Editing Steven Kazmierczak (section)

==Background==
Kazmierczak had an unusually disturbing childhood. He would teach friends how to make homemade bombs and abused animals, sometimes sexually. Later in life, he had a string of sexual partners, both male and female.

He graduated from Elk Grove High School in 1998, during which he was treated temporarily for mental illness at the Elk Grove Village Thresholds-Mary Hill House psychiatric center, for being "unruly" at home, according to his parents Gail and Robert Kazmierczak. He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder as a teenager. He later went on to study sociology at Northern Illinois University (NIU). Though his family moved to Florida in 2004, Kazmierczak continued his education in Illinois. He enlisted in the United States Army in September 2001, and was discharged before completing basic training in February 2002 for lying on his application about his mental illness. His mother died in Lakeland, Florida in September 2006 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS). At the time of Steven's death, his father was living in a retirement community in Lakeland.