9/9/2023 0 Comments Charles whitman shooter![]() ![]() He joined the US Marines aged 18, escaping his violent, oppressive father. They want to die in a big way, being in complete control and essentially doing the thing they can do better than everybody else, and in Whitman’s case that’s using a gun.”Ī diligent and intelligent student from Florida who at age 12 was said to be the world’s youngest Eagle Scout, Whitman was an exceptional marksman. “What we do find about the people who do these things is that they’re losers, and by that I mean they’re failures, even if only in their own mind, and they decide they don’t want to live any more but they don’t want to commit suicide. He went up there and he knew he wasn’t coming down alive. People who committed crimes, you assume they wanted to get away. “It was kind of an introduction to the concept that a person will do this and he doesn’t give a damn about whether he’ll live or die,” he said. Today he works in the university’s admissions research department and his office is on the ground floor of the tower. ![]() Lavergne wrote a thorough account of Whitman’s murders, A Sniper in the Tower, in 1997. The UT Tower massacre was the first mass shooting on a US college campus.Īt a time when television news was expanding in reach and cultural influence and melding important moments into shared national experiences, it was arguably mainstream America’s introduction to a now familiar type of crime: an armed individual inflicting tremendous and unexpected violence at a location whose name would come to be used as shorthand for tragedy. “And I’ll be danged if he wasn’t right.”Ĭharles Whitman killed 17 people, including an unborn child, and injured more than 30. “I’ll never forget the way he said that,” he added. “That nut is showing everybody what’s possible and we’re going to see a lot more of this,” Lavergne recalled his father saying. The act felt shocking in its scale and its originality. The anchor, Walter Cronkite, related the big story of the day: a man had climbed the famous tower at the core of the University of Texas campus in Austin and shot passersby with a rifle. ![]()
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