"When it came over the scanner, about seven or eight people ran out the door with cameras, notebooks and tape recorders," said Jim Killam, 44, the campus newspaper's adviser for the past 13 years.

The student staff planned to work through the night to update the paper's Web site and put out an edition Friday, when classes would be canceled and many students presumably would leave campus.

Alan Edrinn, 21, a journalism major from Matteson, Ill., was at the DeKalb police station checking the police blotter for stories when he "saw officers and lieutenants run out the door, some of them had bulletproof vests on." A secretary told him there had been a shooting at Cole Hall, so he headed there to report the story for the campus newspaper, the Northern Star.

"It was very chaotic. People were definitely in a panic. I saw some people running. Everyone was on their cell phone," Edrinn said.

"I saw bodies on the sidewalk, it looked like two, people were attending to them," Edrinn said. "Police were trying to get people back, there were people crying.

"I became sort of numb to what happened because I had to do my job."