"Nothing like this had ever occurred anywhere before! This wasn't an event where you said, �Oh, this is just like so and so� therefore you had a frame of reference. At first it wasn�t obvious to police, bystanders or the media if there was more than one person shooting from the Tower. KTBC reporter Neal Spelce was about to be involved in the biggest story of his career. And they were shouting at me," Drummond said. "There were some students along the south wall of the Texas Union Building and they were all standing hunkered down, next to the wall. Gunfire on a college campus? It didn't make sense. "As I was walking toward the Tower on the West Mall, I was hearing the reports of the rifle, but it was not clicking what was going on," Drummond said. 1, 1966, it was hot on the University of Texas campus.īut other than that, nothing seemed unusual about that summer school day to newly elected student body president Cliff Drummond. 12 people have jumped from the tower since 1945. The two police officers who killed Whitman. News 8 Austin's main page of links about the tower shootings. News 8 Austin news piece about the tower shootings. Now, here is a TON of info I've been compiling this past week of the event all those years ago. I can't imagine what that day must have been like. Loving Austin, skyscrapers and architecture as I do and having a soft spot for the tower, it's so hard to believe it happened. I have such a hard time believing something like this could have happened in Austin. The cause of death was listed as homocide. In 2001 he died from complications from his condition from the shooting. For 3 decades he had to have kidney dialosis. The doctor's had planned to remove it but they found out that he didn't have a 2nd kidney to rely on. He died in 2001 from complications from the shooting. The last person to die from this shooting was a man from Fort Worth. One of them was 10 blocks from the tower and saw the puffs of smoke from Whitmans rifle on the observation deck. Both of my grandfathers were downtown that day. Austin was just a small town of 150,000 back then and this completely caught the city by surprise. It was worst mass murder in US history at that time. On August 1, 1966, (my dad's 15th birthday), Charles Whitman an architectural engineering student at UT went to the tower's observation deck above the 29th floor.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the University of Texas Tower shootings.
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