Appalachian School of Law Shootings

About

This page shows news stories about the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law. Discussion about these shootings is here.

Sun, 20 Jan 2002

Blue-collar Appalachian community embraces its new law school in time of crisis

Chris Kahn
The Associated Press

It seemed like a risky proposition: building a law school in a small struggling coal town isolated by the rugged Appalachian Mountains.

But with area mines closing and the young moving away to find work, town officials pushed ahead, opening the Appalachian School of Law in 1997 inside an old brick school house.

“We needed this, anything that could help,” said W.H. Trivett, 77, mayor of the blue-collar town of about 1,100.

It took time for the new students to gain acceptance in the close-knit community where many residents’ families had lived for generations.

“We had to get used to people from different cultures living here - and they had to get used to us,” said Richie Mullins, 35, who sells law school text books out of his bicycle store on Main Street.

But any lingering doubts students and faculty may have had about their neighbors’ feelings disappeared last week as the town responded after a disgruntled former student allegedly walked into the school and shot to death the dean, a professor and a student.

In the days that followed, signs of support appeared throughout Grundy.

“ASL our thoughts and prayers are with you,” read a banner in the parking lot of Rife’s TV.

A grocery in nearby Vansant donated ham biscuits, cookies and soda pop to the Baptist church for a memorial service.

Loweda Gillespie, 61, tied yellow ribbons around store fronts, telephone poles and trees.

“We wanted to let them know we’re family,” Gillespie said.

Dean L. Anthony Sutin, 42, and Professor Tom Blackwell, 41, were slain in their offices Wednesday. Law student Angela Dales, 33, died later at the hospital. Three other students were wounded.

The gunfire sent terrified students running from the building before classmates tackled the alleged shooter. Peter Odighizuwa, 43, who had been dismissed from the school because of failing grades, is charged with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges. The prosecutor said she will seek the death penalty.

Residents attended memorial services throughout the week, placing flowers on the school’s concrete sign as victims’ families and friends wept in small, shivering circles.

“It’s so heartwarming to see this,” school president Lucius Ellsworth said Saturday. “There’s no doubt that out of this tragedy, this community has united.”

For decades, officials wanted to build a law school in southwest Virginia to create jobs and provide a legal resource for the remote mountain area.

“In all rural areas, there is a real lack of legal education,” said Ellsworth, a former education official in Tennessee and vice chancellor of Clinch Valley College in Wise. Before the law school came to Grundy, there was no other law school within a three-hour drive.

The Appalachian School of Law now has about 200 students. The American Bar Association granted it provisional accreditation last year. And everyone at the school - students and faculty alike - is required to support the town with 25 hours of community service per term.

Students, many of whom are older and looking for a second career, tutor Grundy school children.

“These kids, the way they’re allowed to work with the public, I’m sure they’re getting a better education than they could in other places,” Trivett said.

Among the faculty, Blackwell was one of the most involved. His children regularly helped out at the Mountain Mission School, a local agency for orphans and children of extreme poverty. He and his wife, Lisa, sang in a church choir, and he was on a committee to find a new pastor.

“Y’all have become our family,” Lisa Blackwell said at a memorial service for her husband Friday. “We have more love here than we could possibly have asked for.”

Blackwell’s funeral was planned for Monday in Dallas, where the family lived before moving to Grundy. A private memorial service for Sutin was held Sunday at the local high school.

“He came to Grundy because he thought he could use his talents to help people in Appalachia, and to help boost the economy of a small coal town,” said Kent Markus, Sutin’s former Harvard Law School roommate and one of about 500 people who attended the service. “He was trying to help the sons and grandsons of coal miners.”

At the law school, classes were expected to resume Tuesday. The faculty shuffled around schedules to cover Blackwell’s classes, and Paul Lund, who has been assistant dean, was appointed to fill Sutin’s role until a new dean can be hired.

“As horrific as this has been, I’m certain the institution will be stronger,” Ellsworth said.

/duplicates | 041

RAIN, DRUMS DROWN OUT KLAN’S WORDS AT RALLY

The Augusta Chronicle (Georgia)

Rain and drums drowned out the words of two dozen Ku Klux Klansmen on Saturday at a rally held days after a wooden cross was burned on the lawn of the town’s first black mayor.

