Unabomber Attack, May 15, 1985, by Marshall Poe
From MemoryArchive
Who: Marshall Poe What: Unabomber bombing of Cory Hall When: May 15, 1985 Where: Berkeley, California
In 1985 I was a graduate student at Berkeley. I lived on North Side in a private coop called PAX house (now defunct). I don’t exactly remember why, but I was walking from PAX up Hearst on May 15th (perhaps to play basketball—I used to play at the court on top of the parking structure near there) when I saw a large gathering of police vehicles. The entire area was cordoned off. I walked up to the gathered crowd and asked what had happened. Some one told me that the building, Cory Hall, had been bombed. I thought at the time that it might have been some radical group, like the Young Spartacists or perhaps a splinter of the then very active South African divestment campaign. I didn’t think it was likely, though, because those groups tended to burn buildings down when they resorted to violence at all, and they usually didn’t. It was probably a nut, or so it seemed to me. I never considered that the perpetrator might be the Unabomber; in fact, I’m not sure I knew about the Unabomber at all. Eventually, I found out that’s who was suspected (and, in fact, who had done it). At the time though, the Unabomber was not on my radar.
External Links:
