Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [25]
To the north, two students were wounded on their way to the biology building. Beyond that, far to the north of the campus, 36-year-old Associate Press reporter Robert Heard was running full tilt from cover to cover when he was hit in the shoulder. ‘What a shot,’ he marvelled as he winced with pain.
To the east, 22-year-old Peace Corps trainee Thomas Ashton was sunning himself on the roof of the Computation Center. A single round ended his life. A girl sitting at the window of the Business Economics Building was nicked by a bullet. But to the south was the worst killing field. The university’s main mall had been turned into a no-man’s land. It was strewn with bodies that could not be recovered safely.
One man was responsible – one man 30 storeys up in the university tower had turned the peaceful campus into a free-fire zone. The Austin Police Department had never had anything like this to deal with before.
The bullet-scarred clock of the Austin tower was booming out its Big Ben chimes at 12.30 when a local Texan turned up in camouflage fatigues and began chipping large chunks of limestone off the wall of the observation deck with a tripod-mounted, high-calibre M-14. Meanwhile a Cessna light aircraft circled the tower with police marksman Lieutenant Marion Lee on board. He tried to get a clear shot at the gunman but the turbulent air currents around the tower made aiming impossible. The plane was eventually driven away when the sniper put a bullet through the fuselage.
Down below an armoured truck laid down smoke cover and a fleet of ambulances, sirens wailing, began loading up the dead and wounded. Students braved the sniper’s fire to haul other victims to shelter.
Austin Police Chief Robert Miles decided that he could not risk using helicopters against the sniper. His accurate fire could easily bring one down. So Police Chief Miles ordered his men to storm the tower. His directive was curt – ‘Shoot to kill’.
Patrolmen Houston McCoy and Jerry Day found their way through the underground passageways that connected the university buildings into the foyer of the tower. There they met Patrolman Ramiro Martinez who had been at home cooking steaks when he heard news of the shootings on the radio. A handsome 29-year-old and veteran of six years with the Austin Police Department, he had driven to within a couple of blocks of the tower, then ran to the passageways, zigzagging across the open plaza with the sniper’s bullets kicking up dust around him. None of the patrolmen had ever been in a gun fight before.
With them was 40-year-old retired Air Force tailgunner Allen Crum, who was a civilian employee of the university. Although he, too, had never fired a shot in combat, Crum insisted on accompanying the officers. He was given a rifle and deputised on the spot. That day, he was to see more action than during his entire 22 years in the Air Force. One of the four men punched the lift button. They were about to make the same 27-floor lift ride that the crazed gunman had taken less than two hours before.
Dressed in tennis sneakers, blue jeans and a white sports shirt under a pair of workman’s overall, the gunman had pulled into a parking space reserved for university officials between the administration building and the library, at the base of the tower, at around 11 a.m. He unloaded a trolley and placed a heavy footlocker on it. Then he wheeled the trolley into the foyer