Forever Tied to Austin and Each Other

Almost forty-two years ago a man killed his wife and mother and made his way to the top of the UT Tower, killing people on the way, and took up a siege of an area for blocks around. FFP stepped out of a drug store on the Drag (as Guadalupe is called by UT area denizens) to see what the commotion was and heard a shot whiz past his ear. He thinks that it was the bullet that killed someone to his right. He thinks he was partly shielded from the sniper's view. He rushed back inside the refuge of the store. At that point, the woman in the center of this picture, Claire, was already lying on the South Mall. Next to her was her boyfriend, dead. She was struck in the abdomen and her unborn baby died. She is more than likely the first person shot that day. (She is a wonderful and humble woman who seems to demure that awful distinction with a "maybe I just wanted to have been the first.") On the left in this picture is Toby Hamilton. He wasn't on campus that day. He was in West Austin, a twelve-year-old kid doing what kids do and he heard about the shootings on the radio and saw puffs of smoke on the Tower deck. What he didn't know at that moment was that it was his scoutmaster shooting at people. And that the two young college students who had stayed with him and looked after him while his parents made a trip a few weeks before were lying on the mall, one dead and one severely wounded.

In 1966, armies of counselors didn't show up in Austin to get the victims, near victims, law enforcement officers and victims' family and friends through this cataclysmic event in their lives. Toby attended the funeral of the man (a boy himself really) he had looked up to that summer. He was so upset that his parents didn't let him visit Claire whose life was saved but who spent months in the hospital. She tried to pay off the bill but isn't sure she ever did. School was suspended for one day. Flags flew at half mast for a week. In 1999, a turtle pond was built in a tucked away spot north of the Tower to honor the victims. Some time later a small plaque was added, identifying the purpose but without naming the victims.

Informally, people affected have been coming together to heal. When I took this picture, Claire and Toby had seen each other for the first time in forty-two years a few hours before. FFP and Toby have been meeting and talking with the officers and citizens who worked to stop the shooter. FFP has worked tirelessly to honor those folks with a plaque on a county building that will be named the "Tower Heroes" building.

A while after this picture was taken, we took Claire to the pond, which she'd never seen. It was full of cute turtles. Claire said she finally felt her baby was at rest.