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Edited with XEmacs |
You can see the part of each story below that mentions how Peter O. was captured here, while an index is here
Fri, 18 Jan 2002
The Advertiser
NEW YORK: A failed law student killed two professors then shot dead a student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia. Three other students, also shot, are in a critical condition. Nigerian foreign exchange student Peter Odighizuma, 43, was disarmed of his .38-calibre automatic pistol by four other students.
The Advertiser
NEW YORK: A failed law student killed two professors then shot dead a student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia. Three other students, also shot, are in a critical condition. Nigerian foreign exchange student Peter Odighizuma, 43, was disarmed of his automatic pistol by four other students.
This Day
Africa News
A Nigerian student angry at being dismissed stormed through the campus of the Appalachian School of Law yesterday with a handgun, killing the dean, a professor and a student and wounding three others before he was tackled by fellow students, the Virginia state police reported.
“Come get me, come get me,” the gunman was heard saying as terrorized witnesses ran for their lives, the New York Times reported
“He was a time bomb waiting to go off,” Dr. Jack Briggs, a county coroner, told news reporters about the alleged assailant, Peter Odighizuwa, 42, a student from Nigeria. The authorities said the school had told Odighizuwa on Tuesday that he was being dismissed because of failing grades. State officials said that Odighizuwa, who was charged with three counts of capital murder, had a history of mental instability and that school authorities had sought to help him.
In a running assault, the gunman confronted and fatally shot the law school dean, L. Anthony Sutin, 42, who was a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. Mr. Sutin was shot in his second-floor office, as was Thomas F. Blackwell, 41, a member of the faculty.
The third person killed, Angela Denise Dales, 33, of Vansant, Va., was described as a former law school employee who was widely admired for achieving her dream of finally enrolling as a student. She was shot in the school lounge with a .380 semiautomatic pistol.
The gunfire stunned the campus and surrounding town of 1,100 residents as it delivered death to a school envisioned in the 1990’s as a pastoral outpost to answer the chronic problems of educational need in one of the more distant and impoverished parts of Appalachia. It opened five years ago in a renovated junior high school and now has 244 students and 19 faculty members.
Sutin was praised by faculty and students as a dedicated pioneer at the school, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who had specialized in legislative affairs for former Attorney General Janet Reno before turning to the school as a fresh adventure. Professor Blackwell, a graduate of Duke University School of Law, was recruited to the faculty from his law practice in Dallas.
The three wounded students, hospitalized in fair to critical condition tonight, were identified as Rebecca Claire Brown, 38, of Roanoke, Va., who was shot in the abdomen; Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Grundy, who was shot in the throat; and Stacey Bean, 22, of Berea, Ky., who was shot in the chest.
“There were pools of blood all over,” Chase Goodman, a 27-year-old student, said in describing a scene punctuated with screams and gunfire.
“When I got there there were bodies laying everywhere,” said Dr. Briggs, who arrived at the first emergency alarm. Two victims suffered point-blank wounds “execution style,” one doctor at the scene said.
Law Student Shoots Six, Kills Three
Vanguard
Africa News
A NIGERIAN student recently suspended by his U.S. law school went on a shooting spree on Wednesday, killing three people and wounding three more, a local coroner and physician said.
The gunman used a .38-calibre semi-automatic handgun at point-blank range to shoot the school s dean and a professor, killing both men, before opening fire on his fellow students in Grundy, Virginia, said Doctor Jack Briggs.
One student was killed, and three more were injured in the rampage at the Appalachian School of Law. One woman was in fair condition and two more were in surgery, hospital staff said. After the rampage, the gunman was tackled by four male students before being arrested, said Briggs, whose medical practice is near the school.
Virginia State Police identified the man they were holding in the shooting as Peter Odighizuwa, 43. They did not immediately release any further details or announce charges.
One victim, the school s Dean, was Anthony Sutin, a former U.S. Justice Department official who worked on the 1992 election campaign for former President Bill Clinton.
Professor Thomas Blackwell was also shot dead in his office in the small law school, located in the Appalachia mountain range, about 500 km southwest of the capital Washington.
Briggs said he knew the gunman, who had complained of stress about half-a-year ago and in hindsight had been “a time bomb ready to go off”.
The student had flunked out of the school last year and, after a second attempt, had been suspended for poor grades.
“So he took his anger out on the people he felt were responsible for him leaving the school,” the doctor said. “I had no idea it would affect him this way.”
The faculty members were “executed”, said Briggs, who described gunpowder burns on the shirt of one victim who was “obviously shot at point-blank range”.
School administrators issued a statement saying they were shocked and saddened by the shooting. Classes were canceled for the rest of the week. A memorial service was held at noon yesterday.
The three wounded students were taken to Buchanan General Hospital and later transferred to other hospitals for treatment.
All three wounded students are women, said Tim Baylor, spokesman for Wellmont health system. Two of them were in surgery and the third was in fair condition, he said.
Police said one student was shot in the abdomen and arm. A second student was shot in the throat and the third student suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.
The law school, with about 170 students enrolled, began offering classes in 1997 at a renovated junior high school about 45 miles north of Bristol.
Shattered town mourns ‘irreplaceable’ victims killed during campus shooting spree
Chris Kahn
The Associated Press
Hundreds of people gathered to remember a dean, a professor and a student who were killed during a campus shooting spree, allegedly by a man described as “off-balance” and prone to violence.
Students lit tiny white candles and wept in small, shivering circles at the Appalachian School of Law as they remembered the victims Thursday.
“They were irreplaceable, whether you see them as teachers or father figures or friends,” said William Sievers, 25, president of the school’s Student Bar Association. “It’s going to be tough going back to school.”
Peter Odighizuwa, 43, a troubled law student who had recently flunked out of school for a second time, opened fire with a handgun at the school on Wednesday, police said.
Dean L. Anthony Sutin and professor Thomas Blackwell were slain in their offices and student Angela Dales, 33, died later at a hospital. Three other students were wounded.
Kenneth Brown said his fellow students always joked that Odighizuwa was one of those guys who would finally crack and bring a gun to school.
“He was kind of off-balance,” said Brown, 28. “When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later he came back and said, ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.’ Out of the blue.”
Odighizuwa, a native of Nigeria, faces three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges.
At an arraignment Thursday, Odighizuwa told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out … I don’t have my medication.”
Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.
Students described Sutin as a hands-on administrator who knew all of his students’ names.
“He just had this integrity about him,” said Mary Kilpatrick, who will graduate in a semester.
Blackwell, a father of three, was remembered as an avid runner and trumpet player. He recently performed with his family in a Christmas show at a local elementary school, said professor Stewart Harris.
Dales, a mother of an 8-year-old girl, became a student after working as a recruiter for the school. She wanted to work in law education.
Odighizuwa was arrested on Aug. 15 for allegedly assaulting his wife. The police report said he hit her in the face, bruising her right eye.
Chief Deputy Randall Ashby said Odighizuwa repeatedly approached police with concerns about people breaking into his house on the outskirts of this small town in western Virginia.
Grundy, a gritty coal town of about 1,100 in the shadow of two great mountain ridges, has long been isolated from violent crime, the Rev. Stan Parris said at an afternoon memorial at the Grundy Baptist Church. He asked the crowd of a few hundred to pray and reassured them that “God will bring justice.”
Laws protect privacy of students, so screening for mental illness difficult, experts say
Arlene Levinson
The Associated Press
After failed law student Peter Odighizuwa allegedly stormed the Appalachian School of Law and killed the dean, a professor and a student, acquaintances said they knew all along he was troubled.
But screening college applicants for instability and removing students with serious mental health problems can be difficult, experts say.
Federal laws bar admissions officers from asking about mental illness, and clamp a shield of privacy over information about students once they’re enrolled. Add the communal setting and the culture of openness on college campuses and they are as vulnerable as any community.
“The whole range of behaviors and problems you have in small towns, you have in universities,” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “They’re small towns.”
Unlike small towns, however, there are some extra rules.
The Americans with Disabilities Act prevents schools from asking about any mental illness in admissions, and requires the school to accommodate afflicted students - which they gladly do, said Barmak Nassirian, policy analyst for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
“Regrettably, there isn’t a whole lot institutions are allowed to do prior to the commission of a nefarious act,” Nassirian said. A “hunch” is not enough to keep someone out of the classroom, he said, “just because somebody is very passionate - shall we say - in their discourse.”
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act generally prevents schools from revealing student records to anyone outside the school.
This became controversial after the Sept. 11 attacks. A survey of registrars found 220 schools had been contacted by at least one agency seeking student information - 50 schools by more than one agency from a group that included the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and state and local police.
Most of the time, campuses are generally peaceful havens.
“There’s no national pattern of violence on college campuses,” said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, which represents higher education groups. “You’re dealing with isolated instances that are basically idiosyncratic and very difficult to prevent.”
But privacy protections need not be a barrier to safer campuses, said Scott Doner, public safety director at Valdosta State University in Georgia.
Odd or scary behavior should be reported to campus police, who can check it out, he said. That’s a lesson learned from the high school shootings in recent years: the shooters often talked about their plans.
“A lot of people do not want to get involved,” said Doner, president-elect of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Officers. “But I think because of what happened on Sept. 11, and going all the way back to Columbine, people are beginning to realize they can make a difference.”
Two killed in apparent murder-suicide on Florida college campus; shooter was ex-boyfriend
The Associated Press
A man shot his ex-girlfriend to death Friday at the community college she attended, then killed himself, authorities said.
Moriah Ann Pierce, 20, was studying to become an elementary school teacher, according to a statement from Broward Community College, southwest of Fort Lauderdale.
Michael Holness, 23, of Miramar, shot her, then himself, because of a domestic dispute, police Lt. Gary Killam said.
Several students witnessed the late-morning shooting, but no one else was injured.
“I turned around and I saw the girl was shot,” student Joe Fazio said. “It looks like she was shot in the back of the neck. Then I heard the second gunshot. I turned around and the guy was laying on the ground.”
It was the third shooting at schools nationwide in the past week.
On Wednesday, the dean, a professor and a student were shot and killed at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va. A student who had recently flunked out was arrested.
Two students were shot and wounded Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on New York City’s Upper West Side. A teen-ager was arrested Friday.
Slain law school professor remembered for embracing secluded mountain town
Chris Kahn
The Associated Press
A law professor who left practices in big cities for this secluded mountain community was remembered Friday for how he touched lives here.
Thomas F. Blackwell, a 41-year-old Dallas native, was one of three people killed by a gunman Wednesday at the Appalachian School of Law.
“I would have taken that bullet for him,” high school buddy Andrew B. Sommerman told a crowd of about 300. “I loved him.”
Since the law school opened in the heart of Virginia coal country in 1997, administrators pushed faculty and students to embrace their host town. Blackwell did this perhaps better than anyone.
He worked with a county river cleanup project and helped build homes. The family participated in programs at the Mountain Mission School, an agency for children of extreme poverty. He and his wife sang in the choir at Buchanan First Presbyterian Church.
“At the moment he died, Tom was going about doing good,” the Rev. Miller Liston said.
Blackwell graduated from Duke University and worked as a corporate lawyer in Dallas and Chicago. But life in the big city wasn’t for him.
The Grundy job was perfect, said Sommerman, a lawyer from Dallas. “He knew every single one of his students. I’m not sure if you could have that at Duke,” he said.
Also slain Wednesday were L. Anthony Sutin, the school’s dean, and student Angela Dales, 33. Three students were wounded.
Former student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, who authorities said had recently flunked out of school a second time, faces three counts of capital murder and other charges. A preliminary hearing is March 21.
For two nights since the shootings, students, faculty and residents have gathered at churches and on the school lawn to embrace and cry.
Before the crowd left the church, Blackwell’s wife stood and thanked everyone.
“Y’all have become our family,” Lisa Blackwell said. “We have more love here than we could possibly have asked for.”
Screening College Students Difficult
Arlene Levinson
Associated Press Online
After failed law student Peter Odighizuwa allegedly stormed the Appalachian School of Law and killed the dean, a professor and a student, acquaintances said they knew all along he was troubled.
But screening college applicants for instability and removing students with serious mental health problems can be difficult, experts say.
Federal laws bar admissions officers from asking about mental illness, and clamp a shield of privacy over information about students once they’re enrolled. Add the communal setting and the culture of openness on college campuses and they are as vulnerable as any community.
“The whole range of behaviors and problems you have in small towns, you have in universities,” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “They’re small towns.”
Unlike small towns, however, there are some extra rules.
The Americans with Disabilities Act prevents schools from asking about any mental illness in admissions, and requires the school to accommodate afflicted students - which they gladly do, said Barmak Nassirian, policy analyst for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
“Regrettably, there isn’t a whole lot institutions are allowed to do prior to the commission of a nefarious act,” Nassirian said. A “hunch” is not enough to keep someone out of the classroom, he said, “just because somebody is very passionate - shall we say - in their discourse.”
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act generally prevents schools from revealing student records to anyone outside the school.
This became controversial after the Sept. 11 attacks. A survey of registrars found 220 schools had been contacted by at least one agency seeking student information - 50 schools by more than one agency from a group that included the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and state and local police.
Most of the time, campuses are generally peaceful havens.
“There’s no national pattern of violence on college campuses,” said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, which represents higher education groups. “You’re dealing with isolated instances that are basically idiosyncratic and very difficult to prevent.”
But privacy protections need not be a barrier to safer campuses, said Scott Doner, public safety director at Valdosta State University in Georgia.
Odd or scary behavior should be reported to campus police, who can check it out, he said. That’s a lesson learned from the high school shootings in recent years: the shooters often talked about their plans.
“A lot of people do not want to get involved,” said Doner, president-elect of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Officers. “But I think because of what happened on Sept. 11, and going all the way back to Columbine, people are beginning to realize they can make a difference.”
2 Die in Fla. Murder-Suicide Shooting
Associated Press Online
A man shot his ex-girlfriend to death Friday at the community college she attended, then killed himself, authorities said.
Moriah Ann Pierce, 20, was studying to become an elementary school teacher, according to a statement from Broward Community College, southwest of Fort Lauderdale.
Michael Holness, 23, of Miramar, shot her, then himself, because of a domestic dispute, police Lt. Gary Killam said.
Several students witnessed the late-morning shooting, but no one else was injured.
“I turned around and I saw the girl was shot,” student Joe Fazio said. “It looks like she was shot in the back of the neck. Then I heard the second gunshot. I turned around and the guy was laying on the ground.”
It was the third shooting at schools nationwide in the past week.
On Wednesday, the dean, a professor and a student were shot and killed at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va. A student who had recently flunked out was arrested.
Two students were shot and wounded Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on New York City’s Upper West Side. A teen-ager was arrested Friday.
Two killed in apparent murder-suicide on Florida college campus; shooter was ex-boyfriend
Associated Press Worldstream
A man shot his ex-girlfriend to death Friday at the community college she attended, then killed himself, authorities said.
Moriah Ann Pierce, 20, was studying to become an elementary school teacher, according to a statement from Broward Community College, southwest of Fort Lauderdale.
Michael Holness, 23, shot her, then himself, because of a domestic dispute, police Lt. Gary Killam said.
Several students witnessed the late-morning shooting, but no one else was injured.
“I turned around and I saw the girl was shot,” student Joe Fazio said. “It looks like she was shot in the back of the neck. Then I heard the second gunshot. I turned around and the guy was laying on the ground.”
It was the third shooting at schools nationwide in the past week.
On Wednesday, the dean, a professor and a student were shot and killed at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia. A student who had recently flunked out was arrested.
Two students were shot and wounded Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. High School in New York City. A teen-ager was arrested Friday.
The Australian
UN names date
for E Timor poll
DILI: In a final step towards nationhood, East Timor will hold its first presidential elections on April 14, the territory’s UN administrator announced yesterday.
Independence leader Xanana Gusmao is widely expected to win and become East Timor’s first head of state when it gains full independence on May 20.
Argentina reacts
BUENOS AIRES: Argentina has announced emergency measures to feed the poor and will consider using troops to free up police facing unrest and protests over banking curbs.
Shooting spree
WASHINGTON: Three people were killed yesterday in a shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in southwestern Virginia, authorities said.
Elephant kills 10
RANCHI, India: At least 10 people, including a woman and two children, were killed and several others injured when an elephant went on a rampage in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, officials said yesterday.
Belfast News Letter (Northern Ireland)
A LAW student who is accused of killing his college dean, a professor and another student told a judge yesterday that he is sick and needs help.
Peter Odighizuwa shuffled into Virginia’s Buchanan County Court in leg chains, surrounded by policemen. Hiding his face behind his green arrest warrant, Odighizuwa told Judge Patrick Johnson, “I was supposed to see my doctor. He was supposed to help me out. I don’t have my medication.”
Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old naturalised American from Nigeria, went to the Appalachian School of Law yesterday to talk to his dean, Anthony Sutin, about his dismissal for failing grades, officials said.
He shot Sutin and professor Thomas Blackwell, who taught him, with a pistol, authorities and students said.
He then went to a commons area and opened fire at students, killing Angela Dales, 33, and injuring three others.
Students ended the rampage by tackling him
“He was angry. He thought he was being treated unfairly, and he wanted to see his transcript,” said Chris Clifton, the school’s financial aid officer.
“I don’t think Peter knew, at this time, that his dismissal was going to be permanent and final.”
Odighizuwa said, as he was led into the courtroom, “I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
Bristol Evening Post
AMERICA: A law student who is accused of killing his college dean, a professor and another student told a judge in Virginia yesterday that he is sick and needs help. Peter, a 43-year-old naturalised American from Nigeria, shot his dean at the Appalachian School of Law yesterday as well as professor Thomas Blackwell, who taught him.
He then opened fire on students, killing Angela Dales, 33, and injuring three others. Students ended the rampage by tackling him.
Classmates feared accused gunman
Calgary Herald (Alberta, Canada)
The expelled student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree at Appalachian School of Law in Virginia on Wednesday was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming.
