Well, they caught the guy...
May. 12th, 2003 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynThe gunman at my school? A former student. An MBA. Sixty-two years old, so it's not as if he were back for revenge against some prof who dinged him last year. He had worked at Case at some point, too; maybe there was something in his employment history that went wrong, I don't know. His name is Biswanath Halder. He wounded two people and killed a third.
The dead man's name is Norman Wallace; he was thirty, he was from Youngstown, Ohio. Norman was a graduate student. Older than me, but a graduate student still. I'd say 'go, Norman', but...
I just hope they name a scholarship after him. Or something. He didn't deserve to be cut down just because he was in a school building after exams were already over for the year when some psychopath with a bulletproof vest and two semi-automatic pistols decided it was time to Settle Something Or Other.
I'm not really mad about this, just... I dunno, upset, I think, and still a little freaked out. I mean, it was Case. We joked that they built some of the buildings in that part of the campus with crenellations along the roof so that the archery team could defend Mather Quad from Communist attack. We knew that walking through Mather Quad at night was dangerous, so we avoided it then, but during the daytime there were no real problems with it. Most of my anthro classes were in that part of campus. So were most of my religion classes, for that matter. And now it's got the ugliest building I've ever seen squatting on it, and that building's a murder scene.
I was flipping through the radio stations at one point this weekend trying to find something I liked and instead ran across the protest song about the Kent State shootings, and caught myself thinking about Case instead, even though that was only one dead in Ohio. Dammit, that's not supposed to happen to alumni memories. This was Case. If a campus shooting occurred, it was always kind of assumed - at least, by myself and the people I knew - that it'd be a tower sniper kind of thing, that it'd be a current student on the roof of the tallest building on campus picking off people around thePhallic PhountainMichaelson-Morley Fountain or something. Or that one of the Theta Chis would go 'elf postal' and start nailing people with a sixty-pound longbow, since CWRU Theta Chis are not like Theta Chi brothers anywhere else on the planet. Or something. We never thought this would happen. No one ever does, but - jeez, we were a campus full of nerds, we pretty much still are, and you just don't associate things like this with a place like that.
So now Case joins the École Polytechnique of the University of Montreal; we have had our psychos, and they have drawn our hearts' blood. I doubt the Case gunman will turn out to have had any kind of similarity of motive to the perpetrator of the Montreal Massacre, since in Montreal the psychopath blamed women and feminism for all his problems, but unless something is very much wrong with post-graduate education in this country I don't see the Case situation coming from the same roots as grade school and high school shootings. The difference is that the Case shooter is alive. The one who committed the Montreal Massacre killed himself, coward that he was. I hope some good comes of this, somehow, some way. . . but for now I do not know what to say, or what to do, and the only response I can quite think of just at the moment is a private one. As with the Massacre, as with the Oklahoma City bombing, as with the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown, I will not use the perpetrator's name again. Let the deed be remembered, but the one who did it deserves no more than he gave Norman Wallace. Less than he gave Norman Wallace.
Norman deserves to be remembered. The gunman doesn't.
The dead man's name is Norman Wallace; he was thirty, he was from Youngstown, Ohio. Norman was a graduate student. Older than me, but a graduate student still. I'd say 'go, Norman', but...
I just hope they name a scholarship after him. Or something. He didn't deserve to be cut down just because he was in a school building after exams were already over for the year when some psychopath with a bulletproof vest and two semi-automatic pistols decided it was time to Settle Something Or Other.
I'm not really mad about this, just... I dunno, upset, I think, and still a little freaked out. I mean, it was Case. We joked that they built some of the buildings in that part of the campus with crenellations along the roof so that the archery team could defend Mather Quad from Communist attack. We knew that walking through Mather Quad at night was dangerous, so we avoided it then, but during the daytime there were no real problems with it. Most of my anthro classes were in that part of campus. So were most of my religion classes, for that matter. And now it's got the ugliest building I've ever seen squatting on it, and that building's a murder scene.
I was flipping through the radio stations at one point this weekend trying to find something I liked and instead ran across the protest song about the Kent State shootings, and caught myself thinking about Case instead, even though that was only one dead in Ohio. Dammit, that's not supposed to happen to alumni memories. This was Case. If a campus shooting occurred, it was always kind of assumed - at least, by myself and the people I knew - that it'd be a tower sniper kind of thing, that it'd be a current student on the roof of the tallest building on campus picking off people around the
So now Case joins the École Polytechnique of the University of Montreal; we have had our psychos, and they have drawn our hearts' blood. I doubt the Case gunman will turn out to have had any kind of similarity of motive to the perpetrator of the Montreal Massacre, since in Montreal the psychopath blamed women and feminism for all his problems, but unless something is very much wrong with post-graduate education in this country I don't see the Case situation coming from the same roots as grade school and high school shootings. The difference is that the Case shooter is alive. The one who committed the Montreal Massacre killed himself, coward that he was. I hope some good comes of this, somehow, some way. . . but for now I do not know what to say, or what to do, and the only response I can quite think of just at the moment is a private one. As with the Massacre, as with the Oklahoma City bombing, as with the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown, I will not use the perpetrator's name again. Let the deed be remembered, but the one who did it deserves no more than he gave Norman Wallace. Less than he gave Norman Wallace.
Norman deserves to be remembered. The gunman doesn't.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-12 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-12 08:26 am (UTC)I'd just like to point out at this point that the Case shooter was sixty-two years old. Anyone tries to turn this into 'the Internet sucks away the lives and morals of our youth' and I will plotz, okay? Thanks.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-12 08:44 am (UTC)Which is a different kind of rant....