Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #True Crime, #Murder, #test

A Sniper in the Tower (59 page)

Page 197

13
Independent Actions

In a short time, nearly all of Austin's police force had reported for duty. Some of the officers went directly to the campus. Others, including Officers George Shepard, Phillip Conner, Harold Moe, and Milton Shoquist, went to police headquarters first. There, the team was given tear gas and a walkie talkie and told to report to the campus area. Since the officers were in possession of communications equipment and tear gas, when they reached 21st and Speedway, Sergeant Marvin Ferrell, who had been directing officers to their assign-

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ments, sent them to the UT Security Office a few blocks north of the Tower at 24th and San Jacinto. There Houston McCoy asked them if they had any additional shotguns. They did not. He also asked if they had any directions or a plan. They did not. At the office, UT's Security Chief Allen R. Hamilton directed one of his men, Sgt. A. Y. Barr, to lead the APD team to the Tower.

From the university police station, the band of officers walked through the campus to an area directly east of the Tower. From that position there appeared to be only one way to get to the Towera dash over an open area. McCoy wondered aloud if there was a safer way for six men to get to the Main Building. William Wilcox, a university employee, knew of a maze of tunnels connecting the buildings to allow for relative ease when maintaining the campus infrastructuretelephone, power lines and water lines. Through the tunnel connecting the Computation Center to the Main Building, Wilcox guided McCoy's team.
¹

Inside the Tower, APD officer Jerry Day, DPS intelligence officer W. A. Cowan, and the civilian Allen Crum had already taken the elevator and stairs to the twenty-seventh floor. As Day, Cowan and Crum climbed towards the top, Ramiro Martinez unsuccessfully attempted to establish contact with APD headquarters before deciding to join Day and the others on the twenty-seventh floor. He walked toward the elevator, but before he could enter it a young man holding a clipboard asked him for his name. "Why do you want my name?" Ramiro asked. The man said he really did not know, but he felt the need to do something. In any case, Ramiro gave the man his name and entered the elevator, alone. The doors closed and he heard familiar elevator sounds and felt the well-known push on his heels and the soles of his feet as the elevator began to defy gravity. Like a typical occupant, he stood quietly and watched the illuminated numbers change, going upand up.

Ramiro's parents would have been proud. He remembered the prayers he had been taught at home and at Catechism on Sunday mornings in Rotan, Texas. Raising his right hand to his forehead to begin the Sign of the Cross, he closed his eyes, pledged his life to God and asked for forgiveness of his sins:

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Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen.

The elevator doors opened onto the twenty-seventh floor. Ramiro Martinez stepped out and joined Crum, Day, and Cowan, the latter two struggling to establish communications with UT Security Chief Allen Hamilton in order to request more shotguns. They also wanted the firing from the ground to stop.

Meanwhile, the first policeman to enter the tower, Patrolman Bob Day, still waited on the third floor for someone to bring a rifle; he had been instructed to hold his position.
²

On the twenty-seventh floor, a librarian named Jules Emig and his wife Patricia had been closer to the shooting than anyone in the Tower, except for the Gabours and Lamports. Emig had heard three shots and seen M. J. Gabour and William Lamport running through the twenty-seventh floor crying for help. Shortly afterwards, they could hear Mike and Mary Gabour moaning. James Zinn ran in and asked them to call for help. After doing so, they locked themselves in a room with Gabour and Lamport. The group looked out of the twenty-seventh floor window directly below Charles Whitman, and like him, they could see the victims being shot. Concrete and limestone made the gunshots sound as though the firing was coming from the inside of the building. Suddenly, someone knocked on the door. The panic-stricken group was relieved to discover it was Officer Jerry Day, who had come to clear the twenty-seventh floor.
³

Neal Spelce had asked them not to do it. But as the drama unfolded, hundreds of Austinites began, as Police Chief Miles would later say, to "stupidly" flock to the university. It was as if a citizen's militia had been called to the campus. Chief Miles would later deny it, but on numerous instances Austin Police officers encouraged and even supplied civilians with the weapons to shoot back at the sniper.