At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out . . . I don’t have my medication.”
Police say Odighizuwa opened fire with a handgun at the school Wednesday, killing three people, including a professor.
“He was kind of off-balance,” classmate Kenneth Brown said. “When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later he came back and said, ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.’ Out of the blue.”
EX-CHARLOTTEAN: I HELPED NAB SUSPECT;
Diane Suchetka
Charlotte Observer (North Carolina)
One of the four students who subdued a gunman at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia on Wednesday is an N.C. native and former Charlottean.
Mikael Gross, 34, a first-year student at the small school in Grundy, Va., told The Observer he worked as a state alcohol law enforcement agent in Charlotte from 1996 until 1998 and earned a master’s degree in criminal justice at UNC Charlotte in 1997.
Two other men who helped bring the gunman under control also have worked as law enforcement officers in North Carolina - in Asheville and Wilmington, Gross said.
Gross was walking back to the law school from lunch just after 1 p.m. Wednesday with four classmates when he heard a gunshot. He yelled to the others to take cover and watched as students ran from a student lounge in the administration building.
“People were running everywhere,” Gross said. “They were jumping behind cars, running out in front of traffic, trying to get away.”
Gross ran to his car, parked about 100 yards away, without dropping the gunman from his sight, grabbed his bullet-proof vest from his trunk and a gun from under his front seat.
While the man pointed his gun at fellow students, Gross and two others ran toward him from different directions.
One of the others was Tracy Bridges, a Buncombe County sheriff’s deputy from Asheville, who also had his gun, Gross said.
When the gunman saw them, Gross said, he put his weapon down and his hands up.
The third man, Ted Besen, who has worked as a police officer in Wilmington, was not armed and ordered the gunman onto the ground. Instead, the gunman lunged at Besen, punching him in the face.
That’s when a fourth student ran up and tackled the gunman. Gross and Bridges jumped on the gunman, pulled his hands behind his back and held him as he tried to fight them off.
When the gunman was under control, Gross ran back to his car for his handcuffs. Police arrived a minute or so later, he said.
Afterward Gross and the others headed into the administration building to help those who had been shot.
“There was blood everywhere,” Gross said. “It looked like somebody had mopped the floor with blood.”
They put some of the injured onto folding tables turned into gurneys, loaded them into SUVs and drove them to the hospital.
“I let my instinct kick in and did what any good law enforcement officer would do, what any good person would do,” he said.
Gross, who graduated from Oak Ridge Military Academy in Oak Ridge in 1985 and East Carolina University in 1989, has also lived in Raleigh, Burlington and several other N.C. cities.
He worked as the director of police corps training at the N.C. Justice Academy in 1998 and 1999, he said, and the chief of police at Brevard College before heading to law school in August .
During breaks from law school, he works as a police officer in Grifton. His mother, Cecilia Wicker, lives in Charlotte.
Slain professor’s career started at Chicago-Kent
Mark Skertic
Chicago Sun-Times
Attorney Thomas Blackwell left Chicago for the mountains of Appalachia because he believed he could make a difference in the lives of law students there, his former colleagues recalled Thursday.
Blackwell, who began his teaching career at Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1997, was among three killed Wednesday when a former student at Appalachian School of Law went on a shooting rampage after learning he had been dismissed for failing grades. The school’s dean and a student also were killed.
On Thursday, Peter Odighizuwa appeared in court in Grundy, Va., charged with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six charges for use of a firearm in a felony.
Blackwell, 41, graduated among the top 10 percent of his law school class from Duke University in 1986, earning a master’s in philosophy the same year. A Texas native, he immediately joined a large firm in that state. In the next decade, he moved first to a smaller firm and then to a solo practice before he went into teaching.
Professors at Kent, where Blackwell taught legal writing, said he was a natural teacher who was excited when offered the chance to join Appalachian.
“He relished the challenge of being part of a small faculty and making a difference,” said Harold Krent, dean at Kent.
Krent last spoke with his former colleague 10 days ago in New Orleans.
“[Blackwell] was attracted to the school and to the size of the community,” he said. “He wasn’t someone who needed the lights of the big city.”
Blackwell left Kent in 1999 to join the law school in Grundy. It had opened just two years earlier, with a unique mission to train lawyers to work in the economically depressed coalfield region.
The chance to help the school grow and rear his family in the tiny community appealed to him, said Susan Adams, an associate professor at Kent.
“He reveled in the possibility of being in on the ground floor of the development of a very interesting law school,” she said of Blackwell, remembering him as one who always made time for students and faculty. “He was a very good man.”
In 1996, a decade after earning his law degree, Blackwell wrote that he was re-evaluating his professional choices.
“I have now come to the conclusion that money is not only not the priority in life, it is not a priority in life . . .” he said in a story that appeared in the law magazine Legal Times. “As a result, I am re-evaluating what I want to be when I grow up.”
The next year he joined the faculty at Chicago-Kent.
Mary Rose Strubbe, an associate professor there, said Blackwell was excited after his first visit to the Appalachian School of Law.
“He was a person who made a difference,” she said. “He was impressed with the law school’s ambition. He loved the area in terms of its geography and small towniness.”
Troubled law student faces murder counts
Wire Reports
Chicago Tribune
Townspeople watched in shock and grief Thursday as the law student known on campus as Peter O. was led into the Buchanan County courtroom, shuffling in chains and hiding his face from cameras, to face murder charges in this remote Appalachian coal town.
Peter Odighizuwa looked at the floor as he was accused of assaulting his colleagues at the 5-year-old Appalachian School of Law and murdering the founding dean, a second faculty member and a student caught in the handgun rampage. Three other people were wounded.
“Section 18.3,” the clerk intoned as the bloody rampage was translated into cold subsections of the state criminal code.
Possible death penalty case
Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.
A few law students listened, appalled at the lesson in life and law unfolding before them.
During his arraignment on three counts of capital murder and six weapons charges, Odighizuwa told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” he said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out . . . I don’t have my medication.”
As cameras bored in on the lens-shy defendant, the town tried to absorb the fact that the law school, one of the most hopeful innovations in decades in hard-pressed Grundy, had been visited by tragedy just at the moment of its greatest promise.
“Oh, Tony, my dear friend,” said Richard Mullins, a bike shop proprietor and law book dealer, mourning Dean Anthony Sutin, 42.
Sutin, a cum laude Harvard Law School graduate and Clinton administration Justice Department veteran, had retreated from the limelight of Washington to pioneer an adventure in education amid the beauty and chronic poverty of backwoods Appalachia. He was fatally shot at close range Wednesday as he worked in his office.
A second notice of dismissal last week left Odighizuwa increasingly confrontational, students and faculty members said. Police said the shooting occurred after he arrived to protest his dismissal.
Law program had flourished
The school, which had a faculty of 15 and more than 200 students, earned provisional accreditation last year from the American Bar Association. This meant graduates finally had standing to take bar exams.
“The network was starting to take hold,” Mullins said, and so was the rustic professorial life sought by Sutin, whose wife, Margaret Lawton, was also on the faculty.
In their home on Walnut Street, the couple had just adopted a daughter from China to join their adopted Russian-born son, residents said.
Also killed was professor Thomas Blackwell, 41, shot to death seconds after the dean.
A graduate of Duke Law School, Blackwell had built a life in a foothills home with his wife, Lisa, a worker at the school law library, and their three young sons.
Odighizuwa sought no less an idyllic place when he arrived here two years ago, intent on a law degree. Odighizuwa, 43, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Nigeria, brought his wife, Abieyuwa, and four sons with him to Virginia. They soon needed charity, and Grundy residents quietly obliged, with Sutin helping him get a car and a loan, school colleagues said.
But Odighizuwa failed courses and then faced wife-beating charges last August. Those charges are pending.
Access to gun a mystery
It was clear in interviews that there were many questions about Odighizuwa, including why he chose the law school here and, most pressing, how he might have gotten a handgun.
The third person killed, Angela Denise Dales, also had high hopes at the school. Dales, 33, who was raising her 7-year-old daughter alone, first worked at the school office but then realized her dream to enroll and seek a law degree. She was shot in the neck as the gunman moved from the faculty quarter to the students’ Lions Lounge and sprayed students with a .380 semiautomatic handgun.
“We’re all devastated,” said Tom Scott, a local lawyer and close friend of Sutin’s. “This is a sleepy community, but we all understand by now that this type of incident can happen anywhere in the U.S.A.”
Odighizuwa was held without bail pending a March hearing.
GRAPHIC: PHOTOPHOTO: Mourners try to comfort one another Thursday in Grundy, Va., following a memorial service for victims of Wednesday’s attack. AP photo by Steve Helber.
On campus, a struggle to meet mental-health needs
Gail Russell
Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)
The Appalachian School of Law is not a typical “sink or swim” campus, but a place where the philosophy is to give second - even third - chances.
That’s why the school, set in rural Grundy, Va., let Peter Odighizuwa return for a second year, after failing his first. It’s also why the faculty got together to buy him a car, after his was totaled in an accident, and helped his children get into a local private school.
Though many in the close-knit academic community seemed aware that Mr. Odighizuwa was often troubled and angry, mental-health services were a luxury the five-year-old law school could not afford. And certainly, no one counted on the gun. Now he is charged in this week’s shooting deaths of the school’s dean, a professor, and a student.
The tragedy presents an acute side of a larger problem: how to address mental-health problems on college campuses.
“One of the trends we have noticed over the last 10 years is an increase of students with much more serious psychological problems,” says Robert Gallagher, former director of counseling and student development at the University of Pittsburgh. He oversees an annual survey of campus counseling-center directors, now in its 20th year.
The challenge of inadequate mental-health services hit public schools hard, after a wave of high-profile shootings in the 1990s. Suddenly, school boards even in rural areas began putting more resources into student counseling and security.
The issue is much less talked about on college campuses. But experts cite many reasons for the growing mental-health caseload: families that don’t function, student drinking and substance abuse that exacerbate psychological problems, and intense academic pressure. After cutting counseling services in the 1980s, colleges and universities began beefing them up in the 1990s to deal with the problem.
Still, on many campuses, demand for such services is outstripping these new efforts. To cope, many colleges reverted to “time-limited therapy” - which restricts the number of sessions a counselor can have with a student on campus - or simply referred students to outside therapists. Those solutions are not meeting the need, says Mr. Gallagher.
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which tried the referral approach for serious problems, the administration said in November it would significantly expand on-campus counseling services to better oversee students feeling emotional and academic pressure. For years, students and parents had complained about the suicide rate on the campus.
This fall has seen rising mental-health demands on campuses nationwide.
“Talk to counseling directors on campuses across the country, and you’ll find that this year has been particularly intense, especially since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11,” says psychologist Dennis Heitzmann, director of the Center for Counseling at Pennsylvania State University, at University Park. “We are finding that those who had experienced other trauma at other points in their lives were finding that unresolved issues were rising to the surface.”
That’s especially true for foreign-exchange students “concerned about incidents of harassment,” he adds.
Harassment appears not to have been an issue at Appalachian School of Law. When students had problems, the 12 faculty members often put their heads together to help solve them. In the small, tight-knit academic community - whose legal specialty was problem-solving skills - it seemed to work.
Until Wednesday. Former students remember the alleged gunman as a troubled man who often spoke of his need for more money and had great difficulty in his classes.
“Everyone there felt that it didn’t matter if you were not capable of succeeding the first time. If you had the desire, the gumption, to apply again, why shouldn’t you be given a second chance?” says Julie Palas, a former student at ALC, now working as special projects counsel for the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
“To allow him to come back and try again was a characteristic of what the school was all about… Perhaps if we had had a trained professional, they might have seen something,” she adds.
The US Department of Education reports that the incidence of crime at colleges and universities is significantly lower than in surrounding areas. “Campuses are typically a safer environment than the areas they serve,” says spokeswoman Lindsey Kozberg. Figures show campus homicides spiked to 24 in 1998, then dropped to 11 in 1999. The department will release campus crime figures for 2000 later this month.
SUSPECT PARANOID, LAW STUDENT SAYS
Wire Reports
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
The expelled law-school student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming.
At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out. . . . I don’t have my medication.”
Police said Odighizuwa was evaluated and given medication in jail, but declined to identify the drug.
Police say he opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time. Dean L. Anthony Sutin, professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales, 33, were slain and three other students were wounded.
Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.
On Thursday, students wept in small, shivering circles, many wondering about the classmate who always seemed aloof and was prone to vulgar outbursts.
Kenneth Brown, 28, said his friends always joked that Odighizuwa was one of those guys who would finally crack and bring a gun to school.
“He was kind of off-balance,” Brown said. “When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later he came back and said, ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.’ Out of the blue.”
Zeke Jackson, 40, said he stopped trying to recruit Odighizuwa for the school’s Black Law Students’ Association after Odighizuwa sent the dean a letter complaining that Jackson was harassing him.
“I knew he’d do something like this,” Jackson said.
Odighizuwa arrived here two years ago, intent on a law degree. He, his wife Abieyuwa, and four sons soon needed charity, and Grundy residents quietly obliged, with Sutin helping him get a car and a loan, according to school colleagues.
“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” said Mary Kilpatrick, a third-year student, wondering aloud why Odighizuwa would kill the dean. “He’s the one who allowed him to stay here.”
But the student’s life worsened as he struggled in class, flunked courses and then faced wife-beating charges last August. Those charges are pending.
Police said Odighizuwa approached them repeatedly with concerns about people breaking into his house.
Chief Deputy Randall Ashby said Odighizuwa told police last year that someone placed a bullet in a stairway at his home. Three months ago, he complained again that his home has been broken into.
“Both times my deputies checked it out and found nothing,” Ashby said.
Odighizuwa also regularly visited the sheriff’s office to nitpick with deputies over the wording of the police reports he’d filed, Ashby said.
“Everybody helped the man,” said Richard Mullins, the town’s combination bike-shop proprietor and official law-school book dealer. “But with Peter, life was always a matter of somebody else’s fault.”
“We’re all devastated,” said Tom Scott, a local lawyer and close friend of Sutin’s.
LAW SCHOOL EXECUTIONER TELLS COURT: ‘I NEED HELP’
Daily Record
THE law student accused of killing his dean, his professor and a classmate appeared in court yesterday, and announced: “I’m sick and I need help.”
Peter Odighizuwa shuffled into a district court in Grundy, Virginia, in leg chains, surrounded by police officers. Hiding his face behind his arrest warrant, Odighizuwa told Judge Patrick Johnson: “I was supposed to see my doctor. He was supposed to help me out. I don’t have my medication.”
As he was led in, he told reporters: “I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
Odighizuwa had been kicked out of the Appalachian School of Law for failing exams. But the 43-year-old naturalised US citizen from Nigeria, returned on Wednesday to talk to his dean, L. Anthony Sutin.
In the office, he shot Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell with a .380 -calibre pistol.
He then went downstairs to a common area and opened fire. Student Angela Dales, 33, was killed in the attack. Three other students were injured.
Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, who dropped his weapon.
School financial officer Chris Clifton said: “He was angry. He thought he was being treated unfairly.”
Associated Press
Daily Press (Newport News, VA)
The expelled law school student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming.
At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out … I don’t have my medication.”
Police say Odighizuwa opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time.
Dean L. Anthony Sutin and professor Thomas Blackwell were slain in their offices and student Angela Dales died later at a hospital.
Three other students were wounded.
Odighizuwa also faces three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges. As he was led into the courtroom, Odighizuwa told reporters, “I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
Police said Odighizuwa was evaluated and given medication in jail but declined to identify the drug.
SLAIN LAW SCHOOL DEAN LEFT D.C. TO HELP THE POOR
Associated Press
Daily Press (Newport News, VA)
Law school dean L. Anthony Sutin, slain in his office during a campus shooting rampage, was a highly successful lawyer who left a career in the halls of power to deliver better legal services to the poor of Appalachia.
He came to tiny Grundy in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia in 1999 to become dean of the Appalachian School of Law, a private school established two years earlier.
A student angry over flunking out ended Sutin’s life Wednesday with a gunshot to the head, authorities said. A professor and student also were slain, and three students were wounded.
Sutin served in the Clinton administration as acting assistant attorney general for legislative affairs under former Attorney General Janet Reno.
“I lost not only a former colleague, but a friend,” Reno said in a statement. “Tony was an incredibly kind, exceptionally bright, and intensely dedicated public servant who was committed to bettering the welfare of all Americans.”
Before joining the Justice Department, Sutin, 42, was a partner in the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson. While at the firm, he represented the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton-Gore 1992 campaign and the Paul Tsongas for President campaign.
Sandy Mayo, a colleague at Hogan & Hartson, said the Harvard Law School graduate could have continued his career in Washington if he had wanted.
Sutin told The Roanoke Times last April that he had found in Grundy the old-fashioned virtues of life, such as knowing all your neighbors and being able to leave your doors unlocked.
LAW SCHOOL DEATHS SHAKE GRUNDY HUNDREDS TURN OUT TO HONOR VICTIMS
Associated Press
Daily Press (Newport News, VA)
Mourners lit candles, then sat silently in their glow.
One day after gunfire shattered the serenity of this tiny, southwest Virginia town, there seemed little anyone at the Appalachian School of Law and the community it calls home could do but sit in silence, lost in their agony and question “why?”
“Columbine seemed like a world away, until lunch yesterday,” the Rev. Stan Parris told a few hundred people at a memorial service at Grundy Baptist Church.
On Wednesday, a disgruntled student upset about flunking out of the law school arrived with a .380 pistol and shot dead the dean, a professor and a student. Three other students were wounded, and they remained hospitalized Thursday.
Peter Odighizuwa, 43, was charged Thursday with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six felony firearms charges. Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she would seek the death penalty.
Tolliver then entered the school’s cafeteria with about 150 others to watch the service on closed-circuit TV because the church couldn’t hold everyone.
