University of Texas Tower Shooting, 1966, Buck Wroten
From MemoryArchive
Who: Buck Wroten What: University of Texas Tower Shooting When: Summer of 1966 Where: Austin, Texas
It can be hot in Austin in the summertime and the summer of 1966 was no different. I was attending the summer sessions and the University of Texas to get some core courses out of the way to be able to take more interesting classes in the fall. Austin is a wonderful place in the summer with all the attractive recreational features in and around the city. There are three nearby lakes and many parks with swimming holes perfect for a couple of months of studying and sunning.
My 10-11:30am speech class had just let out. A friend, Steve, and I were walking across the south mall below the tower building with a couple of classmates that were engaged to be married in the fall. It was a beautiful morning and all the flowers were blooming around the large campus. We were walking rather slowly because our next classes did not begin until noon. The sound we heard next is a sound I will never forget. The thud of a high-powered bullet crashing into flesh and bone. Then the report of the rifle. Again the thump a bullet into a human body. Again the sound of the rifle. Steve and I glanced at the couple on the ground and then sprinted into the hedges and flowers to our right. We could hear the rounds hitting the pavement where we had been walking but had no idea where they were coming from. Then it was quiet. I looked back at the two bodies on the mall. There was no movement. Steve was a few yards in front of me trying to be as small as he could in the flowerbed. We hid there for what seemed hours. Actually, it was only a few minutes. The sporadic gunfire seemed to be somewhere else on campus and we could not see anyone but the bodies on the south mall. Without a word, we jumped up and ran like the wind across the rest of the east and south mall. As we rounded the south mall, we could see more bodies strewn on the flagstone. Steve ran into the Hogg building and I slipped into the English building.
The mind does strange things under stress. Mine strives for normalcy. Therefore, I went into my noon English class. There were about thirty students already there looking out of the windows onto the south mall when the professor entered the room. He actually began class but could not seem to get the attention of the students. He followed the class’s attention out on the mall just in time to see an Austin policeman gunned down trying to move students to a safer area next to the mall. A security officer came into the room saying someone was shooting from the top of the tower. We evacuated the classroom rather quickly. The hallway and basement were the safest places to be but I decided to go up to the top floor offices to get a better idea of what was happening.
None of the professor’s offices were occupied except for one whose door was open. As I walked down the hall toward that office the sound of a large caliber rifle thundered from that open doorway followed by two men talking. After all the bizarre events of the last few minutes it didn’t seem strange to me when I peeked around the office doorway to see one professor shooting a deer rifle at the top of tower while the other fed him ammunition. It never entered my mind to question why an English professor would have his deer rifle in his office complete with boxes of ammunition. This was Texas after all. Guns were commonplace. From the office windows, we could see the top of the tower clearly. Small puffs of smoke were coming from the rifle of the sniper on the observation deck. The large glass faced clock above the observation deck was shattered from others shooting back at him. The professor ran through several boxes of shells before running out of rounds. My ears were ringing.
A while later there was no more gunfire from the tower and word was spread that the sniper had been killed. Students and EMT’s recovered the wounded and dead around campus. People who had been on the observation deck when the shooting rampage began, were the first ones killed when the sniper started. They were brought down the elevator on gurneys covered in blood soaked sheets.
Charles Whitman, an ex-marine engineering student, was finally killed by Officer McCoy. Whitman had killed his own wife, mother before going to the tower. He had a brain tumor. It was the first time in America that a shooting spree had been televised live. I believe I came closer to death that morning than I ever did in Vietnam.
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