The rally, the first public Klan event in the region in decades, fell on Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s birthday and two days before the observance of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

About 800 people attended a diversity festival Saturday held to counter the Klan event. Mayor Roland Dykes received a standing ovation.

At the Klan rally, about 400 people watched from behind yellow police tape, chanting and playing drums to drown out the Klan’s remarks.

School shooting victim remembered at funeral

GRUNDY, Va. -

Law student Angela Denice Dales, one of three people slain at her school Wednesday, was remembered Saturday as a woman who loved to learn and who taught a lesson in her death.

Hundreds of friends and family attended the funeral for Ms. Dales, the single mother of a 7-year-old girl. Ms. Dales, 33, was shot to death along with the dean and a professor at the Appalachian School of Law. Three other students were wounded and remained hospitalized in fair condition Saturday.

The suspect, former student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, is in jail on capital murder and attempted murder charges.

/nd | 044

THE WEEK THAT WAS

The Baltimore Sun

The Crisis

John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old American captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan, was charged with conspiring to kill U. S. citizens and providing support to terrorist groups, counts that do not carry the death penalty.

Richard C. Reid, who allegedly tried to explode a jetliner with a bomb in his shoe, pleaded innocent to nine counts, including the charge that he was a member of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror group.

Baltimore-Washington International Airport was chosen by the Federal Transportation department as a test of how luggage screening and other security measures will be handled at the nation’s other major airports.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited India and Pakistan to try to persuade them not to go to war, and Afghanistan, to voice U. S. support for the war-ravaged country. Videotapes found in Afghanistan showing five purported al-Qaida terrorists making martyrdom statements were released by Attorney General John Ashscroft who asked for help in identifying and finding the men, saying, “They could be anywhere in the world.”

After a month in custody charged with lying to investigators about having an aviation radio in his hotel room near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Egyptian Abdallah Higazy was released when another hotel guest, a private pilot, said the radio was his.

Britain arrested 13 in an anti-terror probe, charging that two are al-Qaida members.

Bosnia handed six Algerians suspected of having terrorist links over to U.S. military authorities, though that country’s highest court had ruled that the suspects, most employees of various Islamic humanitarian groups, be released.

U.S. Special Forces began arriving in the Philippines to help in that country’s battle with Islamic separatists linked to Osama bin Laden.

The Nation

A pretzel apparently lodged in President Bush’s throat while he was watching the Ravens-Dolphins game, triggering a reaction that caused him to faint, bruising his face when he hit the floor.

A key figure in the Novatek International Inc stock-rigging scandal, Vincent D. Celentano, was fined $350,000 by the Security and Exchange Commission and barred from ever running a U. S. public company . . . Former executives of the Sunbeam corporation agreed to pay $15 million to settle a stockholder lawsuit accusing them of inflating he value of the appliance maker’s stock . . . An internal memo warned Enron executives of accounting irregularities months before they led to the company’s downfall.

Five former members of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army were named as suspects in a deadly bank robbery in California 27 years ago. One of them, Sara Jane Olsen, later received a 10-year sentence for conspiring to blow up a Los Angeles police cars.

A student at the Appalachian School of Law, went on a shooting rampage at the Grundy, Va., campus, killing the dean, a professor and another student.

President Bush named 17 Americans from the fields of medicine, law and religion to his Council on Bioethics, to advise him on delicate issues of science versus morality, beginning with the issue of human cloning.

The former home of Rosa Parks, a civil rights heroine who sparked the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott half a century ago, has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Facing possible bankruptcy, Kmart named turnaround specialist James B. Adamson as its new chairman.

The Security and Exchange Commission proposed that an outside group monitor the accounting industry. Bankrupt Enron fired Arthur Andersen as its accountant.

The World

Hundreds of thousands fled a volcanic eruption that sent lava flowing into Goma, Congo, a city on the border of Rwanda.

U. S. and Colombian law enforcement officials grabbed $8 million in cash and arrested three dozen suspects in the United States and Colombia in what they said was an assault on a major drug money laundering operation.