Dean L. Anthony Sutin, 42, and Professor Thomas Blackwell, 41, were killed in their offices. Student Angela Dales, 33, of Vansant, died later, also from a gunshot wound.
In Grundy, a gritty coal town of about 1,100 in the shadow of two great mountain ridges, violent crime has been an infrequent occurrence, Parris told the mourners.
He asked them to pray, and reassured them that “God will bring justice.”
After the service, a few hundred students, families and residents gathered to cry. Nearby, people placed roses and carnations at the base of the stone school sign in a makeshift memorial, the American flag on the school lawn at half mast above.
“We feel in our hearts the deepest pain,” said Rabbi Stanley Funston, who leads a synagogue in Bluefield, W.V., that Sutin attended during the holidays.
Sutin was a hands-on administrator who knew his students’ names, they said.
“He just had this integrity about him,” said Mary Kilpatrick, who will graduate in a semester.
Brian Floyd, 27, said Sutin checked on him when Floyd went to the hospital last April with a bleeding ulcer.
“He called me at the hospital from his office just to see how I was doing,” Floyd said.
Blackwell was remembered as an avid runner and trumpet player.
“I knew him from choir,” said Kenneth Brown, 28, a first-year law student. “We were going to start a little band.”
Dales, a single mother, was a boisterous person putting herself through school.
“She was just this high-tempo person,” said Alex VanBuren, 32, of Johnson City, Tenn. “She always got good grades.”
The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia)
NEW YORK: A failed law student executed two professors and a student at a small US university yesterday.
Three more students are in a critical condition after being shot as they ran through the corridors of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia.
The gunman, 43-year-old Nigerian foreign exchange student Peter Odighizuma, was eventually wrestled to the ground and disarmed of his .38 automatic pistol by four other students.
The dead included the university’s dean, Anthony Sutin, 41, who advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and served under Mr Clinton in the Justice Department.
The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia)
NEW YORK: A failed law student executed two professors and a student at a small US university yesterday.
Three more students are in a critical condition after being shot as they ran through the corridors of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia.
The gunman, 43-year-old Nigerian foreign exchange student Peter Odighizuma, was eventually wrestled to the ground and disarmed of his .38 automatic pistol by four other students.
The dead included the university’s dean, Anthony Sutin, 41, who advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and later served in a senior position in the Justice Department.
AAGM: FOREIGN STUDENT KILLS 3 IN US
Mike Oduniyi
This Day (Nigeria): AAGM
A Nigerian student angry at being dismissed stormed through the campus of the Appalachian School of Law yesterday with a handgun, killing the dean, a professor and a student and wounding three others before he was tackled by fellow students, the Virginia state police reported.
“Come get me, come get me,” the gunman was heard saying as terrorized witnesses ran for their lives, the New York Times reported
“He was a time bomb waiting to go off,” Dr. Jack Briggs, a county coroner, told news reporters about the alleged assailant, Peter Odighizuwa, 42, a student from Nigeria. The authorities said the school had told Odighizuwa on Tuesday that he was being dismissed because of failing grades.
State officials said that Odighizuwa, who was charged with three counts of capital murder, had a history of mental instability and that school authorities had sought to help him.
In a running assault, the gunman confronted and fatally shot the law school dean, L. Anthony Sutin, 42, who was a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. Mr. Sutin was shot in his second-floor office, as was Thomas F. Blackwell, 41, a member of the faculty.
The third person killed, Angela Denise Dales, 33, of Vansant, Va., was described as a former law school employee who was widely admired for achieving her dream of finally enrolling as a student. She was shot in the school lounge with a .380 semiautomatic pistol.
The gunfire stunned the campus and surrounding town of 1,100 residents as it delivered death to a school envisioned in the 1990’s as a pastoral outpost to answer the chronic problems of educational need in one of the more distant and impoverished parts of Appalachia. It opened five years ago in a renovated junior high school and now has 244 students and 19 faculty members.
Sutin was praised by faculty and students as a dedicated pioneer at the school, a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who had specialized in legislative affairs for former Attorney General Janet Reno before turning to the school as a fresh adventure. Professor Blackwell, a graduate of Duke University School of Law, was recruited to the faculty from his law practice in Dallas.
The three wounded students, hospitalized in fair to critical condition tonight, were identified as Rebecca Claire Brown, 38, of Roanoke, Va., who was shot in the abdomen; Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Grundy, who was shot in the throat; and Stacey Bean, 22, of Berea, Ky., who was shot in the chest.
“There were pools of blood all over,” Chase Goodman, a 27-year-old student, said in describing a scene punctuated with screams and gunfire.
“When I got there there were bodies laying everywhere,” said Dr. Briggs, who arrived at the first emergency alarm. Two victims suffered point-blank wounds “execution style,” one doctor at the scene said.
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Slain professor had local ties
Peyton D. Woodson
Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas)
BENBROOK - While juggling calls from reporters, the owner of Benbrook Funeral Home spent Thursday preparing arrangements for a friend of 25 years.
Associate professor Thomas Blackwell, a longtime North Texas resident, was one of three people fatally shot Wednesday at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va.
Funeral director Kate Moore has known Blackwell and his wife, Lisa, since they were students at Western Hills High School. Once during a phone interview, she paused to talk to someone else about e-mailing Lisa Blackwell pictures of casket models.
“I knew when I came back to my hometown and opened a funeral home I’d have to bury friends and family,” Moore said. “But nothing prepares you for the violence of this death.”
Blackwell’s funeral will be at 2 p.m. Monday at the King of Glory Lutheran Church in Dallas.
Authorities in Grundy say Peter Odighizuwa, 43, opened fire with a handgun at the school a day after he was expelled for a second time.
Blackwell and L. Anthony Sutin, a school dean, were slain in their offices. Student Angela Dales, 33, died later at a hospital.
Three other students were wounded.
Blackwell, who was born Jan. 13, 1961, graduated from Western Hills High School in 1978 and from the University of Texas at Arlington and the Duke University School of Law.
He practiced business law in Dallas as an associate with Jenkins & Gilchrist and later opened his own law firm.
From 1995 to 1997, Blackwell taught legal writing, analysis and research to first-year students at the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. He then went to the Chicago Kent Law School and finally to the Appalachian School of Law, where he was an associate professor of law.
Thomas Trahan, an assistant director of the legal writing program at Wesleyan, first met Blackwell when they practiced law in Dallas. They were also choir members at the King of Glory church.
“He was extremely bright,” Trahan said. “He could cut to the heart of a problem better than anyone I knew. He was a very successful lawyer, who gave that up to teach others.
“He dedicated himself to the Appalachian School of Law to bring legal education to a part of the country that traditionally had been economically deprived. He believed in the mission of that school.”
Blackwell and his wife also had a humorous side, Trahan said.
They gave their three children - Zebadiah, 14, Jillian, 12, and Ezekiel, 10, - especially long first and middle names so they wouldn’t fit in the allotted spaces on standardized test exams, he said.
“Tom was the class clown,” Moore said. “He was a cut-up.
But he was exactly the person you wanted to be there if you needed something. He was a wonderful person.”
Moore recalled that the Blackwells’ first date ended in a car accident that left him in the hospital with several broken bones.
His future wife stayed by his bedside throughout his recovery.
“He missed almost half the school year and he still graduated valedictorian,” Moore said.
Blackwell could have attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Trahan said, but chose to attend college closer to home because Lisa Blackwell was attending Baylor University in Waco.
Moore said she and Lisa Blackwell were in each others’ weddings, which were a week apart.
Blackwell will be buried in Hamilton County near the family’s ranch, Moore said.
In addition to his wife and children, survivors include his mother, Margaret Cantrell of Benbrook; a sister, Rebecca Miller of Kentucky; and a brother, David Blackwell of Florida.
Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada)
CANADA
New minister declines trip
OTTAWA—Deputy Prime Minister John Manley invited his replacement in the foreign affairs portfolio to go with him to India and Pakistan this week but the new minister had to decline.
Less than 24 hours into his new job, Bill Graham was too busy learning his new job to join the 16-day mission, Canada’s first to the two countries since nuclear-related sanctions were lifted against them last year.
“He’s not travelling anywhere in the next little while,” said Lillian Thomsen, a spokeswoman at Foreign Affairs. “He’s been in office for 27 hours now. He’s got a whackload of things to do.”
Australians hope to stay
FREDERICTON—An Australian mother and daughter have been given their marching orders to leave Canada, but they’re hoping new Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre will have a change of heart and allow them to stay.
Elizabeth Sweeney, 84, will be deported to Ireland on Jan. 31 while daughter Veronica Sweeney, 52, will be sent to Australia next Thursday under deportation orders that include medical and immigration escorts for the ailing mother.
Elizabeth Sweeney suffers from deep-vein thrombosis, a potentially fatal blood-clotting disorder that can be aggravated by sitting for long periods of time in cramped spaces, such as the economy-class seats of an airplane.
Alberta teachers delay strikes
EDMONTON—Alberta teachers will wait until Feb. 4 before staging widespread strikes that would throw more than 127,000 students out of class.
“There’s still time for the government to address the issues,” Larry Booi, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said yesterday.
“There’s still time for a settlement.”
But Alberta Learning Minister Lyle Oberg was quick to deflate hopes that extra government money would avert a strike. “I am saying definitively there is no more money available to me to bring forward,” he said, adding legislation could end a lengthy strike.
Day defends Bailey
TORONTO—There’s no need for the Canadian Alliance to discipline MP Roy Bailey for criticizing the new veterans affairs minister because of his “Asiatic” background, says the party’s former leader.
Bailey, an MP from Saskatchewan, did the right thing by apologizing to Filipino-born Rey Pagtakhan for calling him a “Chinese chap” and questioning his fitness for his new role in cabinet, Stockwell Day said yesterday.
The furor erupted Wednesday when a Saskatchewan newspaper story described Bailey’s reaction upon learning that Pagtakhan had been named to veterans affairs.
WORLD
Accused killer ‘paranoid’
GRUNDY, Va.—The expelled law school student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming.
At yesterday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out … I don’t have my medication.”
Police say Odighizuwa opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time.
India-Pakistan resolution near
WASHINGTON—India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes said yesterday he believes that despite another terrorist attack blamed on militants in the disputed Kashmir province, the standoff between his country and Pakistan may be “on the way to resolution.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it is in neither the interest of Pakistan nor India to stay at a high state of readiness for war.
Rumsfeld also said, after talks with his Indian counterpart, that he hopes the standoff will not force Pakistan to move troops from the border with Afghanistan, where they remain on the outlook for fugitive al-Qaeda suspects, including Osama bin Laden.
Volcano erupts in Congo
GOMA, Congo—A volcano in eastern Congo erupted yesterday, sending out plumes of ash and three rivers of lava that destroyed 14 villages near the Rwandan border and drove thousands from their homes.
The sky around Mount Nyiragongo began glowing red, and ash fell on the nearby town of Goma before dawn yesterday. Three lava flows were detected, two coming down the mountain’s east side and one down the west.
Thousands of people were left homeless when the lava destroyed their villages.
Michael Beach
Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
A FAILED law student executed two professors then shot dead a fellow student at a small American university yesterday.
Three more students are in a critical condition after being shot as they ran through the corridors of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia.
The gunman, 43-year-old Nigerian foreign exchange student Peter Odighizuma, was wrestled to the ground and disarmed of his 38-calibre automatic pistol by four other students.
The dead included the university’s dean, Anthony Sutin, 41, who advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and served under Mr Clinton as a high-ranking legal counsel in the Justice Department.
Local physician Dr Jack Briggs, who had treated Odighizuma for stress, was the first doctor to arrive at the law school after the shootings.
“The scene was a disaster,” he said.
Dr Briggs said Mr Sutin and another professor had been shot at point-blank range in an apparent revenge attack.
“He had flunked out of school last year,” Dr Briggs said.
“He had been allowed an opportunity to come back and complete the semester again.
“But I believe the dean was about to tell him he was no longer going to be able to come back.”
A university spokesman said Odighizuma had been suspended from the school yesterday.
After murdering the two professors, he began shooting randomly at students. One died after being shot in the neck and back.
Three others, suffering bullet wounds to their abdomens, were flown to the closest trauma centre in Bristol, Tennessee, for emergency surgery.
The Appalachian School of Law was founded four years ago to help ease a shortage of lawyers in the southwest Virginia coal mining towns.
The killings came a day after a high school student evaded a metal detector to shoot two classmates at the Martin Luther King Jnr school in Manhattan.
/nd/tackle/after18/byline | 112
Revenge attack by failed student
Michael Beach
Hobart Mercury (Australia)
A FAILED law student executed two professors then shot dead a fellow student inside a small American university yesterday.
Three more students were in a critical condition after being shot as they ran through the corridors of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia.
The gunman, 43-year-old Nigerian foreign exchange student Peter Odighizuma, was wrestled to the ground and disarmed of his .38-calibre automatic pistol by four other students, police said.
The dead included the university’s dean, Anthony Sutin, 41, who advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and later served under Clinton as a high-ranking legal counsel in the Justice Department.
Local physician Dr Jack Briggs, who had treated Odighizuma for stress, was the first doctor to arrive at the law school after the shootings.
“The scene was a disaster,” he said.
Dr Briggs said Sutin and another professor had been shot at point-blank range in an apparent revenge attack.
“He had flunked out of school last year,” Dr Briggs said.
“He had been allowed an opportunity to come back and complete the semester again.
“But I believe that the dean was about to tell him he was no longer going to be able to come back.”
A university spokesman said Odighizuma had been suspended from the school yesterday morning.
After killing the two professors, he began shooting randomly at students.
One died after being shot in the neck and back. Three others, suffering bullet wounds to their abdomens, were flown to the closest trauma centre in Bristol, Tennessee, for emergency surgery.
STUDENT HELD IN KILLINGS ASKED FOR HELP, GOT IT, CLASSMATES SAY
Lee Mueller
Lexington Herald Leader (Kentucky)
GRUNDY, Va.—Throughout his star-crossed career as a law student, classmates said, Peter Odighizuwa had been asking people in this small coalfield town for help, and was receiving it.
Yesterday, the 43-year-old—accused of shooting to death the Appalachian School of Law’s dean, a professor and a former classmate—pleaded for another form of help.
During his arraignment in the Buchanan County Courthouse, Odighizuwa, with his legs shackled, told a judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind an arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out … I don’t have my medication.”
Odighizuwa, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Nigeria, faces three counts of murder and other charges. He will remain in jail without bond pending a preliminary hearing on March 21, Judge Patrick Johnson ruled.
Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.
Virginia State Police say Odighizuwa opened fire at the school, less than 15 miles from the Kentucky line, after he flunked out for a second time. Police declined to say yesterday where he obtained the .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol used in the shooting.
Police said Odighizuwa went to the law school’s second floor to discuss his suspension with Dale Rubin, a black professor with whom classmates said he felt comfortable. As he left Rubin’s office, Odighizuwa told the professor to pray for him. He then went into the separate offices of Dean L. Anthony Sutin and associate professor Thomas Blackwell and shot them to death, police say.
Afterward, he walked downstairs and opened fire in the student lounge, killing classmate Angela Denise Dales, 33, and wounding three other women, including Berea College graduate Stacey Beans, 22, of Paducah.
Medical officials said yesterday all three women are expected to make full recoveries and probably will be released from Tennessee hospitals next week.
Law student Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., pointed out that there were men in the lounge, but that the only students Odighizuwa allegedly shot were women. One male student said the gunman “actually walked around” him in order to shoot Dales, Gross said.
Gross, a police officer in Grifton, N.C., was among at least two students with law-enforcement backgrounds who helped subdue Odighizuwa when he emerged, brandishing his pistol.
When one of the students yelled for him to put down his gun, Odighizuwa placed it, along with an extra magazine, on a lamp post, Gross said. Both were empty, he said.
The suspect was tackled and handcuffed by another student, Ted Besen, a deputy sheriff in North Carolina. Gross said both he and Besen were armed.
Gross and the other students who helped capture Odighizuwa were praised yesterday.
“To be honest, I feel I’m surrounded by heroes,” said Paulina Havelka, 27, of Charlotte, a first-year student, after hugging Gross.
Lonnie Ayers, 42, a first-year student from Cumberland in Harlan County, agreed.
“These guys, instead of running away from the situation, ran to the situation,” Ayers said.
Odighizuwa faces three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges, court records show.
A few minutes before his arraignment, Odighizuwa told reporters as he was led into the courtroom, “I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
Police said Odighizuwa was evaluated and given medication in jail, but officers declined to identify the drug.
Before and after a memorial service yesterday at Grundy Baptist Church, students and faculty members embraced, and wondered about the classmate who, some said, was prone to vulgar outbursts.
“He never smiled,” said Misty Kennedy, 24, of Cumberland, a daughter of Harlan County school board chairman David Kennedy.
Kennedy said Odighizuwa often appeared frustrated when he spoke in class because other students, and sometimes instructors, had difficulty understanding him.
He spoke softly, with an accent, classmates said.
“The teachers would really try to help him,” Kennedy said. “They’d look at him closely and let him repeat himself, up to three times.”
Mostly, these episodes appeared to make him angry, classmates said.
Kenneth Brown, 28, said Odighizuwa “was kind of off-balance. When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later he came back and said, ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.’ Out of the blue.”
Court records show Odighizuwa, the father of four, was arrested Aug. 15 for allegedly assaulting his wife. The police report said he hit her in the face, bruising her right eye.
Yesterday, no one answered the door at the home near campus where Odighizuwa and his family lived.
Police said Odighizuwa, who worked a variety of jobs while in Grundy, including bagging groceries, repeatedly approached them with concerns about people breaking into his former residence. Odighizuwa told police last year that someone placed a bullet in a stairway at his home and complained again three months ago that someone had broken into his house.
Police said they checked both complaints and found nothing.
