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BoingBoing linked this yesterday. Kinda cool. There was a butterfly in the yard yesterday. I wondered what sort it was at the time as we don’t see very many of them.
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I knew there was a reason I should’ve gotten Half Life 2
Jul 252006
Jul 252006
A week from today marks the 40th anniversary of the infamous UT Tower shootings. On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the UT tower and began firing at the people below. He ultimately killed 15 (including his wife and mother, whom he killed that morning before the shooting spree) and wounded 31.
Texas Monthly is running a feature which tells the story in the words of those who were there that day. It includes the stories of many of the victims and one of the men responsible for ending the ordeal, Ray Martinez. Until reading some of these accounts, I hadn’t realized that two men, Martinez and Houston McCoy, shot Whitman and that there was contention between the two about who actually killed him. McCoy brought a lawsuit filed a claim against the City of Austin in 2000 for PTSD from the incident and they counter-sued saying that he’d waited too long to file the claim. You can read more at this site run by John Moore who acted under power of attorney for McCoy.
The shootings were the catalyst for the formation of modern-day SWAT teams. At that time, Austin Police Department officers were only equipped with revolvers or shotguns, weapons that were useless at the distance needed to take down Whitman without storming the tower and getting to him at close range. EMT was also virtually non-existent.
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