“I think he thought it was guerrilla theater,” James, who survived, told Texas Monthly in 2006. When she appealed to a passerby, he yelled at her to get up. The first victim, Claire Wilson (now James), who was 18 at the time and eight months pregnant, lay shot and bleeding on the campus mall next to her mortally wounded boyfriend. One man fleeing the scene ran into Scholz Garten, a restaurant on San Jacinto Boulevard, screaming, “There’s a sniper up on the tower, and he’s shooting people!” People in the restaurant thought it was a joke. Confronted with a novel form of terror, that was easier said than done. Then again, there had never been a tragedy quite like this.Īs the bodies - the death toll eventually reached 15, with more than 30 wounded - amassed across UT’s sunny, spacious campus as phone lines jammed across the city from all the panicked calls to the police and as hundreds of students and faculty hiding behind cars and trees became, in a brutishly literal sense, a captive audience to the deaths of their peers, it became the job of everyday people to save and protect each other. Nor was there yet such a thing as a proper EMT, this still being the era of ambulances run by funeral homes. Those would come later - in part, it turns out, thanks to Whitman. When 25-year-old ex-Marine Charles Whitman, armed with a Remington Model 700 and other weapons, climbed to the top of the University of Texas tower on August 1, 1966, and opened fire on his classmates from 300 feet up, there was no ready-made response.
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