Despite Odighizuwa’s problems, the dean and others tried to help him through school. Last year, Sutin raised enough money to buy Odighizuwa a used car, clothes and food, according to students and staff.
Chris Clifton, the school’s financial aid officer, said Sutin also helped get Odighizuwa a $19,000 loan last fall.
“They did everything in the world to help him out,” said Sean Maynard, 27, a first-year student from Kenova, W.Va.
Dink Shackleford, a former classmate, recalled giving Odighizuwa $20 after he stood up in class and announced, “I’m having a rough time. I’ve got four kids and they cut my electricity off.”
“People in this community bent over backward to help him out,” Maynard said. “He was just a bad student.”
BEREA CAMPUS RELIEVED THAT GRADUATE IS OK;
Lance Williams
Lexington Herald Leader (Kentucky)
BEREA—Encouraging news yesterday about the condition of a Kentucky woman who was injured in a law-school shooting spree produced widespread relief at Berea College.
Doctors said Stacey Beans, a Paducah native who graduated from Berea last year, is expected to make a full recovery after being shot Wednesday at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va.
“I’m hoping she will be able put this behind her,” said Thomas Bosch, an assistant professor of German at Berea. “She is the last person to deserve something like that.”
Beans, 22, was recovering from surgery at a Bristol, Tenn., hospital. The hospital issued a statement from Beans, who could be released within a week.
“I thank God I’m OK,” Beans said in the statement. “I want people to pray for the other victims and our friends and family.”
Beans’ friends at Berea described her as an upbeat student who was involved in several campus activities.
“She was very enthusiastic in whatever she did, and she was able to spread that to others,” Bosch said.
He said Beans helped re-establish a German club at the college after she studied in Munich one summer. She also spent a summer studying in London.
“She didn’t want to lose what she learned,” Bosch said. “She was always eager to learn.”
Beans was a member of the women’s chorus, swim team and president of the German Club. She also helped run a campaign for a Berea city council member and interned in the office of a local circuit judge.
Her swim coach, Bill Best, said Beans’ personality will be an asset in her recovery.
“Stacey was one of those who was never at a loss with an opinion,” Best said. “That’s why she’ll make a good lawyer someday.”
Lynn Patterson, a teammate on the swim team, said Beans, who was team captain, was a good leader.
“She really took care of us, and she made sure everyone felt like a part of the team,” said Patterson, a business administration junior from Knoxville, Tenn.
Beans is the stepdaughter of David Wrinkle, an assistant McCracken county attorney.
Attorneys around the McCracken County Courthouse who knew Beans described her as a bright and articulate woman who can’t wait to become a lawyer.
Bean’s sister, Stephanie Medley, of Paducah, said her sister had recently returned to the law school’s campus after the winter break and was excited about classes starting again.
She said the shooting shook the family, most of whom drove to Kingsport.
“I bawled and cried and prayed. I was almost in disbelief,” Medley said. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to hurt that girl.”
In Appalachia, an Unlikely Setting for a Triple Murder;
Jeffrey Gettleman
Los Angeles Times
It was an unlikely place for the two to meet, in the gritty heart of Appalachia.
L. Anthony Sutin was a high-ranking Justice Department official, a Harvard-trained constitutional scholar.
Peter Odighizuwa was a father of four and a former cabdriver from Nigeria, trying to start over.
Sutin had just taken a job as dean of the Appalachian School of Law, an ambitious project aimed at improving legal services in one of the most downtrodden areas of the South. Odighizuwa was one of his students.
Time and again, Sutin was there for him. When Odighizuwa was broke, the dean helped buy him a car and a computer and found him a job bagging groceries. When Odighizuwa flunked out of law school his first year, Sutin gave him a second chance and let him back in.
Now Sutin is dead. And Odighizuwa is in a mountainside jail, charged with murder.
“Out of all the people who tried to help him, that’s who Peter killed first–execution-style,” law student Chuck Scherer said. “It’s bothering us all.”
On Thursday, a day after police said Odighizuwa killed the dean, a law professor and a classmate in a 60-second shooting spree, a few clues emerged as to what led to the fatal collision between the student and the dean.
Court records revealed that Odighizuwa, 43, had a violent past, and classmates said he behaved erratically. He was charged in August with hitting his wife in the face and often was moody and depressed.
As he was led into the courtroom, Odighizuwa, with his head down and hands and legs shackled, yelled out: “I’ve been sick! I’ve been sick! I need help!”
Minutes later, after 12 charges had been leveled against him, prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.
Many people in Grundy, a coal mining town best known for its fierce high school wrestlers, have been ambivalent about the private law school, which opened five years ago in a converted junior high school. Its founders hoped to bring legal services–and a sense of hope–to a historically depressed area.
“People said it’ll help bring jobs,” former coal miner Fred McCracken said. “But I always thought that if you mixed up too many people in a little town, something’s going to happen. It just don’t slide.”
Often in rural areas, locals and college folks don’t mix, but for Sutin, 42, that wasn’t the case.
He’d walk his dog through downtown, past the abandoned movie theater and bronze statue of a coal miner. He’d play T-ball with his son and other boys and their fathers along the Levisa River. And come Sunday, even though he was Jewish, he’d often go to church, just to be part of the community.
His wife, Margaret Lawton, who also taught at the law school, started Buchanan County’s first humane society. The couple adopted two children, a little boy from Russia and within the last six months, an infant daughter from China.
They moved from Washington, where Sutin had served in the Clinton administration as an assistant attorney general under Janet Reno. He also had been a partner in a top Washington law firm and wrote many articles for legal journals.
He came to Grundy, population 1,110, fired by a sense of mission. “He gave his heart to that school,” lawyer and friend Henry Keuling-Stout said. But he didn’t bang his credentials over people’s heads.
“Tony was educated and smart and had every reason to be snobby,” said David Thompson, who works for the county. “But he was as common as anybody. And people liked that.”
“Peter O,” as he was known, stood out in Grundy.
Until the law school opened, “you just didn’t see black people walking down the road,” one resident said. About two dozen of the school’s 250 students are black.
But more than that, in a place where self-reliance and tight-knit families are themes, people remember the many times the Odighizuwas needed help.
There were the clothing drives at the hospital where Odighizuwa’s wife, Abieyuwa, worked, so the family’s four boys would have clothes. And there were the moves from house to house because of rent problems. And several times Odighizuwa burst into faculty meetings at the law school and asked for more money, according to students.
“This guy had an explosive personality,” said Jack Briggs, the county medical examiner.
Odighizuwa had enrolled at the Appalachian School of Law in September 2000, the first year Sutin was dean; he had been a professor there before that. No one seems to know where Odighizuwa went to college and school President Lu Ellsworth said he was told by police not to discuss his record.
Odighizuwa apparently flunked out at the end of the fall semester 2000, took a semester off, bagged groceries at Food City, then came back under academic probation.
On Wednesday, after learning he again had flunked, authorities said Odighizuwa marched into Sutin’s office, pulled out a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol and shot the dean several times; at least two bullets were fired into Sutin’s back from point-blank range. Odighizuwa then allegedly ran into the nearby office of Thomas Blackwell, his professor of contracts, and shot him fatally in the neck while Blackwell was sitting behind his desk.
He dashed downstairs, police say, shooting several classmates, killing 33-year-old Angela Dales, who was his guidance counselor before becoming a student. Three students remained in fair condition Thursday.
Odighizuwa was charged Thursday with three counts of premeditated murder, three counts of attempted murder and six counts of unlawful weapon use.
Later that day, 300 mourners poured out of Grundy Baptist Church where a memorial service was held. Many were law students, but several men wearing work boots and sooty uniforms wiped their eyes as they looked around for someone to talk to.
One by one, Sutin’s students came up to his widow and hugged her. Some left flowers at the law school gates. “God bless Dean Sutin,” read a card attached to a single, plastic-wrapped rose.
Coal Town’s Hopes Clouded by Killings Of 3 at Law School
Francis X. Clines
The New York Times
Townspeople looked on in shock and grief this morning as the failed law student known on campus as Peter O. was led into the Buchanan County courtroom, shuffling in chains and hiding his face from television cameras, to face murder charges in the bloodiest shooting this remote Appalachian coal town has ever suffered.
Peter Odighizuwa looked at the floor as he was accused of assaulting his colleagues at the Appalachian School of Law and murdering the 5-year-old school’s founding dean, a second faculty member and a student caught in the handgun rampage that ended after the wounding of three others.
“Section 18.3,” the clerk intoned as the rampage was translated into precise, cold subsections of the state criminal code.
A few law students listened at the back, appalled at the painful lesson in life and law unfolding before them.
An older woman wept. Cameras bored in on the lens-shy defendant.
All about him, the town tried to absorb the fact that the law school, one of the most hopeful innovations in decades in hard-pressed Grundy, had been visited by tragedy just at the moment of its greatest promise.
“Oh, Tony, my dear friend,” said Richard Mullins, the town’s combination bike shop proprietor and official law school book dealer. In his shop across from the courthouse, Mr. Mullins mourned Dean L. Anthony Sutin.
A cum laude Harvard Law School graduate and Clinton administration veteran of the Justice Department, Mr. Sutin, 42, had retreated from the limelight of Washington to pioneer an adventure in education here amid the beauty and chronic poverty of backwoods Appalachia. He was fatally shot at close range as he worked in his office.
“Tony was so good natured,” Mr. Mullins said, “he was always helping someone.” And no one received more help than Peter O., Mr. Mullins sadly emphasized, noting that the dean had accepted Mr. Odighizuwa—a troubled and increasingly abrasive figure by most accounts—back into the school after he failed his first year.
A second notice of dismissal last week, however, left Mr. Odighizuwa distraught and increasingly confrontational, students and faculty members said. The shooting followed after he arrived at the school to protest his dismissal, according to the police.
“Tony was killed just as the school could see itself achieving something,” Mr. Mullins said, noting that last year the dean won provisional accreditation for the school from the American Bar Association. This meant graduates finally had standing to take bar exams, and enrollment was already growing.
“You could sense it in town: more students arriving, more involvement by the community,” Mr. Mullins said. “We finally had something going here.” The school has a faculty of 15 and an enrollment of more than 200.
“The network was starting to take hold,” Mr. Mullins continued, and so was the rustic professor’s life sought by Dean Sutin, whose wife, Margaret M. Lawton, was also on the faculty.
In their happiness at home on Walnut Street, the couple had just adopted a daughter from China to join their Russian-born adopted son, residents noted. They wondered what would happen to the fledgling school without Mr. Sutin and without Prof. Thomas Blackwell, who was shot to death seconds after the dean.
Professor Blackwell, 41, a graduate of Duke Law School, was recruited into the Appalachian adventure and proved to be one of the more popular professors, students said. He built a life in a foothills home with his wife, Lisa, a worker at the school law library, and their three young sons.
Mr. Odighizuwa sought no less an idyllic place when he arrived here two years ago, intent on a law degree. Born in Nigeria, the 43-year-old student, a naturalized United States citizen, had his wife, Abieyuwa, and four sons with him. They soon needed charity, and Grundy residents quietly obliged, with Dean Sutin helping him get a car and a loan, according to school colleagues.
But the student’s life worsened as he struggled in class, flunked courses and then faced wife-beating charges last August. Those charges are pending.
It was clear in interviews that there were many unanswered questions about Mr. Odighizuwa, including why he chose the law school here and, most pressing, how he might have come into possession of the handgun.
“Everybody helped the man,” the mournful Mr. Mullins said. “But with Peter, life was always a matter of somebody else’s fault.”
The third person killed, Angela Denise Dales, also had high hopes at the school. Ms. Dales, 33, who was raising her 7-year-old daughter alone, first worked at the school office but then realized her dream to enroll and seek a law degree. She was shot in the neck as the gunman moved from the faculty quarter to the students’ Lions Lounge and sprayed students with a .380 semiautomatic handgun.
“We’re all devastated,” said Tom Scott, a local lawyer and close friend of Dean Sutin’s. “This is a sleepy community, but we all understand by now that this type of incident can happen anywhere in the U.S.A.”
Mr. Scott was an onlooker with other Grundy residents as Mr. Odighizuwa stood before the bar of justice at the courthouse. Then the former law student suddenly spoke up as a defendant, requesting medication and legal representation.
“Your Honor, I had a specific request,” Mr. Odighizuwa complained, trying to choose his lawyer even as he hid his face with his arrest warrant. He was assigned a different lawyer, one well versed in the homicide defense needed now by the former law student, Judge Patrick Johnson explained. He ordered Mr. Odighizuwa back to jail without bail pending a hearing in March.
A noon memorial service soon followed at the Grundy Baptist Church. Then, the half-dozen big TV-dish uplink trucks briefly monitoring the town in its tragedy began breaking camp and moving on with a phalanx of visiting reporters.
“Usually, we cover these things in big cities,” said Jordan Placie, a television technician departing for Ohio along the switchback roads leading from Appalachia.
Alfonso A; Castillo
Newsday (New York)
He was just 20 at the time, but even at that young age Anthony Sutin was tackling huge responsibilities.
At the Brookhaven Country Day Camp, where Sutin worked several summers in the early 1980s, the job of kitchen manager usually was reserved for older, more experienced people, but camp owner Neil Pollack knew it was in good hands with Sutin.
“He was just so organized and such a bright, bright kid,” Pollack said. “He was well liked by everyone.” Relatives and colleagues said the only thing greater than the Bellport native’s desire to achieve was his desire to give back. It was the latter that led Sutin, 42, to walk away from a job as a high-ranking attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice to serve as a dean at a small, upstart Virginia law school.
In the end, one of the people who had most benefited from Sutin’s compassion was the one who Virginia police said ended his life.
Police said Peter Odighizuwa, 42, stormed into Sutin’s office at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., Wednesday and shot him once with a .380-caliber pistol. He then shot and killed another professor and a student and wounded three others before being restrained by students, according to police. Odighizuwa faces three counts of capital murder and related weapons charges.
The student was upset over news that he was being kicked out of school, police said. Just one year earlier, Odighizuwa had flunked out of school, but Sutin was there to open the door for him to return.
“That’s typical of him,” said Pollack.
Yesterday, Bellport residents remembered Sutin’s years as a starry-eyed overachiever. During his years as a student at Bellport High School, Sutin worked on several environmental causes as a member of the school’s Students for Environmental Quality and lobbied to enact New York’s bottle deposit program.
“He was clearly going to go some place,” said Arthur Cooley, a board member of the Manhattan-based Environmental Defense Fund and Sutin’s former high school biology teacher.
After graduating with honors as the school’s valedictorian in 1977, Sutin attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in policy and economics and then enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1984.
After law school, Sutin clerked in a U.S. District Court in Dallas, then joined the Washington, D.C., law firm of Hogan & Hartson. Sutin’s passion for politics led him to work on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and ultimately landed him a job in the U.S. Justice Department in 1994.
Sutin rose through the ranks over the next four years, eventually becoming assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in 1998.
Friends said Sutin had close ties with top-ranking officials in the Clinton administration and was all but guaranteed a long and lucrative career as a Washington player, but he walked away from it all when the opportunity to help establish a law school in a small and desolate Virginia community arose.
“He could have been anything. He was so tied in,” said former neighbor and close friend Rachel Alberts of Grundy, Va. “But he really felt that everyone … had an obligation to take care of the community.”
Sutin’s mother, Bonita Sutin of Bellport, said her son’s compassion extended into his personal life. He and his wife, Margaret Lawton, who also taught at the school, adopted their son, Henry Alexander, 4, from Russia several years ago, and just two weeks ago traveled to Russia to adopt a daughter, Clara Li Bessyes.
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Slain Dean Known For His Compassion
Alfonso A; Castillo
Newsday (New York)
He was just 20 at the time, but even at that young age Anthony Sutin was tackling huge responsibilities.
At the Brookhaven Country Day Camp, where Sutin worked several summers in the early 1980s, the job of kitchen manager usually was reserved for older, more experienced people, but camp owner Neil Pollack knew it was in good hands with Sutin.
“He was just so organized and such a bright, bright kid,” Pollack said. Relatives and colleagues said the only thing greater than the Bellport native’s desire to achieve was his desire to give back. It was the latter that led Sutin, 42, to walk away from a job as a high-ranking attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice to serve as a dean at a small, upstart Virginia law school. In the end, one of the people who had most benefited from Sutin’s compassion was the one who Virginia police said ended his life.
Police said Peter Odighizuwa, 42, stormed into Sutin’s office at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., Wednesday and shot him once with a .380-caliber pistol. He then shot and killed another professor and a student and wounded three others before being restrained by students, according to police. Odighizuwa faces three counts of capital murder and related weapons charges.
The student was upset over news that he was being kicked out of school, police said. Just one year earlier, Odighizuwa had flunked out of school, but Sutin was there to open the door for him to return.
“That’s typical of him,” said Pollack.
Yesterday, Bellport residents remembered Sutin’s years as a starry-eyed overachiever. During his years as a student at Bellport High School, Sutin worked on several environmental causes as a member of the school’s Students for Environmental Quality and lobbied to enact New York’s bottle deposit program.
After graduating with honors as the school’s valedictorian in 1977, Sutin attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in policy and economics and then enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1984.
After law school, Sutin clerked in a U.S. District Court in Dallas, then joined the Washington, D.C., law firm of Hogan & Hartson. Sutin worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and landed a job in the U.S. Justice Department in 1994. He became assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in 1998.
“He could have been anything. He was so tied in,” former neighbor and close friend Rachel Alberts said of Sutin and his decision to leave the U.S. Justice Department for the school. “But he really felt that everyone … had an obligation to take care of the community.”
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Newsletter
A LAW student who is accused of killing his college dean, a professor and another student told a judge yesterday that he is sick and needs help.
Peter Odighizuwa shuffled into Virginia’s Buchanan County Court in leg chains, surrounded by policemen.
