7:23am. I roll out of bed. I make a note that this is the first time I've woken up without swearing to drop this class. I take too long to get ready but it doesn't matter;he doesn't take roll. And with a class of 300, I will go unnoticed. I grab one snack sized apple sauce, peel off the tin top and gulp it down while I wait for the elevator, hoping outside is much warmer than this building. It's not.
I shiver my way to class. It's a fairly long walk compared to my other classes. Takes about 10 minutes. The bell tower dongs 8 times when I'm only halfway there. I don't speed up.
On a whim, I decide to sit on the other side of the lecture hall than I normally do, in the back-most row. After a few seconds, everyone forgets I walked in. After a few minutes of lecture, I forget why I walked in.
I hear the back doors behind me and to my right, open. Another straggler. I wouldn't have looked at the girl and guy who'd just rushed in if it wasn't for my professor. "Who are you kids running away from?" he asked jokingly. Everyone looks at them. They're pale and visibly winded. They seem absolutely dumbstruck by the number of people looking at them. They seem to have had no idea what was behind the doors they'd just opened.
They don't answer my professor. They just look around the room and at each other, taking deep breaths. "What are you on the run from? Who was chasing you?" he asks again, with a smile, but apparently, they had been pushed into the room by someone, and the professor saw that. The boy speaks, "We heard shots outside."
"Oh. Really?"
They eventually explain how they heard shots and saw a guy with a black ski mask and hood over a suit holding a big something tightly under his shoulder. When they ran past him, he waved to them.
What followed can be found by any news source; 19 year old sophomore and math major Colton Tooley, brandishing an AK-47, went up the stairwell of The University of Texas' main library, the PCL, and shot himself in the head on the 6th floor.
My classroom is on the first floor of the building right next door to that library. It took until 10:30am for them to let us out of class. I went straight to my dorm's cafeteria and had one of the more dramatic stories of that morning among my friends. Naturally, it was the only thing anyone could talk about.
As my friend Molly pointed out, it doesn't seem like he went out with the intention of killing anyone. He fired a few rounds into the air, but that's it. No one came forward to say he made any threats, or even pointed the gun at anyone except himself. It was intended to be a suicide (and only a suicide) from the get-go. Just a showy and elaborate one.
The real interesting thing was the amount of misinformation. I heard people claim he'd shot anywhere from 7 to 27 people. There were reports of a second gunman in a dark navy suit, which turned out to be people remembering his suit color wrong.
But the incident's been pretty much forgotten. To be honest, it's weird to think that that happened just last Tuesday. Not even a week ago. It seems like it happened last month.
I just wanted to document my experience because, although it's been labeled as 'old news' to most people, it's an event that should be remembered.
P.S. I set my alarms to weird times. That makes it harder for me to calculate how much time I could get away with if I slept in, so I'll get up. It doesn't work.
