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It’s hard to imagine now, but this was a time when mass shootings weren’t part of American life. All for the specific goal of going to the top of the UT Tower and shooting people.”

“After that, until he goes to the campus, he spent the rest of his time polishing, getting weapons ready, buying more ammunition. “By 3 o’clock in the morning, his wife and his mother are both murdered,” says Lavergne. Lavergne says the 25-year-old ex-marine and former Eagle Scout was incredibly methodical as he went about killing his mother, placing her body in bed as if she were sleeping, and then stabbing his wife on July 31. He would return to his violent fantasy though. “It’s a common experience “for students who come to the mental hygiene clinic to refer to the tower as the site of some desperate action, they say ‘I feel like jumping off of the old tower.’ no psychosis symptoms at all! I recall him giving me the impression that he would return.” Heatly spoke in a news conference after the shooting: “Today we take it a whole lot more seriously because of our history, but back then, that kind of thing didn’t happen,” Lavergne says.ĭr. Heatly, claimed he’d heard violent fantasies in therapy with many students before. Gary Lavergne, who wrote “ A Sniper in the Tower,” says the school psychiatrist, Dr. While he was there, he admitted he had a violent fantasy of going to the top of the tower with a deer rifle and shooting people. Six months before Charles Whitman stuck his rifle over the edge of the clock tower at UT Austin he visited a school psychiatrist. There have been theories about abuse, a brain tumor, and of course, insanity. For decades, people have struggled to figure out why. That’s when another 25-year-old man, Charles Whitman, killed 16 people and wounded 32 others. This story is from partner organization, KERA news.įor some people, the attack on police officers by a gunman in Dallas this month brought to mind another attack by a sniper in Austin 50 years ago. “ Out of the Blue: 50 Years After the UT Tower Shooting” is Texas Standard’s oral history on the anniversary of the first public mass shooting of its kind.