Hiding his face behind his green arrest warrant, Odighizuwa told Judge Patrick Johnson, “I was supposed to see my doctor. He was supposed to help me out. I don’t have my medication.”
Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old naturalised American from Nigeria, went to the Appalachian School of Law yesterday to talk to his dean, Anthony Sutin, about his dismissal for failing grades, officials said.
He shot Sutin and professor Thomas Blackwell, who taught him, with a pistol, authorities and students said.
He then went to a commons area and opened fire at students, killing Angela Dales, 33, and injuring three others.
Students ended the rampage by tackling him
“He was angry. He thought he was being treated unfairly, and he wanted to see his transcript,” said Chris Clifton, the school’s financial aid officer.
“I don’t think Peter knew, at this time, that his dismissal was going to be permanent and final.”
Odighizuwa said, as he was led into the courtroom, “I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
Law dean’s death shocks friends
Brian Hicks
The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
The Lowcountry friends and family of a Virginia law school dean gunned down by a student say they are shocked by the death of a man who did nothing his entire life but help people, including the man who killed him.
Anthony Sutin had given Peter Odighizuwa a second chance when the man flunked out of the Appalachian School of Law in rural Grundy, Va., something a lot of deans would not have done, his students and colleagues say.
But when Sutin would not let Odighizuwa re-enroll a third time, police say the man shot Sutin in his office Wednesday afternoon, then killed another member of the law school faculty and a student and injured three students before he was wrestled to the ground by other students and arrested.
It was a sad end to the life of Sutin, the son-in-law of Allendale attorney Thomas O. Lawton—a former law partner of Gov. Robert E. McNair and chairman of the South Carolina Tricentennial Commission.
Sutin, 42, was a humble man who had accomplished much, his family said, and still had much more to do.
“Until something like this happens, you don’t realize how precious life is,” said Angus Lawton, a Charles-ton attorney and Sutin’s brother-in-law. “Our family is saddened by this tragedy, and we will miss Tony greatly. We appreciate the thoughts and prayers of our friends, and we wish the very best for the Appalachian School of Law.”
Nine years ago, Margaret Lawton of Allendale married Sutin, a soft-spoken man from Long Island, N.Y., who loved country music and was so modest he didn’t like to mention he was a graduate of Harvard Law School.
At the time, Sutin was a Washington, D.C., attorney who became acting assistant attorney general under Janet Reno.
The family lived in Alexandria, Va., until Sutin decided to help out with a fledgling law school nestled in the Appalachian Mountains.
Sutin started as a professor but soon was made dean of the Appalachian School of Law, a small school in the economically depressed town of Grundy, 45 miles north of Bristol, near the Kentucky and West Virginia borders.
Sutin loved the small-town feel. In an April interview with the Roanoke Times, Sutin said he loved the old-fashioned qualities of life in Grundy, knowing all your neighbors and being able to leave your doors unlocked.
He felt it was a good place to raise his growing family. Sutin and Lawton had adopted two children, the second one only a month ago—a 14-month-old baby from China.
Sutin’s murder brought reaction from across the country. Attorney General John Ashcroft called him a “dedicated public servant.” Paul Dull, a former student of Sutin’s, told the Roanoke Times that “The legal community has lost a great individual. Dean Sutin was one of those guys you aspired to be. He thought being a lawyer was a commendable profession.”
The local connection to the national news story had trickled into Charleston by early Thursday, and some of the friends of the family made plans to travel to Virginia for memorial services this weekend.
“The Lawton family has a lot of friends in Charleston that are shocked and saddened by this,” said Joseph H. McGee, a friend of the family.
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‘I was sick, I need help,’ accused killer maintains in court
Associated Press
The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario)
A former law student accused of killing his dean, a law professor and another student told a judge as well as bystanders yesterday that he is sick and needs help.
Peter Odighizuwa shuffled into Buchanan County general district court in leg chains, surrounded by police officers.
Hiding his face behind his green arrest warrant, Odighizuwa told Judge Patrick Johnson: “I was supposed to see my doctor. He was supposed to help me out . . . I don’t have my medication.”
Odighizuwa called out to reporters as he was led into the courtroom: “I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Nigeria, went to the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday to talk to his dean, L. Anthony Sutin, about Odighizuwa’s dismissal for failing grades, officials said. He allegedly shot Sutin and Prof. Thomas Blackwell, who taught Odighizuwa during the fall and winter.
Also killed with a shot from a .380-calibre pistol was student Angela Dales, 33, said Virginia State Police spokesman Mike Stater. Three others are in hospital in fair condition.
Prosecutors charged Odighizuwa with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six charges of using a firearm in a felony.
When Johnson said he would appoint lawyer James Turk to represent him, Odighizuwa asked for another lawyer, who he named. But Johnson appointed Turk and said, “Once you’ve talked with him, I’m sure you’ll see he can help you.”
Odighizuwa will remain held without bond pending a preliminary hearing March 21.
Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, officials said.
“He was angry; he thought he was being treated unfairly, and he wanted to see his transcript,” said Chris Clifton, the school’s financial aid officer.
“I don’t think Peter knew at this time that it (dismissal) was going to be permanent and final,” Clifton added.
The suspect, known around the rural campus as “Peter O,” had been struggling with his grades for more than a year and had been dismissed once before. Clifton met with Odighizuwa a day earlier when the student learned he was to be kicked out of school.
Dr. Jack Briggs, who has a private practice about a kilometre from the school, said Odighizuwa went downstairs from Sutin’s and Blackwell’s offices to a commons area and opened fire.
“When I got there, there were bodies laying everywhere,” Briggs said.
Odighizuwa left the building and dropped his gun after being confronted. Students then tackled him and one who is a sheriff’s deputy handcuffed him.
Odighizuwa kept saying, “I have nowhere to go,” said student Todd Ross, 30, of Johnson City, Tenn.
Justin Marlowe, a first-year law student from Richwood, W.Va., said the suspect had been in all of his classes.
“He was a real quiet guy who kept to himself. He didn’t talk to anybody, but he gave no indication that he was capable of something like this.”
Other classmates, however, described the suspect as an “abrasive” person who would regularly have outbursts in class when he was challenged by classmates or the professor.
“I knew he’d do something like this,” said Zeke Jackson, 40.
The private law school has an enrolment of about 170 students. It opened five years ago in a renovated junior high school to help ease a shortage of lawyers in the region and foster renewal in Appalachia.
Sutin, a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law School, also was an associate professor at the school.
He left the U.S. Justice Department to help found the school, and had worked for the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, according to the Web site of Jurist, the Legal Education Network.
SHOOTINGS SUSPECT PRONE TO OUTBURSTS
Chris Kahn
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
The expelled law school student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming.
At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out . . . I don’t have my medication. ” Police say Odighizuwa opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time.
Dean L. Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell were slain in their offices and student Angela Dales, 33, died later at a hospital.
Three other students were wounded.
Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.
Odighizuwa also faces three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges. A few minutes before his arraignment, Odighizuwa told reporters as he was led into the courtroom, “I was sick, I was sick. I need help. ” Police said Odighizuwa was evaluated and given medication in jail, but declined to identify the drug.
On Thursday, students wept in small, shivering circles, many of them wondering about the classmate who always seemed aloof and was prone to vulgar outbursts.
Kenneth Brown, 28, said his friends always joked that Odighizuwa was one of those guys who would finally crack and bring a gun to school.
“He was kind of off-balance,” Brown said. “When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later he came back and said: ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.¬ Out of the blue. ” Zeke Jackson, 40, said he stopped trying to recruit Odighizuwa for the school’s Black Law Students¬ Association after Odighizuwa sent the dean a letter complaining that Jackson was harassing him.
“I knew he’d do something like this,” Jackson said.
Odighizuwa was arrested on Aug. 15 for allegedly assaulting his wife. The police report said he hit her in the face, bruising her right eye.
Police said Odighizuwa repeatedly approached them with concerns about people breaking into his house on the outskirts of this small town in western Virginia.
Chief Deputy Randall Ashby said Odighizuwa told police last year that someone placed a bullet in a stairway at his home. Three months ago, he complained again that his home had been broken into.
“Both times my deputies checked it out and found nothing,” Ashby said.
Odighizuwa also regularly visited the sheriff’s office to nitpick with deputies over the wording of the police reports he’d filed, Ashby said.
Despite Odighizuwa’s problems, the dean and others tried to help him through school. Last year, Sutin raised enough money to buy Odighizuwa a used car, clothes, and food, according to students and staff.
Chris Clifton, the school’s financial aid officer, said Sutin also helped get Odighizuwa a $19,000 loan last fall.
“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” said Mary Kilpatrick, a third-year student, wondering aloud why Odighizuwa would kill the dean. “He’s the one who allowed him to stay here. ” Odighizuwa, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Nigeria, had been struggling in school for more than a year and had been dismissed before.
His grades were poor again last semester, and school officials told Odighizuwa on Tuesday that they were flunking him.
“I don’t think Peter knew at this time that it was going to be permanent and final,” said Clifton, the financial aid officer. “He slung his chair across the room and slammed the door. ” The next day, after the rampage, witnesses say Odighizuwa left the building, dropped a gun, and was tackled by several students.
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Calvin R. Trice
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)
Angela Denise Dales was a single mother in the second semester of her long-awaited pursuit of a law degree when she was killed, a former co-worker said.
Dales, 33, left her administrative job at the Appalachian School of Law to become a student there in the fall.
She was among three people killed Wednesday afternoon in a shooting rampage at the school. The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, 42, and professor Thomas F. Blackwell, 41, also were killed.
Dales’ 8-year-old daughter, Rebecca, has been with her grandparents in Vansant since the shooting, family friends said.
Dales worked for the law school for three years as an admissions counselor in the office of student services, said financial aid director Chris Clifton.
“She was a bright, intelligent person,” he said. “She was also funny, and she was excellent at her job.”
Dales recruited Brandon Short, who later became her classmate in the fall as a first-year law student. Short was impressed with Dales’ concern for his plans, he said.
“She called me constantly to make sure I still had my hopes up for law school,” Short said. “She was a big motivator.”
Clifton said Dales always wanted to pursue a law degree. She served as a tour guide for prospective students of the law school, and friends said the job increased her enthusiasm to attend the school.
“One of her greatest joys was telling students on the phone that they had made it through the admissions process and had been accepted,” professor Stewart Harris said at a candlelight vigil for the victims last night.
Lisa Belcher, a friend and stylist at Hair-4-U beauty salon, which Dales frequented, said, “She was really excited about getting into law school.”
Rex Bowman
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)
“I was sick, I was sick. I need help.”
That was the terse explanation Peter Odighizuwa offered yesterday when reporters outside the courthouse asked him why he shot and killed three people at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday. Three others were wounded.
Inside Buchanan County General District Court, Odighizuwa was less vocal. He hid his face and said nothing as a court clerk read the charges against him: three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six counts of using a firearm in commission of a felony.
Odighizuwa, who was wrestled to the ground by fellow students, one of whom aimed his own revolver at Odighizuwa, could face the death penalty if convicted.
The shooting rampage, which claimed the life of the law school’s dean, has rocked the town of Grundy, which until Wednesday had been known mostly for its high school’s championship wrestling squad. Now, the entire town is grieving on national television over what everyone can describe only as an act of senseless violence.
“The Oklahoma City bombing, the World Trade Center, Columbine - at the time they seemed like worlds away,” the Rev. Stan Parris said yesterday during a memorial service for the three dead. “This time the tragedy has struck home, a remote, tiny town, a place protected by mountains and family values.”
“Those who were killed were some of our finest people,” Buchanan Supervisor Ed Bunn said. “It’s on everybody’s mind.”
The man accused of the killings, 43-year-old Odighizuwa, is being held without bail. Yesterday, General District Judge Patrick Johnson appointed Radford attorney James C. Turk Jr. to represent the Nigerian-born Odighizuwa.
Odighizuwa protested briefly, saying he wanted area lawyer James Carmody to represent him. Carmody had represented Odighizuwa in August when he was charged with assault and battery against his wife.
But Carmody is not on Virginia’s short list of lawyers qualified to represent capital defendants, so Johnson appointed Turk.
In his only courtroom outburst, Odighizuwa complained loudly that he is not getting proper medical attention.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” he said, his voice rising. “He was supposed to help me out. I need my medication.”
Bailiffs then led Odighizuwa from the courtroom. He wore shackles on his feet and handcuffs on his wrists. He hid his face behind the green court documents that stated the crimes he is accused of committing.
Those killed in Wednesday’s shooting rampage were the school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, 42, of Grundy; associate professor Thomas F. Blackwell, 41, of Grundy; and student Angela Denise Dales, 33, of Vansant. The wounded are Rebecca Claire Brown, 38, of Roanoke; Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Grundy; and Stacey Beans, 22, of Berea, Ky.
State police and school authorities allege that Odighizuwa, upset about being dismissed from school for poor grades, shot and killed Sutin and Blackwell in their upstairs offices, using a Jennings .380 semiautomatic pistol he had concealed beneath his trench coat. He then allegedly went downstairs and fatally shot Dales and wounded the three other students.
Police said they do not know how many shots were fired, but by the time fellow students tackled Odighizuwa, the two magazine clips he had with him were empty. Each magazine could hold eight rounds.
One of the students who subdued Odighizuwa was Tracy Bridges, a 25-year-old sheriff’s deputy from Buncombe County, N.C., who is studying to become a lawyer.
“We went to get to class after 1 o’clock, and [student] Ted Besen and other students and I were in the classroom when we heard the first three shots,” Bridges said yesterday. “It sounded kind of muffled, and a few seconds later we heard the next round of shots, and a scream.
“Me and Ted and [student] Rob Sievers went out to look. A professor ran up the stairs and said, ‘Peter [Odighizuwa] has got a gun and he’s shooting.’ I ran back and told the class to get out. They went out the back way,” Bridges said.
“We went down, too, and Peter was in the front yard. I stopped at my vehicle and got a handgun, a revolver. Ted went toward Peter, and I aimed my gun at him, and Peter tossed his gun down.
“Ted approached Peter, and Peter hit Ted in the jaw. Ted pushed him back and we all jumped on,” Bridges said.
Yesterday, the day after the killings, authorities and students who knew Odighizuwa painted a picture of a man who had hit rock bottom.
In addition to being charged with abuse last year, Odighizuwa, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had flunked out of the law school last spring, a fact he kept hidden from his wife and four young sons. His wife, who worked as a nursing aide at an area hospital, left him three months ago and moved away, taking the children with her.
Odighizuwa and his wife and children had rented a small house just outside Grundy. Trying to make ends meet, Odighizuwa tutored students and also worked other part-time jobs.
David Branham, who works at his family’s real estate and insurance business in downtown Grundy, said Odighizuwa had an out-of-state real estate license and was looking for a job at the family business, but it did not have any openings.
“When I saw him after that, I would throw up my hand and wave at him, but we weren’t boozing buddies or anything,” Branham said.
Odighizuwa found a part-time job at the Vansant Food City working as a maintenance man, the manager said. The manager, who would not give his name, said Odighizuwa worked there a few months before quitting.
Odighizuwa then went to work at Issues and Answers, a market research firm above the Vansant Food City.
Branham said that at one point, a few people, including employees at Buchanan General Hospital, took up a collection for the Odighizuwa family at Christmas. Odighizuwa’s wife worked at the hospital.
The departure of his wife, the loss of his children and the failing grades sent Odighizuwa into a well of depression, said law student Kenneth Brown, of Rougemont, N.C. “The last time I really sat and talked to him was last semester, in November. We were at a dance and he came alone. He was really down. All he was saying were negative things.”
Other students said Odighizuwa was a loner with an abrasive personality and a chip on his shoulder, convinced that faculty members had it in for him.
Odighizuwa began attending the school again last fall after Sutin agreed to give him another chance, allowing him to re-enroll. Once again, though, according to financial aid director Chris Clifton, Odighizuwa’s grades were too poor.
Last week, he was informed that he was being academically dismissed, and he was told his financial aid was being suspended Wednesday.
According to state police, as he left professor Dale Rubin’s office, Odighizuwa said, “Pray for me.” Then the shooting began.
State Sen. Leslie L. Byrne, D-Fairfax, said the shootings in Grundy point to the need for more gun control.
“A man described as a ticking time bomb was able to get a semiautomatic weapon,” Byrne told Senate colleagues yesterday.
“We’ve heard a lot about homeland security and domestic defense, but the likelihood of being injured by a gun” is far greater than the likelihood of a plane flying into an office building, she said.
But Sen. William C. Wampler Jr., R-Bristol, said now is a time to mourn, not to cast blame.
Yesterday, the town of Grundy and the students and teachers at the law school tried to find solace.
“From a human standpoint, we see no sense in this tragedy,” said Parris, the clergyman who led the memorial service attended by about 250 people. “So we find ourselves asking, ‘Why? Why does God allow these senseless acts of violence?’*”
Calvin R. Trice
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)
The wife of law professor Thomas F. Blackwell described her husband as generous, loving and firmly grounded in his Christian faith.
Blackwell, 41, was one of three people killed in a shooting rampage at Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday afternoon. The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, 42, and first-year student Angela Dales, 33, also were killed.
A member of Blackwell’s church said she was on the phone with him during the gunfire.
Charlotte Varney, the church secretary, said Blackwell was on the search committee for a pastor of the 130-member Buchanan First Presbyterian Church.
About 1:15 p.m., Blackwell returned a call that Varney made earlier that day. The two spoke for several minutes before the conversation ended abruptly with what Varney described as a “loud, muted pop noise.”
“The telephone apparently just fell to the floor, and I could hear running and people’s voices in the background,” Varney said. “I didn’t know what it was until I got a call here about a half-hour later about it.”
Blackwell’s wife, Lisa, a librarian at Appalachian School of Law, detailed in a statement yesterday her husband’s love of music and running. He played trumpet, trombone, piano and flute and sang in the choir of Buchanan First Presbyterian Church.
