Grief echoes at Fresno State
Fresno Bee 4/17/07
At Fresno State on Monday -- even as the smell of fresh-mown grass floated over sidewalks full of students walking by rosebushes -- the connection to a college campus brought a mass shooting in Virginia tangibly home.
"They said it was in a lab and my mind immediately could picture just what that classroom would look like because of my lab classes," said 21-year-old English major Rachel Shillito.
Joanne Lui, 21, a journalism major, walked around Monday morning carrying her notebook computer and watching news updates.
"It made me want to cry, and the whole time I'm thinking, 'I have to go to class in an hour.' "
In the music class they share, both Shillito and Lui noted that they were near the back in a classroom with no back doors, no escape route. They discussed whether they would have been one of the students who jumped from a window or who stayed and got shot, had they been in that Virginia Tech classroom.
After class, they and others sat in the student satellite center in front of a TV that repeatedly flashed the headline "Campus Horror."
Paul Oliaro, Fresno State's dean of student affairs, learned of the shootings during a morning meeting.
It was not until after he had faced local TV cameras, answering questions about Fresno State's security, that he got a chance to watch the tape of what had happened in Virginia.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his face at the footage of gunshots and police running into a building on the southwestern Virginia campus.
"I feel it right in the gut. Your heart sinks and it stays in the pit of your stomach, and still there's a part of me that says, 'Thank God it wasn't here,' " he said.
During a morning press conference, some reporters pressed Fresno State Police Chief Dave Huerta to say that something like the Virginia shooting wouldn't take place at Fresno State -- something he said he couldn't do.
"We're an open campus, no fences, many ways to come in or out," he said. "I can't assure you it's not going to happen."
But he went over current security measures -- officers trained to shoot, more than a dozen security cameras, a card key security system for residence halls -- and said his department would closely study the Virginia shooting to look for ways they can update security.
Security improvements Fresno State police are eyeing include a warning system that will allow campus police to send out blanket warnings to anyone with a cell phone. Huerta said the university began looking for such a system after Fresno police and bank robbers had a shootout near the campus in August.
During the Virginia shootings, students and faculty continued to arrive on campus, unaware of the danger.
The massacre in Virginia took place almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High bloodbath near Littleton, Colo. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.
Before Monday, the deadliest college campus shooting in U.S. history was a rampage in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles Whitman climbed a clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the 28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before he was shot to death by police.
Today's 21-year-old college student was 13 years old at the time of the Columbine shootings. Fresno State students said the Virginia shootings were triggering memories of Columbine.
"I remember writing poetry about Columbine when I was in seventh grade and stupid. It is one of those events that shaped my age group," Lui said.
Columbine also was on the minds of local law enforcement. Until that tragedy, police had been trained to secure an area and wait for support. Now, officers are told to confront a gunman.
"We want any shooter to have to deal with officers. We're going after the bad guy, that's all there is to it," said Huerta.
At the University of California at Merced, Police Cmdr. Mike Parish said patrols were not stepped up after the Virginia Tech shootings, but the police department is prepared for such a scenario.
"It's business as usual because we are, in fact, armed, equipped and trained to respond to an active shooter," Parish said.
He said all nine sworn officers in the department have gone through state training so they can respond to a shooting in progress and not have to wait for SWAT units to arrive.
Parish said all UC Merced officers carry rifles that can penetrate body armor.
At Fresno State, students, administrators and faculty said years of school violence has not numbed them to grief, but it has left them aware that no place is completely safe.
"It hits hard if you live or work on campus or have kids in college, because you know it could happen anywhere," said Oliaro as he watched the death toll mount at Virginia Tech. "Tomorrow we'll do the only thing we can do -- try to get in touch with that campus and see if there is any way we can be of help."
In the student recreation center, biology student Matt Brown, 28, divided his attention between a basketball and coverage of the shootings as he worked out.
"You can still feel bad, but as for shocking -- I remember Columbine. I remember a lot of things. You know it can happen."