Monday, April 16, 2007

VA Tech Shooting

Unbelievable. 31 shot dead on the campus of Virginia Tech today. Reports say the majority of the victims were in Norris Hall!

I have some fond (and not so fond) memories of several classes in Norris Hall between 1984 and 1988 including:
  • Engineering Statics and Dynamics (Professor Arpad Pap)
  • Programming (FORTRAN)
  • Fluid mechanics lab
  • Strength of Materials (and busting lab.)
  • Mechanics of Composite Materials (Professor Robert Jones)
and others I can't seem to remember.

I lived in Pritchard Hall, an all-male dormitory, during my freshman year (1984-1985.) It was adjacent to Ambler-Johnson (AJ.) We went over to AJ occasionally because they had a state-of-the-art PC lab with the latest in dot-matrix printer technology.

What could possess a person (or persons) to commit such heinous and senseless acts? What troubles were they having that drove them to this? I guess you can take two points of view on it. One, try to understand what drives people to this level and two, develop processes and safeguards to deal with the inevitability of such situations. There are many questions yet to answer. For now we must empathize with the victim's families and try to comprehend why this happened.

1 comment:

Charlie said...

Regarding the West AJ crime scene:
Before assuming that both this incident and the Norris Hall scene were perpetrated by the same person, think about this scenario...

A disgruntled boyfriend goes upstairs to the 4th floor of the West AJ dorm. He kills his girlfriend, then commits suicide. In that circumstance, the two incidents would most likely not be related at all.

Both incidents may be related, BUT we are NOT sure just yet...

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