Blackwell was an active church member and a man of abiding faith, his wife said.
“Tom Blackwell - my best friend, life companion and husband - was a very generous and loving man to his children, his wife, his friends, family and work companions,” she said in a statement read by a family friend.
Besides his wife, Blackwell is survived by three children - sons Zeb, 14, and Zeke, 10, and daughter Jillian, 12.
Blackwell, a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington, earned his law degree with high honors from Duke University in 1986. He practiced law for 10 years, his wife said. Blackwell was a law professor for five years.
Student Jason Kincer, who took a legal-writing course with Blackwell, said, “He was very entrenched in serving the community and building relationships between the school and the community.”
CORRECTION-DATE: January 22, 2002 Tuesday
CORRECTION:
Charlotte Varney, the secretary of Buchanan First Presbyterian Church, is not a member of the church. Articles about the shooting at the Appalachian School of Law, which appeared Friday and Sunday, indicated she was.
GRIEF FLOWS FROM GRUNDY AS IT MOURNS FOR VICTIMS
Paul Dellinger
Roanoke Times & World News (Roanoke, VA)
Hundreds of people turned out Thursday to honor three people killed a day earlier in a shooting spree at the Appalachian School of Law.
Tragedies at Columbine High School, Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center seemed far from this coalfield community, said the Rev. Stan Parris. “But now we, too, have tasted violence. . . . This is a terrible reminder of the reality of evil that exists in the human heart.”
The sanctuary and balcony of Grundy Baptist Church overflowed with faculty and students from the 5-year-old law school and friends and family of the three shooting victims: Anthony Sutin, 41, the school’s dean; Thomas Blackwell, 41, a professor; and Angela Dales, 33, who worked at the school before becoming a student.
Peter Odighizuwa, 42, a student who recently learned he would be dismissed because of insufficient grades, is charged with capital murder in all three deaths.
Three other students were injured and taken to two hospitals in Tennessee. Dr. Dale Sargent said Rebecca Brown, Martha Madeline Short and Stacey Beans were all in fair condition Thursday afternoon. “We would expect each of these patients to be released from the hospital within a week, and all are expected to make a full recovery,” he said.
Mikael Gross, one of several students who tackled Odighizuwa and held him for authorities Wednesday afternoon, said after the memorial service that Dales was his admissions counselor when he entered the school three years ago. Dales was in her first year of law school.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Mary Kilpatrick, a third-year student, said after the service. Kilpatrick said people at the school had obtained a car for Odighizuwa and helped him in other ways.
“Dean Sutin was one of the ones that was involved in that,” she said. “Everyone in this community, I feel like, has gone above and beyond to help him.”
Grundy Town Manager Chuck Crabtree said Gov. Mark Warner had wanted to attend the service, but scheduling did not allow it. Warner, who served on the law school’s board, sent a statement, in which he said the best memorial to the victims would be continued support of the school.
Warner said Sutin was at the height of his career in the U.S. Justice Department when he embraced the concept of a law school in Virginia’s coalfields and came to Buchanan County to help make it happen. Warner said he considered Blackwell a friend and remembered hiking with him and his family at Breaks Interstate Park.
Warner said he saluted the students who took control of “this barbaric situation.”
The memorial service was organized by the Buchanan County Ministerial Association.
The Rev. Paul McNalley opened the service with a prayer to “protect us all from the violence of others and keep us safe from the weapons of hate.” Rabbi Stanley Funston urged the community to keep its faith “in the face of senseless tragedy.”
Thursday night, about 250 people from the law school and the town attended a candlelight vigil in front of the school.
One speaker, professor Stewart Harris, said, “We are standing tonight on sacred ground. Innocent blood was shed here, blood of three people who achieved, who cared and who dreamed. . . . Let us honor them by keeping our own dreams alive.”
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CHANGE IN CAREER PLANS TOOK VICTIM TO GRUNDY;
Emi Kojima
Roanoke Times & World News (Roanoke, VA)
A Roanoke woman who was injured in the shooting rampage at Appalachian Law School Wednesday only decided to attend law school about a year ago, after years of working as a respiratory therapist, said a close family friend.
Rebecca Clair Brown, 38, was shot in the abdomen and arm in the downstairs lobby of Grundy’s Appalachian School of Law. After surgery, the first-year law student was listed in fair condition at Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn.
“Out of all people, I know this shouldn’t have happened to her,” said Glenda Link, 59, of Roanoke. Link is a close friend of the family and was house-sitting and dog-sitting for Brown’s mother, Norma Brown Waddell, who was at the hospital with Brown. “She’s a very hard-working individual and dedicated,” she said.
Brown, who attended Andrew Lewis High School in Salem, had worked as a licensed respiratory therapist for a number of years, Link said. The job took her to many different cities.
About a year ago, Brown decided to make a career change and go to law school, Link said.
“I’m not exactly sure what made her change,” she said, although she remembers Brown asking advice from lawyer Charles Osterhoudt, who has been a friend of Brown and her mother for a number of years. He declined to be interviewed for the story.
Brown, the youngest of four children, has an exuberant personality and her own sense of style, Link said. She said Brown treated her twin nieces as if they were her own daughters.
“She’s a very caring and thoughtful person,” Link said. “You just couldn’t ask for a better person.”
Roanoke Times & World News (Roanoke, VA)
FRUSTRATION, alienation and a gun.
The same lethal mix that explodes in mass slayings with some regularity in communities across the United States came together Wednesday in Appalachia. It left three people dead and the public with a sense of bewildered loss dismaying in its familiarity.
Here is yet another “senseless act of violence” - one that is cause for particular grief in Southwest Virginia.
Partly, this is because the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy were all too close to home. True, the little coalfield town is tucked away in isolated far Southwest, hours by car from Roanoke or Virginia Tech, the region’s major city and major university.
But in far-flung, geographically diverse Virginia, the ridges and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains define a region, and Grundy is part of it.
Mainly, though, people familiar with the hard times afflicting Virginia’s coalfields might regard Wednesday’s slayings as particularly poign-
ant because of the nature of the victims and the work they were doing.
Anthony Sutin, dean of the Appalachian School of Law, was a professionally accomplished public servant who left booming Northern Virginia to lead a tiny, new law school in one of the most economically depressed areas of the state.
The distance between Washington, where he held a post in the Justice Department, and Grundy can be measured in more than miles. But the path seems natural for someone whom a colleague described not only as brilliant but as committed to working for the poor.
Another of the shooting victims was Thomas Blackwell, remembered Wednesday as a tough professor, but one willing to work long hours to make himself available to students so that they might succeed. The third, student Angela Dales, at one time was a recruiter for the school. She was a single mother taking her bite at the opportunity it offered.
Every slain victim who leaves behind family and friends is mourned in a personal way by people who feel each loss acutely, in ways even sympathetic strangers cannot know.
To the bereavement of the victims’ families and friends add, in this case, the loss to a newly established institution and all the hope a community has vested in it for greater opportunity.
Peter Odighizuwa, the man police have charged with the shootings, is a naturalized American from Nigeria. Perhaps that is what prompted state police to declare that the shootings were “absolutely not connected to terrorism in any way, shape or form.”
Of course not. America has witnessed this kind of horror before Sept. 11, and will witness it again. Such tragedies raise public policy questions about guns and mental health care and who has access to what. But debate about such issues must await another day, when more is known about this latest case.
Grundy already knows the nature of its loss, and it is grievous.
Laurence Hammack And Tad Dickens
Roanoke Times & World News (Roanoke, VA)
As Peter Odighizuwa was led to court Thursday, handcuffed and hunched over, someone in a throng of reporters shouted, “Peter, why’d you do it?”
“I was sick; I was sick,” Odighizuwa replied. “I need help.”
A few minutes later, as the 43-year-old was arraigned on charges that he killed three people and wounded three more in a shooting spree at the Appalachian School of Law, he told Judge Patrick Johnson that he had not seen his doctor or received his medication while in jail.
Speaking rapidly and almost incomprehensibly, the former law student leaned over in his chair and used his arrest warrants to shield his face from a bevy of news photographers who crowded the courtroom.
Odighizuwa’s comments and interviews with neighbors and fellow students suggest that his mental state may become an issue in his capital murder prosecution.
Buchanan County Commonwealth’s Attorney Sheila Tolliver said she expects Odighizuwa’s defense attorney to request a psychiatric evaluation. “That’s one of the first things they will look at,” she said.
But based on what police say - that Odighizuwa killed the school’s dean, a professor and a student because he was angry that he had been suspended from school for the second time - Tolliver has already decided to seek the death penalty.
“I don’t think I would be doing my job if I didn’t,” she said. “It’s just a senseless, violent act.
“From what I understand, these all were people who knew him and were trying to help him,” she said of the victims. Authorities say they think that Anthony Sutin, dean of the fledgling law school, was the first to die after Odighizuwa arrived on campus about 1 p.m. Wednesday to discuss his academic suspension, which became effective that day.
Sutin, 42, was shot with a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun in his second-floor office. Professor Thomas Blackwell, 41, was shot next in his office. After that, four students were fired upon in the student lobby on the first floor of the school’s main building.
Angela Denise Dales, 33, a former staffer at the school who became a student, died at a hospital. Three other students - Martha Madeline Short, 37; Stacey Bean, 22; and Rebecca Claire Brown, 38, of Roanoke - were all listed in fair condition Thursday.
Hospital officials said all three women are expected to be released within a week.
On Thursday, police added three counts of attempted capital murder to the list of charges that Odighizuwa faces. He was charged immediately after the shooting with three counts of capital murder. In Virginia, killing two or more people as part of a single offense is a capital crime.
Court records show that Odighizuwa was charged in August with assaulting his wife, who ended up leaving him the following month. In October, a judge took the case under advisement for a year with the understanding that the charge would be dismissed if there were no further problems.
Although an emergency protective order was issued, Abieyuwa Odighizuwa did not seek a permanent restraining order. Had she done so, it would have been illegal for her husband to possess a firearm.
The gun used in Wednesday’s killing was purchased some time before the assault charge was filed, said Tolliver, who said he was not aware of any reason - such as a prior felony conviction - that Odighizuwa would not have been allowed to legally possess a firearm.
At Thursday’s arraignment in Buchanan County General District Court, Judge Johnson appointed Radford attorney Jimmy Turk to represent Odighizuwa. He scheduled a preliminary hearing for March 21.
Meanwhile, those who knew Odighizuwa portrayed him as a troubled student and a distant husband.
“He was an angry man,” said Shirley Trent Stanley, who lived next door to the Odighizuwas before they moved away last fall. As Odighizuwa’s grades fell at the law school, he would complain that the professors and students were harassing him, she said.
Stanley said that while Odighizuwa was always a quiet loner, he seemed nice enough until his first semester of law school. After flunking out in 2000, he was not allowed to visit the library, she said. “I’m sure that was persecution, in his mind,” she said.
As Odighizuwa’s mood appeared to darken, Stanley suggested to his wife - with whom she was close - that he should seek psychiatric help.
Odighizuwa refused to seek treatment, Stanley said.
Buchanan County authorities said that in the past year, Odighizuwa twice made complaints to them, saying that his home had been entered by someone who apparently did not take anything, and that on another occasion a bullet was left on his basement steps.
Police found the steps covered with dust and cobwebs, with no indication that anyone had been on them recently, said Chief Deputy Randall Ashby. And at the time Odighizuwa’s home was reportedly entered, the back door had been left open.
Odighizuwa and his family moved to Grundy from Ohio in 2000 so he could attend the law school.
Descriptions of Odighizuwa by people in Dayton, Ohio, sound like a cliche - he was quiet, kept to himself, didn’t make trouble, they said.
He was helpful to at least one set of neighbors at the Neal Avenue apartment building where he lived for about four years. Josephine Percy, who with her husband, Jefferson, lived downstairs from the Odighizuwas, said he brought in the groceries and took out the trash for the elderly couple.
“He would help us with anything we needed to have done,” Josephine Percy said. “He asked to see how we were, if we needed anything, all that sort of stuff.”
Odighizuwa and his wife were very quiet and stable people who worked “all the time,” she said.
“They were just nice, mannerly people.”
He never discussed any law school plans but did tell acquaintances that he planned to eventually move back to his homeland of Nigeria “to help his people,” according to Percy and Paula Bartley, the apartment house manager.
Odighizuwa was licensed as a substitute teacher in the Dayton area, according to the state board of education. He was licensed in Montgomery County, Ohio, for the 1999-2000 school year, but that school system had no records Thursday of his having taught there.
He was licensed to teach the following school year in the Trotwood-Madison City school district, although it was unclear Thursday whether he actually taught there.
Odighizuwa’s family suddenly packed a car full of belongings and left town more than a year ago, Paula Bartley said. He told her that the family had to move because he had lost his job. Bartley said she did not know what the job was. She said that after they left, Bartley found the apartment a mess.
“It surprised us when they just up and moved,” she said. “When they left here, they just literally packed stuff into their car and left.”
Saint Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota)
SMALLPOX VIRUS TO BE PRESERVED
GENEVA—Acting on fears of bioterrorism, the World Health Organization’s governing body on Thursday reversed a long-standing order for the destruction of all smallpox virus stocks and recommended they be retained for research into new vaccines or treatments. The U.N. health agency’s 32-member Executive Board endorsed a recommendation by WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland to drop a 2002 deadline for destroying the virus, held at top security laboratories in the United States and Russia. U.S. Assistant Surgeon General Kenneth Bernard said research into improved vaccines is vital after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent anthrax scare.
Hart building reopening delayed
WASHINGTON—The Senate has postponed plans to reopen the Hart Senate Office Building today after a bag with gloves and a protective suit was found above a hallway ceiling. Preliminary tests found no evidence of the bacteria on the protective gear, which was used in a massive cleanup after an anthrax-contaminated letter was opened in the building three months ago. Officials said a decision to reopen would depend on final test results, expected this afternoon.
Study: Stress leaves brain hypersensitive
WASHINGTON—Even relatively short periods of stress may cause changes that leave brain cells hypersensitive for weeks, report Israeli scientists trying to uncover the molecular root of post-traumatic stress disorder. The experiments were with mice, and it’s far from clear if human brain cells react the same way. In today’s edition of the journal Science, Hermona Soreq and colleagues at Hebrew University argue that a key player is a brain protein called acetylcholinesterase, or AChE, which is important in helping messages jump from one neuron to the next. Within minutes, relatively short periods of stress caused the mice to produce a usually rare, abnormal version of AChE that doesn’t provide the same help in neuronal signaling. That somehow left the mice’s neurons hypersensitive.
Sharon retains Labor Party backing
JERUSALEM—The Labor Party voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to remain in the coalition government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, beating back left winger Yossi Beilin’s argument that the party was being used to make the hard-line policies of Sharon look more acceptable to moderates. Party leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said it should stay in the government, but leave if Sharon doesn’t work toward the resumption of peace talks.
Lyme disease cases rise 8%
ATLANTA—Reported cases of Lyme disease, the tick-borne illness that can cause fatigue, sore joints and heart damage, climbed to a record high in 2000, the government reported Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it recorded 17,730 cases, up 8 percent from 1999. The disease was found in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Lyme cases nearly doubled in the 1990s, in part because more Americans built homes in the woods, exposing themselves to ticks, according to the CDC. Lyme disease can badly damage the heart and nervous system if it goes untreated by antibiotics.
Jury mulls whether priest touched boy
BOSTON—Jurors deciding whether to convict defrocked Catholic priest John J. Geoghan of indecent assault on a young boy a decade ago began deliberations Thursday and will continue today after a swift trial of less than two days. The former priest, who has pleaded not guilty, is charged with one count of indecent assault and battery on a child, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. The jury must decide if Geoghan intentionally slid his hand beneath the boy’s bathing suit and squeezed the boy’s buttocks while in a boys and girls club swimming pool a decade ago.
2 Air Force jets collide, killing 1 pilot
TUCSON, Ariz.—Two single-seat A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets collided and crashed Thursday while on a training mission over Arizona, the Air Force said. One pilot was killed, the other was airlifted to a hospital where he was in stable condition. The pilots were assigned to the 355th Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The crash site was in a rugged area north of the U.S.-Mexico border in the southeast corner of Arizona.
Law student foresaw attack
GRUNDY, Va.—An expelled law school student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming. At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help. “I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said. “He was supposed to help me out. … I don’t have my medication.” Police said Odighizuwa opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time. Classmate Kenneth Brown, 28, said of the suspect: “He was kind of off-balance. When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later, he came back and said, ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.’ Out of the blue.”
Jury convicts pilot impostor for lying
NEW YORK—An Egyptian man who flew to Kennedy International Airport in September with a fake pilot’s uniform and license was convicted Thursday of lying to investigators about his plans to attend aviation school. But jurors acquitted Wael Abdel Rahman Kishk, 21, on a second charge of trying to impersonate a pilot by carrying a forged document. Kishk faces up to five years in prison on a federal charge of making false statements. Kishk was detained at Kennedy Airport in New York on Sept. 19. Defense attorney Michael Schneider told the jury his client was guilty of nothing more than “poor judgment.”
EX-STUDENT FACING MURDER CHARGES
Wire Reports
San Jose Mercury News (California)
The expelled law school student accused of killing his dean and two others in a campus shooting spree was so paranoid and prone to outbursts that at least one classmate said he saw the violence coming.
At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, told the judge he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “I don’t have my medication.”
Police said Odighizuwa, who was evaluated and given medication in jail, opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time.
The Seattle Times
Update
• Peter Odighizuwa, a former law student charged with capital murder in the shooting deaths of three people at Appalachian School of Law, told a court in Grundy, Va., yesterday that he is sick and needs help. Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver said she will seek the death penalty.
• Carolyn Murphy, a Lennox, Calif., woman who raised puppies related to a mastiff that fatally mauled a San Francisco woman, has averted a trial by pleading no contest to breeding dogs without a license and other violations.
