Hours earlier, Whitman, a student at the University of Texas in Austin, had killed both his mother and his wife, leaving notes calmly explaining that he loved them.
He then went to several hardware stores to buy guns and ammunition, telling one clerk he planned “to shoot some pigs.”
Whitman took his small arsenal to the top of the university’s 307-foot high tower, where he began firing on unsuspecting students at 11:48 a.m. Police responded immediately but were outgunned, carrying only pistols while facing Whitman’s long range, high-powered rifle.
Eventually four officers, including Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez, made it into the tower. Martinez shot Whitman with his pistol six times, and McCoy shot him twice with a shotgun. “At 1:24 p.m., 96 murderous minutes after his first fusillade from the tower, Charlie Whitman was dead.”
Whitman had seemed a model citizen before the rampage. One of the youngest boy scouts ever to earn Eagle Scout honors, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of 18. After an honorable discharge, he earned a B average as a University of Texas architectural engineering student. In the wake of the massacre, outraged citizens sought explanations, but a clear motive was never found.
The shooting fueled debate over gun control that still rages today, and the Austin police department’s struggle with inadequate equipment spurred the nationwide establishment of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams equipped for such emergencies.
Unfortunately, Whitman’s rampage was only the first in what has become a tragic American legacy of school violence.