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Houston McCoy actually made two trips to Everett Hardware to get ammunition for civilians. After hearing a radio call for officers to stop firing at the Tower below the twenty-sixth floor, Officer L. Janetzke ran down the Drag spreading the request.

In buildings, on rooftops and through windows, dozens of people, policemen and civilians side by sidewith varying degrees of accuracyfired at Whitman with pistols, shotguns and rifles. From the English Building a civilian mumbled, "I'm going to get the son-of-a-bitch." Elsewhere another civilian, this one dressed in camouflage, fired an M-14 mounted on a tripod. Husbands with wives working in the Tower went home for their deer rifles to return and join in the fray Don Vandiver, a newspaper reporter, had been handed a forty-five-caliber pistol; he chose not to use it. Throughout the campus students claiming to be "good shots" searched for weapons and asked the police for guns. Gunmen lined the rooftops adjoining the Tower. Soon, Whitman could not peer over the parapet, take aim, and shoot. He was forced to use the rain spouts and could not stay there long. As soon as he appeared, an avalanche of ground fire hit the Tower all around him. On the floor of the deck chunks of limestone were scattered amongst an even covering of pale dust. As Whitman ran from

Police and civilian fire directed at Whitman hit the walls of the Tower instead,
creating an even coating of pale dust and gravel-size chunks of limestone covering the red
tile floor of the deck, and leaving gunfire marks on the ornate exterior.
Austin Police
Department Files.

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Photo of the Tower with an arrow
pointing to dust kicked up from
return fire from the ground.
UPI/
Corbis-Bettmann.

one position to another, the bits of rock crunched under his sneakers.

The police could do little. Trying to disarm dozens of civilians in the shadow of a Tower housing the deadliest sniper in American history would have been foolish. After all, the return fire was largely successful in pinning Whitman down; nearly all of the dead and wounded were hit during the first twenty minutes. Austin's response to the incident exposed evidence of Texas's fondness for deer hunting and Army surplus items. In
Texas Monthly
Bill Helmer would repeat the story of an incident in the San Jacinto Cafe, where, as customers watched coverage of the Tower massacre on television, a man carrying a deer rifle hurriedly purchased a six-pack of beer and rushed right out.
⁴

Such varying degrees of qualifications with so many weapons could have been disastrous. The fact that no one was hurt as the result of "friendly fire" was miraculous. Charles Whitman probably could have posed as just another civilian wanting to help, had he

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decided to come down from the Tower and escape. Could he have gotten out of the building? If stopped and questioned, he could easily have produced a student identification card, a permit to be on the campus from 12:30 to 1:10
P.M.
, and a card showing an honorable discharge from the marines.

Ultimately, the Tower incident would reinforce the Texas tradition of bearing arms. When asked to comment on the civilians' use of firearms, Chief Miles responded:


They did it on their own. I imagine some of them had military training. And I don't want to condemn their action because their fire did help pin him down. And most important it was not irresponsible shooting. They were shooting at the Tower ⁵

But there were other people in the Tower besides Charles Whitman.

III

Houston McCoy kept asking for a plan. That none existed bothered him immensely Once inside the Tower he was surprised at the number of people in the hallways and rooms; the place was full. ''In my mind, there was nobody in the building." He had been in the Tower only once before to take a competitive typing exam for the Texas Employment Commission. He had not stayed long. Once instructed to begin, the other test-takers, about thirty women, had filled the room with the noise of fingers assaulting keys at a rate much faster than Houston dared to dream about. He had slowly removed the paper from the typewriter's carriage and gracefully left the room
⁶

After entering the Tower, Officer McCoy's team utilized the expertise of Frank Holden, an Otis Elevator employee. McCoy asked if it were possible to take the elevator all the way to the very top of the Towerthat is, up into the crown of the building itself, even higher than the deck. His plan was to get above the "snipers" and shoot down upon them. Holden knew of a way to get there. The elevator could be taken to the twenty-seventh floor, after which a panel could be removed from the car's ceiling. Conceivably, once on

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