Sunday, April 29, 2007 | 7:28 a.m.
Reasonable people have an inherent need to seek explanations for unreasonable behavior. We struggle to make sense of our world when all about us seems senseless. Whenever a tragedy of epic proportions occurs, as it did three weeks ago at Virginia Tech, our grief is tinged with confusion.
Students on college campuses across the country were especially affected by the massacre, and so it's no surprise that some of Dr. John Irsfeld's students at UNLV have been full of questions for him.
The students ask these questions because their teacher, an acclaimed novelist who has been voted into the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame, is a thoughtful and intelligent man in his 70th year, and they respect his opinion.
But when they first sought his perspective in the days immediately following the tragedy of April 16, Irsfeld's students had no way of knowing that he possessed an eerie familiarity with the subject.
It is a hot August day in 1966. Irsfeld is driving to campus at the University of Texas to turn in a paper on death in medieval poetry. It is the kind of day that finds the Longhorns football team on a practice field, losing pounds of sweat in blocking and tackling drills as they take another run at a national championship.
Irsfeld has just completed his masters degree in English and is beginning his doctoral studies. Though he lives only blocks from the campus, he elects on this day to drive to school. After parking his car in front of a Baptist church near the English Department building, he gets out and suddenly hears what sounds like a rock glancing off the pavement near his Chevrolet. He looks around to see who might have thrown it.
Next he sees a woman running towards him, her face distorted, as she turns a corner. She is panic-stricken. The two odd events occurring within seconds alert him that something extraordinary is happening. As he quickens his pace toward the giant quadrangle that sits in the heart of the Austin campus, he sees a sight that stays locked in his memory four decades later. People are strewn about on the concrete, in strange physical attitudes.
Then he hears again a sound like that of the rock that landed near his car. And then another sound, and another. He looks up and sees a puff of smoke emerge from where the sound came. And then he sees the barrel of a rifle poking out of a rain spout in the University of Texas tower that is the centerpiece and looming symbol of the university.
What John Irsfeld is witnessing is the first mass murder on a college campus in American history. Before it's over the gunman, a clean-cut former Marine named Charles Whitman, will have shot 43 innocent people in his rampage, and killed 13. It is discovered later that day that he has also killed his wife and mother in the hours before he ascended the tower. A note he leaves behind says he murdered them to spare them the embarrassment his impending actions would cause.
Time and again over the past three weeks media accounts mention that the Virginia Tech killings eclipsed those of Austin, 1966, and set a new bar for campus horror. For those who were there, each mention of it dissolves the 41 years between the two events and makes the Tower murders feel like yesterday.
One of Irsfeld's favorite writing instructors as an undergrad at Texas was a poet named Frederick Eckman. The two had remained friends in the years following their student/teacher relationship, and when it was time for Eckman's only son, Tommy, to attend college, UT Austin was the easy choice.
"Tommy was an excellent student, a talented musician, just a great kid with a world of potential," Irsfeld recalls. "On the night that Fred left Tommy to start summer school the two of them were at our house and we had a great time. Fred played the guitar and Tommy the banjo and we all sang and laughed through the night. The last words Fred Eckman said to me before he returned to his teaching job in Ohio were, 'Take care of Tommy.' "
Irsfeld said he would.
Who would ever have imagined the set of circumstances that would unfold just a month later? For within the same minute that a bullet hit the ground near John Irsfeld's parked car, another bullet struck Tommy Eckman in the chest and killed him instantly. The 8-month pregnant woman with whom Tommy was walking at the time had been hit in the abdomen, and when he leaned down to shield her he was struck. Most accounts of the horror say Tommy was the first student murdered in the rampage, which lasted 96 minutes. The woman with Tommy survived, but the infant she carried was silenced the moment she hit the pavement. The unborn child is included in some listings of the body count.
An autopsy performed on Charles Whitman in the days that followed showed he had a small brain tumor, and some who theorized about his actions claim that was the cause. However, the consensus of the medical community in Austin was that the tumor was probably not to blame, given its size and location. A commission was put together by Gov . John Connally (who himself had been shot in the JFK assassination three years earlier) to explore the question, but the results were inconclusive. It was later learned that Whitman had told a campus psychiatrist named Maurice Heatly three months before the shootings that he was "oozing with hostility," and that he felt a desire to go to the top of the Tower and shoot people with a deer rifle.
That information was kept from the public because Dr. Heatly feared that if he made a practice of revealing the confessions of disturbed students, "there would be too many people in the psychiatric ward."
Does any of this sound familiar in the wake of Virginia Tech? It should. The student who did the killing in Blacksburg sent up at least half a dozen flares to various people on campus that he was heading down the same dark road as Charles Whitman. Yet no one took the warnings seriously enough to remove him from the university, and all that is left for the parents and survivors is to wonder why it had to happen.
Frederick Eckman died in 1996, and when Dr. Irsfeld returned to Texas for his funeral, he visited Fred's home, and there above his desk was a large portrait of his boy Tommy. The young man looked exactly the same as he did the night he played the banjo at John's place before starting summer school.
Years after the event, Eckman published a book of poems titled "The Noonday Devil." The father never came close to getting over the loss of his son and the horror of that day.
Neither has John Irsfeld.
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