Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Penn State shooter at her arrest

Watching the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre over the past week has made me reflect on another shooting that took place at Penn State about a decade ago. I was acquainted with the shooter, and some of the similarities are chilling.

By media standards, the shooting was small, with one person killed and one wounded out of several she targeted. But the incident was nonetheless terrifying and tragic to students, alumni and the State College community at large.

Just like with the Virginia Tech killer, you could look back and see warning signs. She was an odd girl. Whereas the Virginia Tech killer was taciturn and shunned company, she was manic and had a way of setting people on edge. It wasn't anything in particular she said, just the fact that there was something a little off about everything she did.

At the time I knew her, she was an average height, medium build girl with dark blonde hair, not the sort of person you'd notice in a crowd. I didn't know her terribly well, but I doubt many people did.

My connection to her came from playing a WhiteWolf LARP (live action role playing game) which ran weekly on campus at the time. Interestingly, her involvement in the LARP never came up in press coverage afterwards, much to the relief of everyone involved, who feared that the press would scapegoat the role-playing game for her behavior.

In truth, even here, she showed how askew she was in relation to the rest of the world. She played a Malkavian character, which is an insane vampire, which struck me as odd when I later learned she'd been in and out of mental hospitals herself. This was not something she hid from people; I remember her mentioning her troubled mental health history once or twice in conversation.

As far as I could tell, she played the Malkavian character just so she'd have an excuse to hang out with a guy she had a crush on, a colleague of mine from the English Department. He and I were grad students, sharing a large office with about 20 other grad students.

My colleague had a strong personality, complete with long, bushy blonde hair and black biker boots. But even he was sufficiently unnerved by her attention to tell her to back off. Afterwards, I didn't see her at the LARP as much.

While she was playing the game, I seldom interacted with her, since I was playing a very different character, a martial artist vampire who was involved in political intrigue. I do know that whenever the two of them walked through a room, my colleague would have a rather pained look on his face as she followed with a manic gleam in her eye, barely able to suppress her energy.

By the time that tragic day rolled around, she'd been in and out of relationships with a husband and then a boyfriend that I never met.

The moment that looms large in my mind, though, is something she said to me once.

She used to work at a convenience store in State College, and since I lived nearby, I'd stop in during her late night shift and make conversation while I paid for my purchases. Usually, it was just the two of us in the store. She would show me drawings she'd done, which I can no longer remember except that they were clearly influenced by one of her favorite comics, Tank Girl. They weren't particularly violent or disturbing, just typical comic book fare.

One day, however, after she'd stopped showing up at the LARP, she casually dropped into conversation that she'd bought a Mauser. At first I thought she meant a mouser. "You mean a cat?" I asked.

"No, a gun." She described it in loving detail.

I asked her what she was going to use it for. She said she was going to go hunting, which is not uncommon in central Pennsylvania. I asked her what she was going to hunt for.

"People," she replied.

Looking back, how much clearer could a warning sign be? But at the time, I didn't see it that way. Everything she'd done had always been odd, and I thought she was making a bad joke.

I filed it away in the back of my head, not telling anyone: not the police, not my friends from the LARP, not even my English department colleague. This decision still haunts me.

I'd graduated with my MFA and was working as a pizza delivery driver in my hometown when I heard the news about the shooting. At first, details were sketchy, and they didn't give the shooter's name. When I heard that she'd used a Mauser as her murder weapon, my blood froze.

I contacted my English department colleague and asked him if he knew if it was her. He said that, in fact, it was. He was still working as an English professor on campus. The thought crossed my mind that, had she wanted to, she could have showed up at his office and gotten revenge for being rejected. Or she could have targeted her ex-husband or her boyfriend. She did none of those things.

As I'm learning, this sort of killer doesn't normally have a personal connection to the people they kill. I'm no psychologist, but she seemed to have the intent of a mass murderer, rather than a spree killer. Spree killers, in a fit of rage, attack the people they blame for their unhappiness. Mass murderers are more methodical and aim, instead, for easy targets to have the biggest impact possible.

I believe she was planning this for a long time, at least from the time that she bought the gun and told me she was going people hunting. She chose a location where she thought she could pick off many unsuspecting targets: the HUB Lawn behind the Hetzel Union Building, which was at the time the biggest green space on campus. The bush she hid behind no longer exists; it was chopped down after the killings and now a HUB expansion has completely covered that portion of the lawn.

The reason she wasn't classified as a mass murderer is simply a technicality. Only one of her shots was fatal, and she was tackled by a heroic student, who wrestled the gun away from her while she was attempting to reload.

I learned later that one of the victims was a member of the same martial arts group where I'd earned an orange belt when I was a grad student. The whole thing was very unsettling.

As far as how this connects to the Virginia Tech killing, I think that there are more similarities than differences. Both killers showed warning signs, stalking people on campus and exhibiting strange behavior, and both had come to the attention of the mental health system. Yet, the system failed, and they were free to enact their murderous rampages.

Today, the Penn State killer is serving a sentence of 30 to 60 years under a plea agreement where she pleaded guilty to third-degree murder. The Penn State community has moved on, and many incoming students don't even know about the incident.

Yet, I'm sure many of the people who knew her and interacted with her wonder, like me, if they could have stopped it. So I can sympathize with all the students and faculty at Virginia Tech, especially my hero, Nikki Giovanni, whose poetry I always admired but who I now admire as a human being. She was the poetry instructor who identified the Virginia Tech killer as a troubled young man and referred him to her English department chair, who tried desperately to get him help.

To all those people, I urge you not to blame yourself. In both cases, people had referred the killers to the mental health system. The mental health system failed them, failed all of us.

Even then, who can you blame? Our mental health facilities are sadly underfunded, understaffed and ill equipped. We need to focus on how that can be fixed.

One more thought on the Virginia Tech killings. I understand the initial coverage. It was a huge event, and it would have been shocking not to cover it. I also understand how, on day two, everyone wanted to know about the killer: who he was and why he did what he did. By all means, cover the police investigation. Tell us about the victims and commemorate their lives.

What I didn't appreciate was the endless wallowing in the so-called multimedia manifesto he sent to NBC, which appears to be a disjointed series of self-important ramblings by the killer. The endless shots of him posing with his guns, the endless clips of him bewailing how he was a victim, this coverage sickened me.

If you'll notice, I've used neither of the killers' names. I once had a high school history teacher who refused to test us on the names of assassins, because he felt many of them had killed just to be mentioned in history books alongside their famous victims. There are plenty of stories online about the Penn State shootings if you want to seek further info.

Unfortunately, we will probably never know the reason why the Virginia Tech killer, or even the Penn State killer, struck.

Rather than dwelling on that, I think we should all think about what we can do to prevent another tragedy. Start the debate about what we can change: gun laws, mental health practices, security policies, public education.

That's the best way to get something positive out of a terrible event.

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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