Something so awful happens that sometimes I am just speechless and just left feeling sick to my stomach. That's how I felt after the gunmen killed all those little girs at the Amish school and that's how I feel now in the aftermath of the mass killings at Virginia Tech. I also have a feeling of there but for the grace of God, go I.
I worry about my kids in their respective schools. Kristin's high school has been in lock down several times and now the kids are restricted from using all but 2 or 4 of the bathrooms in the whole big building. Billy called not long ago to let me know RPI went into lockdown after a body was found in one of the buildings. It turned out the man had killed himself but it was still kind of scary not knowing what had happened. And even though Heidi goes to community college locally you just never know when something crazy can happen.
And I know it for a fact. When I was 17 and a senior--December 13, 1972--a maintenance man at my high school went berserk. He was armed with a machete, stabbed two security guards and took a 10th grader hostage. He held the girl in the tiny office next to our psychology classroom. I can still hear the girl's voice, screaming and pleading and how insane the man sounded in reply. In the end, he let her go and the SWAT team shot the man to pieces and killed him. I never ever would have dreamed something like that could happen at my school--but it did.
And it keeps happening over and over.
I've tried to stay away from the news story but came upon it again when I was reading Blog d'Elisson's post today. I'd heard that one of the professors at Virginia Tech had protected his students by barricading the door with his own body and I'd wondered about that man--what caused him to sacrifice himself like that? Read Blog D'Elisson's post, it might make you cry as I did.
I don't know what else to say.
Posted by Cassie at April 18, 2007 04:44 PM | TrackBack