Upcoming
• East Timor will conduct its first presidential elections April 14, the territory’s U.N. administrator announced. Independence leader Jose “Xanana” Gusmao is widely expected to become the nation’s first head of state when it gains full independence May 20.
• Pope John Paul II’s July schedule will include visits to Toronto for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Youth Day and to Mexico for the canonization of a Mexican Indian. The pope also will visit Bulgaria in May, a week after he turns 82.
Critters
A hibernating bear named Saga and her cubs are spending the long Scandinavian winter isolated in their den, blissfully unaware that the whole world could be watching. A bear park in Orsa, 170 miles northwest of the Swedish capital, Stockholm, has installed a Web cam (www.orsa-gronklitt.se/ index.php?page) in the artificial den.
By the numbers
The largest glacier in Europe, Iceland’s Vatnajokull, is melting away and thinning by an average of 3 feet a year because of a warmer climate, an expert said.
Upbeat
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has declared war on street prostitution, met two former sex workers and was so moved by their horror story that he gave them 5 million lire ($2,286). A priest introduced the east European women to Berlusconi so he could hear how they had been forced into the trade.
People
• Actress Lani O’Grady, found dead in her Valencia, Calif., mobile home in September, died of a drug overdose involving high levels of anti-depressant Prozac and painkiller Vicodin, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said. O’Grady, 46, played the eldest daughter on television’s “Eight is Enough” from 1977 to 1981.
• After two days of treatment for exhaustion and stomach pain, the Dalai Lama left Patna, India, and flew to a 10,000-person gathering at Bodhgaya, where Buddhists believe the founder of their religion gained enlightenment.
Today in history
• In 1912, English explorer Robert F. Scott and his expedition reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. (Scott and his party perished during the return trip.)
• In 1788, the first English settlers arrived in Australia’s Botany Bay to establish a penal colony.
• In 1943, the Soviets announced they had broken the long Nazi siege of Leningrad.
P.S.
A plaque prepared to honor actor James Earl Jones at celebration of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow in Lauderhill, Fla., instead has this inscription: “Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive.” Ray was convicted of assassinating King in Memphis in 1968. Georgetown, Texas-based Merit Industries prepared the plaque at the request of Adpro, a Lauderhill business. Adpro refused Merit’s offer to fix the plaque and is having the damage repaired locally.
Passages
Paul Fannin, 94, a Republican who served in the U.S. Senate from 1964-77 and as Arizona governor from 1959-64, died Sunday in Phoenix.
Camilo Jose Cela, 85, a flamboyant novelist from Spain who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in literature with his crude, straightforward writing style, died of chronic heart disease yesterday in Madrid.
Law school shootings suspect: I’m sick
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
The expelled law school student accused of killing his dean and two others told a judge that he is sick and needs help.
At Thursday’s arraignment on three counts of capital murder, Peter Odighizuwa, 43, hid his face behind a green arrest warrant.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said. “He was supposed to help me out. . . . I don’t have my medication.”
Police say Odighizuwa opened fire with a handgun at the Appalachian School of Law on Wednesday, a day after he was dismissed from the school for a second time.
Dean L. Anthony Sutin and professor Thomas Blackwell were slain in their offices, and student Angela Dales, 33, died later at a hospital. Three other students were wounded.
Rosa Parks’ former home
named U.S. landmark
MONTGOMERY, Ala. - The former home of Rosa Parks, whose arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person in 1955 sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, has been declared a national landmark.
The apartment in the building at 620-638 Cleveland Court was recognized because of its historic and symbolic significance, according to the National Register of Historic Places.
The apartment was Parks’ home at the time she achieved national prominence for her civil rights activism, and it was also her destination at the time she was arrested, the national register noted.
Barbs traded in ex-priest’s
sex abuse trial
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A priest betrayed a boy’s trust when he grabbed his buttocks in a swimming pool 11 years ago and should be punished, a prosecutor said Thursday during closing statements at the man’s sex abuse trial.
Defense attorney Geoffrey Packard implied the abuse charge was all about money, noting the alleged victim didn’t come forward for eight years, and only after consulting an attorney, who sued.
Prosecutor Lynn Rooney said that if the victim was after money, he would have come up with a more dramatic story.
The defrocked Roman Catholic priest, John Geoghan, 66, is charged with indecent assault and battery on a person under age 14, accused of improperly touching the boy, then 10, in 1991. The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison.
Also . . .
CRASH KILLS ONE: Two military attack jets collided and crashed in the southern Arizona desert Thursday, the Air Force said. One of the pilots was killed. Base officials said the second pilot was hospitalized.
INQUEST DENIED: A Colorado county coroner on Thursday rejected a request for an inquest into the shooting death of a student who was killed as he fled the Columbine High School massacre. Daniel Rohrbough’s parents believe the 15-year-old was accidentally shot by police April 20, 1999.
TWO DEAD AFTER GAS LEAK: Two workers were killed and another was in critical condition Thursday after poisonous gas leaked from a Georgia-Pacific paper mill in Butler, Ala. Twelve others were hospitalized after the hydrogen sulfide leak Wednesday at the company’s Naheola mill near Pennington, said Choctaw County medical services director J.W. Cowan.
COP-KILLER SEEKS NEW TRIAL: Lawyers for former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal said Thursday that he will ask a federal appeals court to grant him a new trial in the 1981 slaying of a police officer. Last month, U.S. District Judge William Yohn threw out Abu-Jamal’s death sentence but upheld his 1982 murder conviction.
GAY TEEN’S SUIT SETTLED: The Titusville school district in Pennsylvania will pay $ 312,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a gay teenager who said officials did nothing to stop other students from tormenting him. Timothy Dahle, now 19, said he was pushed down a set of stairs and subjected to other physical assaults as well as name-calling and obscene jokes.
Townsville Bulletin/Townsville Sun (Australia)
GRUNDY, Virginia—A student who had been dismissed from law school went on a campus shooting spree, killing the dean, a professor and a student before he was tackled by students, authorities said.
The attack on Wednesday also wounded three female students at the Appalachian School of Law. They were hospitalised in a fair condition.
“When I arrived there were bodies lying everywhere,” said Dr Jack Briggs, one of the first to arrive after the shooting.
Dean Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell were gunned down in their offices. Police said the third person slain was student Angela Dales, 33.
Authorities said the suspect, Peter Odighizuwa, 42, was at school to meet the dean about his academic dismissal, which came into effect that day. Dr Briggs said Odighizuwa, a naturalised US citizen from Nigeria, had flunked out last year and been allowed to return to the school.
Odighizuwa first stopped in the office of Professor Dale Rubin to talk about his grades and reportedly asked Professor Rubin to pray for him, police said. Professor Rubin declined to comment.
Odighizuwa then walked to Mr Sutin’s and Professor Blackwell’s offices and shot them with a .380-calibre pistol, State Police spokesman Mike Stater said.
Witnesses said Odighizuwa then went downstairs into a common area and opened fire on a crowd of students, killing Professor Dales and seriously wounding three others.
Todd Ross, 30, was among the students who were outside when Odighizuwa left the building. Ross said the suspect held his hands in the air and dropped the gun at his prompting.
“He struggled after we got him on the ground, but then just laid there,” Mr Ross said. “He kept shouting ‘I have nowhere to go’.”
Odighizuwa was being held at the Buchanan County Jail on three counts of capital murder and three weapons counts.
Ellen Qualls, a spokeswoman for Governor Mark Warner, said Odighizuwa had a history of mental instability.
First-year student Justin Marlowe said the suspect had been in all of his classes.
“He was a real quiet guy who kept to himself,” Mr Marlowe said.
He said that after Odighizuwa “flunked out” a year ago, “the dean bent over backward to enrol him again”.
AAGM: LAW STUDENT SHOOTS SIX, KILLS THREE
Vanguard (Nigeria): AAGM
A NIGERIAN student recently suspended by his U.S. law school went on a shooting spree on Wednesday, killing three people and wounding three more, a local coroner and physician said.
The gunman used a .38-calibre semi-automatic handgun at point-blank range to shoot the school s dean and a professor, killing both men, before opening fire on his fellow students in Grundy, Virginia, said Doctor Jack Briggs.
One student was killed, and three more were injured in the rampage at the Appalachian School of Law. One woman was in fair condition and two more were in surgery, hospital staff said.
After the rampage, the gunman was tackled by four male students before being arrested, said Briggs, whose medical practice is near the school.
Virginia State Police identified the man they were holding in the shooting as Peter Odighizuwa, 43. They did not immediately release any further details or announce charges.
One victim, the school s Dean, was Anthony Sutin, a former U.S. Justice Department official who worked on the 1992 election campaign for former President Bill Clinton.
Professor Thomas Blackwell was also shot dead in his office in the small law school, located in the Appalachia mountain range, about 500 km southwest of the capital Washington.
Briggs said he knew the gunman, who had complained of stress about half-a-year ago and in hindsight had been “a time bomb ready to go off”.
The student had flunked out of the school last year and, after a second attempt, had been suspended for poor grades.
“So he took his anger out on the people he felt were responsible for him leaving the school,” the doctor said. “I had no idea it would affect him this way.”
The faculty members were “executed”, said Briggs, who described gunpowder burns on the shirt of one victim who was “obviously shot at point-blank range”.
School administrators issued a statement saying they were shocked and saddened by the shooting. Classes were canceled for the rest of the week. A memorial service was held at noon yesterday.
The three wounded students were taken to Buchanan General Hospital and later transferred to other hospitals for treatment.
All three wounded students are women, said Tim Baylor, spokesman for Wellmont health system. Two of them were in surgery and the third was in fair condition, he said.
Police said one student was shot in the abdomen and arm. A second student was shot in the throat and the third student suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.
The law school, with about 170 students enrolled, began offering classes in 1997 at a renovated junior high school about 45 miles north of Bristol.
Va. Town, Law School Linked in Mourning; Grundy Residents Pay Tribute to 3 Killed in Shootings
Maria Glod and Fredrick Kunkle
The Washington Post
Thomas F. Blackwell was a hard-charging corporate lawyer known for a methodical and creative approach to his cases. But here in this tiny mountain town, he was known for singing duets with his wife in the Buchanan First Presbyterian Choir and for his fiery homemade chili at his son’s Boy Scout gatherings.
Grundy remembered Blackwell today, along with L. Anthony Sutin and Angela Denise Dales, who were all fatally shot Wednesday at the Appalachian School of Law. At memorial services and candlelight vigils and gatherings over coffee, this much became clear: Longtime residents of this old, struggling, coal-mining town and their new educated, legal-minded, high-profile neighbors at the law school are forever linked. When community leaders founded the law school in 1997 to revitalize the region, many people in Grundy were skeptical that the two cultures would mesh. Now people can’t imagine the town without the school. “When it was first announced the school was coming, there were a lot of naysayers. Now I don’t think there is a naysayer left,” said Michael Hunt, a paralegal who has been accepted into Appalachian’s fall class.
Ginger Robertson, who works at Jackson Hardware and knew Sutin and Blackwell because their wives are members of the Grundy Women’s Club, will tell you how the school opens its doors to the arts community and the women’s club when they need space for meetings and other functions. Grundy’s town manager talks about the student who helped out by researching zoning laws. County social services officials applaud the students who tutor at the teen center.
“These were super people who found a little niche in the world and decided they were going to make it better,” said Jim Wayne Childress, a graduate and former schoolteacher who now practices law.
As Grundy mourned the dead, the student arrested in the killings appeared at a hearing in the Buchanan County courthouse, just down the street from the college. Peter Odighizuwa yelled to reporters as he walked across the outdoor catwalk connecting the jail and the courthouse: “I was sick. I was sick. I need help.”
Police say Odighizuwa, who was suspended Wednesday over his grades, went to the school’s second-floor offices to discuss his academic standing with professor Dale Rubin. When the conversation ended about 1:15 p.m., Odighizuwa told Rubin to pray for him, walked down the hall to Dean Sutin’s office and opened fire at close range with a semiautomatic handgun, killing Sutin, 42, a former top Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, police said.
The attacker then fatally shot Blackwell, a professor, in his office before walking downstairs to a lounge, where he opened fire again, killing Dales, a 33-year-old student, and injuring three other students, police said. Three students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived.
The shooting deaths caused the town to reflect on the five-year-old law school and people like Blackwell and Sutin, who gave up lucrative careers to come to this town on the West Virginia and Kentucky borders to try something new.
So Rife’s TV put a new message on the billboard outside the Main Street store: “ASL our thoughts and prayers are with you.”
Ellen Cook and Loweda Gillespie, who work at a supermarket, drove around town hanging about 40 yellow ribbons from telephone poles and light posts.
And hundreds of family members, friends and neighbors gathered in the Baptist church next to the college for a service honoring the dean, professor and student.
Several noted without irony that Sutin helped the accused killer get on his feet by securing a $ 19,000 student loan for him and raising enough money for a car, some food and clothes.
It was exactly that kind of spirit the school’s founders envisioned when they recruited Sutin and Blackwell to Grundy.
Sutin enjoyed the easy pace of life in a small town, said Lucius “Lu” F. Ellsworth, the school’s president. Sutin also liked the idea of building up a new school, especially one whose guiding principles included service to the community, Ellsworth said.
Faculty members and students alike are required to put in 25 hours of community service per term. The students have participated in 65 social programs, including programs for the elderly, conflict resolution and a humane society for animals.
Sutin and his wife, also a professor at the school, volunteered for a community arts council that brought dance, music and other cultural events to the region.
“I think he enjoyed being part of a smaller community,” Ellsworth said. “I think he liked developing an institution from the ground up.”
Students are former paralegals, insurance agents and taxi drivers. Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, two students who are also former police officers, helped subdue Odighizuwa until sheriff’s deputies arrived. “I thought it was a gunshot, but I wasn’t sure until students started running out yelling, ‘Peter’s got a gun,’ ” Gross said. The students then tackled the gunman.
Odighizuwa was arraigned today on three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted murder and six firearms charges. Odighizuwa, who shuffled into court in leg shackles and covered his face with court papers, told District Judge Patrick Johnson he needs medical attention. “I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said. “He was supposed to help me out. I don’t have my medication.”
Johnson told sheriff’s deputies to see that Odighizuwa is given any medication he needs and appointed Radford lawyer James C. Turk Jr. to handle the case.
Odighizuwa also has a pending assault charge in connection with an incident last summer in which he allegedly punched his wife. The case was set to be dismissed in August.
/nd/tackle/after18/byline | 145
Grundy, Law School Linked in Mourning; Ties Strengthened In Tributes to 3 Slain in Shootings
Maria Glod and Fredrick Kunkle
The Washington Post
Thomas F. Blackwell was a hard-charging corporate lawyer known for a methodical and creative approach to his cases. But here in this tiny mountain town, he was known for singing duets with his wife in the Buchanan First Presbyterian Choir and for his fiery homemade chili at his son’s Boy Scout gatherings.
Grundy remembered Blackwell today, along with L. Anthony Sutin and Angela Denise Dales, who were all fatally shot Wednesday at the Appalachian School of Law. At memorial services and candlelight vigils and gatherings over coffee, this much became clear: Longtime residents of this old, struggling, coal-mining town and their new educated, legal-minded, high-profile neighbors at the law school are forever linked. When community leaders founded the law school in 1997 to revitalize the region, many people in Grundy were skeptical that the two cultures would mesh. Now people can’t imagine the town without the school. “When it was first announced the school was coming, there were a lot of naysayers. Now I don’t think there is a naysayer left,” said Michael Hunt, a paralegal who has been accepted into Appalachian’s fall class.
Ginger Robertson, who works at Jackson Hardware and knew Sutin and Blackwell because their wives are members of the Grundy Women’s Club, will tell you how the school opens its doors to the arts community and the women’s club when they need space for meetings and other functions. Grundy’s town manager talks about the student who helped out by researching zoning laws. County social services officials applaud the students who tutor at the teen center.
“These were super people who found a little niche in the world and decided they were going to make it better,” said Jim Wayne Childress, a graduate and former schoolteacher who now practices law.
As Grundy mourned the dead, the student arrested in the killings appeared at a hearing in the Buchanan County courthouse, just down the street from the college. Peter Odighizuwa yelled to reporters as he walked across the outdoor catwalk connecting the jail and the courthouse: “I was sick. I was sick. I need help.”
Police say Odighizuwa, who was suspended Wednesday over his grades, went to the school’s second-floor offices to discuss his academic standing with professor Dale Rubin. When the conversation ended about 1:15 p.m., Odighizuwa told Rubin to pray for him, walked down the hall to Dean Sutin’s office and opened fire at close range with a semiautomatic handgun, killing Sutin, 42, a former top Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, police said.
The attacker then fatally shot Blackwell, a professor, in his office before walking downstairs to a lounge, where he opened fire again, killing Dales, a 33-year-old student, and injuring three other students, police said. Three students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived.
The shooting deaths caused the town to reflect on the five-year-old law school and people like Blackwell and Sutin, who gave up lucrative careers to come to this town on the West Virginia and Kentucky borders to try something new.
So Rife’s TV put a new message on the billboard outside the Main Street store: “ASL our thoughts and prayers are with you.”
Ellen Cook and Loweda Gillespie, who work at a supermarket, drove around town hanging about 40 yellow ribbons from telephone poles and light posts.
And hundreds of family members, friends and neighbors gathered in the Baptist church next to the college for a service honoring the dean, professor and student.
Several noted without irony that Sutin helped the accused killer get on his feet by securing a $ 19,000 student loan for him and raising enough money for a car, some food and clothes.
It was exactly that kind of spirit the school’s founders envisioned when they recruited Sutin and Blackwell to Grundy.
Sutin enjoyed the easy pace of life in a small town, said Lucius “Lu” F. Ellsworth, the school’s president. Sutin also liked the idea of building up a new school, especially one whose guiding principles included service to the community, Ellsworth said.
Faculty members and students alike are required to put in 25 hours of community service per term. The students have participated in 65 social programs, including programs for the elderly, conflict resolution and a humane society for animals.
Sutin and his wife, also a professor at the school, volunteered for a community arts council that brought dance, music and other cultural events to the region.
“I think he enjoyed being part of a smaller community,” Ellsworth said. “I think he liked developing an institution from the ground up.”
Students are former paralegals, insurance agents and taxi drivers. Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross, two students who are also former police officers, helped subdue Odighizuwa until sheriff’s deputies arrived. “I thought it was a gunshot, but I wasn’t sure until students started running out yelling, ‘Peter’s got a gun,’ ” Gross said. The students then tackled the gunman.
Odighizuwa was arraigned today on three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted murder and six firearms charges. Odighizuwa, who shuffled into court in leg shackles and covered his face with court papers, told District Judge Patrick Johnson he needs medical attention. “I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said. “He was supposed to help me out. I don’t have my medication.”
Johnson told sheriff’s deputies to see that Odighizuwa is given any medication he needs and appointed Radford lawyer James C. Turk Jr. to handle the case.
Odighizuwa also has a pending assault charge in connection with an incident last summer in which he allegedly punched his wife. The case was set to be dismissed in August.
Shooting suspect ‘a real oddball’;
Mary Shaffrey
The Washington Times
Peter Odighizuwa had a history of violent behavior that ended Wednesday in a shooting spree at the rural Appalachian Law School, leaving three dead, including L. Anthony Sutin, dean of the school and former Clinton administration official, and three others injured, police reported.
Court documents show that in August 2001, Mr. Odighizuwa, a Nigerian immigrant, was arrested in the assault and battery of his wife, Abieyuwa. Mrs. Odighizuwa was given an emergency protective order against her husband, and the charges were later suspended for a year, pending review. Another hearing in the matter was scheduled for Aug. 6.
Mr. Odighizuwa became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1989. It is not clear when he arrived in the United States, or under what circumstances he applied for citizenship. He spent most of the past 13 years in Chicago driving a taxi cab, before coming to ALS in 1999.
School officials said Mr. Odighizuwa went on a shooting rampage on Wednesday after being told he was not allowed to return because of poor grades. Fatally shot and killed along with Mr. Sutin, 42, were Thomas Blackwell, 41, an associate professor, and Angela Dales, 33, a student. Three other students injured and listed in fair condition were Rebecca Brown, 38; Martha Short, 37; and Stacey Bean, 22. The injured were taken to different hospitals.
Mr. Sutin, a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law School, left the District five years ago to help establish the law school, which opened in a renovated junior high school in Grundy, a small town a few miles from the Kentucky border. The school was established with the goal of bringing more lawyers to the southwest region of the state.
While in the District, Mr. Sutin had worked for the Hogan and Hartson law firm, the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign in 1992. He served as acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Affairs at the Department of Justice.
Yesterday, Mr. Odighizuwa, surrounded by police officers, shuffled into Buchanan County General District Court hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant.
“I was supposed to see my doctor. He was supposed to help me out. . . . I don’t have my medication,” he told Judge Patrick Johnson.
Mr. Odighizuwa was charged with three counts of capital murder and three counts of use of a firearm in a capital murder. He is also charged with three counts of attempted murder and three counts of attempted capital murder with a firearm. Messages were left on the cell phone and office phone of his attorney, James Turk Jr., but they were not returned.
Commonwealth Attorney Sheila Tolliver, who is prosecuting the case, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Those who knew Mr. Odighizuwa said he was strange and they didn’t seem surprised by his actions.
“Everyone on campus knew he was a real oddball,” said Dr. Jackie Briggs, Mr. Odighizuwa’s former physician, who tended to the ALS shooting victims. Dr. Briggs’ son-in-law attended classes with Mr. Odighizuwa and often told his father-in-law about the erratic behavior of “Peter O,” as he was known by other students.
“He would walk into a class and just start making demands of the professors.
. . . His mannerisms were very odd,” Dr. Briggs added.
Mrs. Odighizuwa left her husband three months ago, Dr. Briggs said. She is currently working at Buchanan General Hospital as a nurse’s aide. Friends said Mr. Odighizuwa was not able to support his family, so they collected a money for food for his four sons, ages 3 to 9.
“She has been a good employee, but of course she is distraught over the incident, and I think took her family to New York to be with relatives,” said Kemper Bausell, marketing director for Buchanan General Hospital, who added later, “she is a very pleasant person, but very hard-working.”
* This article is based in part on wire service reports.
Faculty here remember law prof slain in Va.
Adam W Lasker
Chicago Daily Law Bulletin
A former visiting professor at the Chicago-Kent School of Law was among three people who were shot to death at a Virginia law school.
Thomas F. Blackwell, who had taught legal research and writing here for two years, was slain Wednesday along with the dean of the Appalachian School of Law and one of its students. A former student is accused of going on a shooting rampage that also left three students wounded. “He was a talented teacher and scholar and was respected by both our faculty and our students,” said Harold J. Krent, Chicago-Kent’s interim dean. “His death is a tragic loss to the legal community and to his many friends and colleagues.”
Blackwell, the father of three children, moved to Virginia and joined the law school’s faculty in 1999.
He was in the top 10 percent of his graduating class at Duke University School of Law in 1986, the same year he received a master’s degree in philosophy from that university.
Peter Odighizuwa, 43, went to the law school, located in Grundy, Va., to talk to the dean, L. Anthony Sutin, about his recent dismissal for failing grades. Officials and students said he then used a .380-caliber pistol to shoot and kill Sutin, Blackwell and student Angela Dales, 33, said Virginia State Police spokesman Mike Stater.
“They were irreplaceable, whether you see them as teachers or father figures or friends,” William Sievers, president of the school’s Student Bar Association, said Thursday outside the school during a candlelight remembrance gathering of about a hundred people.
“It’s going to be tough going back to school,” he said.
Three other students were injured and were hospitalized in fair condition, Stater said.
Krent said Blackwell also taught corporate finance, copyright law and law office technology during his time in Chicago, which lasted from August 1997 to May 1999.
Associate Professor Mary Rose Strubbe, who is now the director of Chicago-Kent’s research and writing program, said she worked closely with Blackwell in Chicago helping first-year students prepare oral arguments and working with second- and third-year students in the school’s moot court society.
“He loved teaching. He was a good teacher and had tremendous respect for the students,” Strubbe said. “He would spend an immense amount of time with students who needed help or had questions or just wanted to come and talk.”
Strubbe and Blackwell had kept in touch since he left Chicago, and they saw each other several times about two weeks ago in Texas at a meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. At that event, Strubbe said, they had time for a fairly long conversation during a luncheon for the Association of Legal Writing Directors.
“He was leaving the conference early … to hook up with his wife and kids, who were on the way back from spending the holidays in Texas,” Strubbe said. “He was very full of enthusiasm for teaching, research and writing, the Appalachian school and his family, and how well they were enjoying living and going to school in the area.”
Ralph Brill, a Chicago-Kent professor who was director of the school’s research and writing program for 14 years, said Blackwell was a skilled legal writer who could have taught at any law school.
“He passed up many opportunities to use his immense talents at more prestigious places to go to Appalachian and make it a place for poor people to gain entrance into the profession,” Brill said. “He worked very hard, undertook far too many projects, but somehow completed them on time and highly competently.”
Sutin, the Virginia law school’s dean, was a 1984 Harvard Law School graduate and also was an associate professor at the school, which has an enrollment of about 170 students. He left the Justice Department five years ago to help found the school, which is housed in a renovated junior high school.
Sutin had worked for the Democratic National Committee and former president Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Sutin had said he helped develop the law school to ease the shortage of lawyers in the region and to help foster renewal in Appalachia.
Odighizuwa, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Nigeria, appeared Thursday in Buchanan County General District Court for an arraignment hearing, during which he told Judge Patrick Johnson that he is sick and needs help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor. He was supposed to help me out … I don’t have my medication,” Odighizuwa told the judge.
Prosecutors charged Odighizuwa with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six charges of using a firearm in a felony. Odighizuwa, who was arrested on Aug. 15 for allegedly assaulting his wife, will be held without bond pending a preliminary hearing on March 21.
Chris Clifton, the school’s financial aid officer, said Odighizuwa was recently dismissed permanently from the school because of his poor grades. Clifton met with the student the day before the shooting, and said Odighizuwa had been struggling with his grades for more than a year and had been dismissed once before.
“He was angry. He thought he was being treated unfairly and he wanted to see his transcript,” Clifton said. “I don’t think Peter knew at this time that the dismissal was going to be permanent and final.”
Jack Briggs, a doctor with a private practice a half-mile from the school, said that after Odighizuwa shot Sutin and Blackwell in their offices, he went downstairs to a commons area and opened fire on students.
“When I got there, there were bodies laying everywhere,” Briggs said.
Odighizuwa left the building and dropped his gun after being confronted by students, who then tackled him to the ground. One student who is a sheriff’s deputy handcuffed the gunman until police arrived and took him into custody.
Grundy, a gritty coal town of about 1,100 in the shadow of two great mountain ridges, has long been isolated from violent crime, the Rev. Stan Parris said Thursday afternoon at a memorial at the Grundy Baptist Church. He asked the crowd of a few hundred to pray and reassured them that “God will bring justice.”—The Associated Press contributed
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Shattered town mourns ‘irreplaceable’ victims
Chris Kahn
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
Mourners lit tiny white candles, passing the flame wick to wick in a quiet, shivering circle.
One day after gunfire killed three people and shattered the serenity of this tiny mountain town, students from the Appalachian School of Law and the community they call home wearily watched the glow, lost in their agony and questions of “why?”
“We are standing tonight on sacred ground,” Professor Stewart Harris told the crowd of about 250 mourners who had assembled Thursday on the school’s front lawn. “Innocent blood was shed here.”
Peter Odighizuwa, 43, a troubled law student who had recently flunked out of school, opened fire with a handgun at the school on Wednesday, police said.
Dean L. Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell were slain in their offices and student Angela Dales, 33, died later at a hospital. Three other students were wounded.
Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver already has said she will seek the death penalty - a goal that some law students have trouble accepting.
Cristy Cooper, 23, a first-year student from Dresden, Tenn., said she hopes Odighizuwa can avoid execution, even though he killed three others.
“I still think it’s morally wrong to kill,” Cooper said. “I’ve always been against capital punishment.”
William R. Sievers, 25, president of the school’s Student Bar Association, said he doesn’t want to think about Odighizuwa or his fate. “I just want to be with the people here and help them in any way I can,” Sievers said.
Odighizuwa, a native of Nigeria, faces three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges.
Earlier in the day, Odighizuwa told a judge that he was sick and needed help.
“I was supposed to see my doctor,” Odighizuwa said, hiding his face behind a green arrest warrant. “He was supposed to help me out … I don’t have my medication.”
Kenneth Brown, 28, said his friends always joked that Odighizuwa was one of those guys who would finally crack and bring a gun to school.
“He was kind of off-balance,” Brown said. “When we met last year, he actually came up and shook my hand and asked my name. Then, like five minutes later he came back and said, ‘You know I’m not crazy, but people tick me off sometimes.’ Out of the blue.”
Odighizuwa was arrested on Aug. 15 for allegedly assaulting his wife. The police report said he hit her in the face, bruising her right eye.
He also repeatedly approached police with concerns about people breaking into his house on the outskirts of this small town in western Virginia. Chief Deputy Randall Ashby said Odighizuwa would file complaints and regularly nitpick with deputies over the wording of the reports they filed.
Grundy, a gritty coal town of about 1,100 in the shadow of two great mountain ridges, has long been isolated from violent crime, Rev. Stan Parris said at an afternoon memorial at the Grundy Baptist Church. He asked the crowd of a few hundred to pray and reassured them that “God will bring justice.”
“We’ve never had something this scary,” said Constance C. Bausell, 52, a school teacher who knew Blackwell at church.
Students and family members gathered on the lawn and wept in small circles throughout the day for the dean, the teacher and the student they knew so well.
“They were irreplaceable, whether you see them as teachers or father figures or friends,” Sievers said Thursday night. “It’s going to be tough going back to school.”
Beside him, people were laying their extinguished candles in front of a makeshift memorial of flowers and stuffed animals around the school’s concrete sign.
Students described Sutin as a hands-on administrator who knew all of his students’ names.
“He just had this integrity about him,” said Mary Kilpatrick, who will graduate in a semester.
Blackwell was remembered as an avid runner and trumpet player.
“I knew him from choir, Brown said. “We were going to start a little band.”
Blackwell, a father of three, recently performed with his family in a Christmas show at a local elementary school, Harris said.
Dales, a boisterous mother of an 8-year-old girl who became a student after working as a recruiter for the school. She wanted to work in law education.
Two killed in apparent murder-suicide on college campus
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
A man shot his ex-girlfriend to death Friday at the community college she attended, then killed himself, authorities said.
No one else was injured in the shootings just before 11 a.m. at Broward Community College.
The two died at Broward General Medical Center; their names were not immediately released. The woman, a student at the college just southwest of Fort Lauderdale, was the man’s ex-girlfriend, police Maj. Edward Taylor said.
The man shot the woman with a .357 Magnum and then turned the gun on himself between two buildings at the school’s main campus, said Davie police Lt. Gary Killam.
The shooting stemmed from a domestic dispute, Killam said.
Several students witnessed or heard the shooting between the performing arts building and the English department.
“I turned around and I saw the girl was shot,” said Joe Fazio, a student from Plantation. “It looks like she was shot in the back of the neck. Then I heard the second gunshot. I turned around and the guy was laying on the ground.”
Classes at the English department building were canceled for the rest of the day, according to school security.
It was the third shooting at a school in the past week.
On Wednesday, the dean, a professor and a student at Appalachian School of Law were shot and killed on campus. Charged in the deaths was Peter Odighizuwa, 43, a student who had recently flunked out of school for a second time.
Two students were shot and wounded Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on New York City’s Upper West Side. A teen-ager was arrested.
Texas friends prepare to attend funeral of Virginia law school shooting victim
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
Friends of a professor gunned down at a Virginia law school earlier this week say he was dedicated to his family and job, but also had a humorous side.
“Tom was the class clown. He was a cut-up,” said high school friend Kate Moore of Benbrook. “But he was exactly the person you wanted to be there if you needed something. He was a wonderful person.”
Blackwell and L. Anthony Sutin, a school dean, were slain Wednesday in their offices at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va. Student Angela Dales, 33, died later at a hospital. Three other students were wounded.
Authorities say Peter Odighizuwa, 43, opened fire with a handgun a day after he was expelled for a second time. He faces three counts of capital murder and other charges.
Blackwell’s funeral was set for 2 p.m. Monday at King of Glory Lutheran Church in Dallas.
Blackwell, born Jan. 13, 1961, graduated from Western Hills High School in 1978 and from the University of Texas at Arlington and the Duke University School of Law.
He practiced business law in Dallas as an associate with Jenkins & Gilchrist and later opened his own law firm.
From 1995-97, Blackwell taught legal writing, analysis and research to first-year students at the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law in Fort Worth. He then went to Chicago Kent Law School and finally to the Appalachian School of Law.
Thomas Trahan, an assistant director of the legal writing program at Wesleyan, first met Blackwell when they practiced law in Dallas. They were also church choir members.
“He was extremely bright,” Trahan said. “He could cut to the heart of a problem better than anyone I knew. He was a very successful lawyer, who gave that up to teach others.
“He dedicated himself to the Appalachian School of Law to bring legal education to a part of the country that traditionally had been economically deprived. He believed in the mission of that school.”
Blackwell and his wife also had a humorous side, Trahan said. They gave their three children - Zebadiah, 14, Jillian, 12, and Ezekiel, 10, - especially long first and middle names so they wouldn’t fit in the allotted spaces on standardized test exams, he said.
Moore recalled that the Blackwells’ first date ended in a car accident that left him in the hospital with several broken bones. His future wife stayed by his bedside throughout his recovery.
“He missed almost half the school year, and he still graduated valedictorian,” Moore said.
Two killed in apparent murder-suicide at Broward college
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
A man shot his ex-girlfriend to death Friday at the community college she attended, then killed himself, authorities said.
No one else was injured in the shootings just before 11 a.m. at Broward Community College.
Michael Holness, 23, of Miramar, shot Moriah Ann Pierce with a .357 Magnum and then turned the gun on himself between two buildings at the school’s main campus, police said. They died a short time later at Broward General Medical Center.
Pierce, 20, of Dania Beach, was studying to become an elementary school teacher, according to a statement from the college just southwest of Fort Lauderdale.
The shooting stemmed from a domestic dispute, Lt. Gary Killam said.
Peter Arnold told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale that his daughter was a good friend of Pierce’s and was walking with her to class Friday morning when Holness came up behind Pierce and shot her in the head.
Arnold said Moriah and Holness had dated about two years but she tried to end the relationship recently.
Several students witnessed or heard the shooting between the performing arts building and the English department.
“I turned around and I saw the girl was shot,” said Joe Fazio, a student from Plantation. “It looks like she was shot in the back of the neck. Then I heard the second gunshot. I turned around and the guy was laying on the ground.”
Classes at the English department building were canceled, but the building would be reopened later Friday, according to school security.
Broward Community College, which opened in 1960, is located near Nova Southeastern University, where the Miami Dolphins hold their training camp and practice.
The school’s main campus has about 15,000 students, with the school’s total enrollment about 35,000.
It was the third shooting at a school in the past week.
On Wednesday, the dean, a professor and a student at Appalachian School of Law were shot and killed on campus. Charged in the deaths was Peter Odighizuwa, 43, a student who had recently flunked out of school for a second time.
Two students were shot and wounded Tuesday at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on New York City’s Upper West Side. A teen-ager was arrested.