Sierra Leone and the United Nations agreed to form a special court to try people accused of atrocities during the West African country’s decade-long civil war which the government declared over in a celebration that featured a bonfire of rebel weapons.

Seven Bolivians, including two police officers, were killed as poor farmers protested a crackdown on the sale of coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine.

The Region

The Redskins fired coach Marty Schottenheimer an replaced him with former University of Florida coach Steve Spurrier.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening asked the General Assembly to put off the final installment of a state income tax cut in order to help balance his $22.2 billion budget.

Richard N. Dixon resigned as state treasurer, blaming worsening diabetes.

No. 1 Duke ran away from No. 3 Maryland in the second half, winning the ACC basketball showdown 99-78.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig indicated Washington may be first in line for a relocated team in 2003.

The tenant of a Glen Burnie woman was arrested for killing the woman and her daughter-in-law. The bodies of Laverne May Browning and Tamie Browning were found in the trunk of a car parked at a nearby apartment complex.

Quote

“He’s the mayor, I’m a judge. It’s apples and oranges. He’s the last person I’d ask advice of or be influenced by. I’m not involved in how city government runs. This is not Hillary and Bill.”

–Baltimore District Court Judge Catherine Curran O’Malley, reacting to an ethics panel ruling that she may not hear cases in which police witnesses testify because her husband, Mayor Martin O’Malley is their boss.

GRAPHIC: Photo(s), 1. Final flyby for Galileo: Images from NASA’s Galileo, spacecraft show Jupiter during the 1994 impact of fragments from, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Galileo made a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io on, Thursday. The flyby was the last and closest for the craft, which, NASA plans to crash into Jupiter in 2003.; , 2. Redskins Spurrier named coach; , 3. Violence spreads in Mideast: Relatives mourn during a funeral for, the victims of a Palestinian attack on a coming-of-age party for an, Israeli girl. The attack left six dead and more than 20 hurt. In, retaliation, Israel destroyed a Palestinian security post and, surrounded Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat’s headquarters.; , 4. Baltimore District Court Judge Catherine Curran O’Malley; , 1. - 2. ASSOCIATED PRESS , 3. AGENCE-FRANCE PRESSE

/nd | 045

GRUNDY SHOWS ITS TRUE GRIT;

Rex Bowman
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)

When trouble comes to Grundy, the people don’t quit, they get tough. So it’s no surprise that the Appalachian School of Law, built on a sliver of the town’s precious flat land, is vowing to come back better and stronger after a shooting rampage Wednesday left three people dead on campus.

Begun in Grundy five years ago in the hope of relieving the area’s economic troubles, the law school now finds itself dealing with a calamity just as the little mountain town has dealt with disasters through its history - devastating floods and blizzards, deadly coal mine explosions and mine shutdowns that threw hundreds out of work and left families destitute in an instant.

If the law school needs a lesson in how to steel itself during tough times, Grundy’s the place to be.

“This community has faced many tragic times throughout its history, and while each of these events was separate and apart from the other, one common denominator always remains - its unity,” said law student William R. Sievers. “From each of these events, the community has rallied to become stronger than before. This is the resolve of the students of the Appalachian School of Law.”

The school’s trouble began Wednesday about 1:15 p.m., when, according to authorities, a student who just had been dismissed for poor grades opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol.

Within minutes, the school’s dean, a professor and a student lay dead. Three other students were wounded, shot in the hallway were they had run into the gunman.

Former student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, is charged with three counts of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder. The local prosecutor said she’ll ask a jury to convict Odighizuwa and sentence him to death.

The town has rallied to the law school’s support. While students have been dismissed from classes until Tuesday and have spent the past few days comforting one another, residents have sent flowers and letters and e-mails, attended a candlelight vigil and wept at memorial services.

Many of the residents who attended the gatherings are too young to remember the town’s last disaster, the 1977 flood that all but wiped Grundy from the map, but they understood that the law school now is a part of Grundy and its tragedy was theirs, school President Lucius Ellsworth said.

“The relationship between the town and the Appalachian School of Law has been strengthened incredibly by this event,” Ellsworth said. “People are coming forward to offer their support.”

In many ways, the three who were killed represented the hope of the law school’s creators and of Grundy’s residents. They envisioned a law school in the middle of Buchanan County’s steep hills, amid the unemployment and poverty, that would attract talented, idealistic legal scholars to the Southwest Virginia coalfields to teach Appalachian residents to become lawyers themselves.

The process would, in Ellsworth’s oft-repeated phrase, help bring about “the economic and cultural transformation of the region.”

The dean who was killed, L. Anthony Sutin, had risen to the highest ranks of the U.S. Department of Justice and could have worked for any law firm or taught at any law school of his choosing, his colleagues said.

Professor Thomas Blackwell, shot in his office while talking on the phone with a fellow member of his church, was a top graduate from Duke University’s law school and a noted legal scholar.

“When they came to Grundy, Tony and Tom had dreams not only of a better quality of life for their families, they also dreamed of creating a law school where one was truly needed, a law school that would produce lawyers who cared about more than money and prestige, lawyers who would devote themselves to service and justice,” professor Stewart Harris said.

“They dreamed of helping those who otherwise would never have had a chance to obtain a legal education.”

One of those students whom Sutin and Blackwell helped was the third victim, Angela Dales, of nearby Vansant. One of the law school’s goals was to provide jobs for local residents, and Dales, 33, was one of the first people the school hired.

She was with the school at its inception, working as an administrative secretary and as an admissions counselor. After leading prospective students on tours of the school, she became so enthusiastic about the law that she applied for admission.

Dales, a single mother of an 8-year-old girl, was exactly the kind of student the school hoped to attract: a homegrown Appalachian resident who never would dream of law school if one hadn’t been nearby.

“She was living her dreams at the Appalachian School of Law,” Harris said.

The law school, meanwhile, has been a dream come true for Grundy and surrounding Buchanan County. Though it started with an operating budget of only $102,000 and a student body of no more than 80, it began the year with 234 students and 37 full-time employees who earn an average annual salary of about $43,000, according to the school’s December newsletter.

Built in a former junior high school with more than $9.1 million in private and government money, the school has been a boon for the local economy: 140 new students entered classes last fall, and they spent their money in local restaurants and stores and even created a demand for housing construction in the area. One study found that the school’s students spend $208,000 locally each month for rent, food and gasoline.

The students have been a godsend for Grundy, where local fortunes long have been tied to the boom-and-bust cycle of the declining coal-mining industry.

In a sad way, Ellsworth said, the shooting rampage will help the community: People around the nation who never had heard of the law school before now know it exists and have sent messages that they admire the school’s mission.

“Before this tragedy, we had already accepted a senior associate professor from Marquette University, and he was to begin teaching next fall,” Ellsworth said. “He called right after this happened and volunteered to begin teaching this semester. And I think that’s going to happen.

“Out of this tragedy, you’re seeing what a wide base of support there is for this law school. You’re going to find there’s a great awareness of the positive role of the law school.”

During a candlelight vigil for the shooting victims Thursday, professor Sandra McGlothlin quoted Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as she urged students and faculty to remain a part of what Sutin, Blackwell and Dales belonged to, a little law school in a little Appalachian town: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have thus far so nobly advanced.”

On Friday, sitting in his second-story office down the hall from where Blackwell and Sutin were shot, Ellsworth said the Appalachian School of Law will get through the disaster, just as Grundy has rebuilt after every flood.

“Next week is going to be a tough week,” Ellsworth said, “but the most important thing is that the school is going to go on.”

THE VICTIMS

* L. Anthony Sutin, 42, dean of the law school. He was a graduate of Brandeis University and the Harvard University School of Law. Sutin was a deputy associate U.S. attorney general during the Clinton administration.

* Professor Thomas F. Blackwell, 41, a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington and the Duke University School of Law.

* Angela D. Dales, 33, of Vansant, a first-year student at the school. Dales was a former employee of the school whose responsibilities included acting as a tour guide for prospective students.

* Wounded were students Stacey Beans, 22, of Berea, Ky.; Rebecca Claire Brown, 38, of Roanoke; and Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Grundy.

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.

/nd | 053

SHOOTING HITS MANY LIVES;

Laurence Hammack, Kimberly O’Brien And Lindsey Nair
Roanoke Times & World News (Roanoke, VA)

Spring semester was one week old, and the Appalachian School of Law was returning to full academic life.

At a weekly coffee meeting for students and faculty, professor Thomas Blackwell chatted with first-year student Mikael Gross about practice exams.

Anthony Sutin, dean of the school, finished some research at the law library and headed back to his office.

Student Angela Dales talked with classmates during a break between classes.

Everyone at the school was busy and preoccupied with the work that lay ahead.

Everyone, that is, except Peter Odighizuwa.

Odighizuwa, described as a troubled loner unable to cope with his failure as a law student, had recently been told that he had flunked out of school. Yet Odighizuwa refused to leave, lurking around campus and complaining bitterly about how the school had treated him.

Wednesday afternoon, Odighizuwa returned to the school.

Instead of law books, he carried a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun.

Professor Gail Kintzer was in her second-floor office about 1:15 p.m. talking with a student when she heard the first shot.

“I heard a pop, which made me stop, and a second pop, which I knew was a gunshot,” she said.

Someone - she’s not sure who - opened Kintzer’s door, and two secretaries rushed in. Melanie Lewis, Sutin’s secretary, and Donna Horn, a faculty secretary, were hysterical.

Lewis and Horn had just seen Peter Odighizuwa shoot Blackwell, two offices down the hall, Kintzer said.

Professor Wes Shinn, whose office is next to Blackwell’s, had opened his door long enough to see Lewis and Horn standing horrified in the hallway.

“He’s got a gun; he’s got a gun,” the women screamed.

Once the women got inside Kintzer’s office, they crawled under her desk.

Kintzer tried to call for help. All emergency numbers were busy, swamped by calls from others who had heard the shots.

As Horn and Lewis ran into Kintzer’s office, Shinn ducked back into his office and slammed the door. “My assumption was that he was going to go from office to office,” he said.

Shinn heard two more shots that seemed to come from farther down the hall.

He ventured out and found Blackwell still sitting behind his desk. He was slumped over in his chair and bleeding from the neck. Shinn checked for a pulse and found none.

Blackwell’s telephone was off the hook.

At the time he was shot, Blackwell was on the phone with Charlotte Varney, the secretary of his church. They were talking about an upcoming congregational meeting at Buchanan First Presbyterian Church.

Suddenly, Blackwell stopped talking.

Varney heard a sound as if someone had blown up a paper bag, then popped it. Then she heard the phone drop and what sounded like static. After that, she heard muffled voices and footsteps.

“I asked him what was going on, but he didn’t come back on the line,” she said.

After about two minutes, Varney thought she had been disconnected. So she hung up and went on an errand, figuring Blackwell would call her back if he needed to.

A half-hour passed before she learned the truth.

Meanwhile, Kintzer and Shinn had rushed down the hall to Sutin’s office. They were met by another professor who had found the dean lying face down on the floor of his office. Two powder burns - indicating that he had been shot at close range - could be seen on Sutin’s bloodstained white dress shirt. Sutin had also been shot a third time, in the side.

He was dead, too.

Downstairs, most people did not realize what had just happened.

Arun Rattan, a first-year student, had just returned from lunch at the Italian Village, a downtown eatery frequented by students. He was with Stacey Bean and her boyfriend, James Davis.

They walked into the Lions Lounge, a lobby area named for the two statues of crouched lions that stood near the entrance. About 20 students were in the lounge, sitting in sofas and chairs or passing through on the way to class.

Sensing movement behind him, Rattan glanced over his left shoulder and saw Odighizuwa standing next to him. It appeared he had just come down the stairs that led to Sutin’s office.

“I looked at him, and he just nodded his head at me,” Rattan said.

It was only after Odighizuwa walked past him that Rattan realized he had a gun. “I didn’t think it was a real gun at first,” he said.

Odighizuwa walked up to the couch where students Angela Dales, Rebecca Brown and Madeline Short were sitting.

Standing about five feet from the women, Odighizuwa opened fire, Rattan said.

“Run! Run!” panicked students yelled. Rattan fled out a side door and ran behind the library, next to the school’s main building.

Rose Hurley, director of career services, was in her first-floor office adjacent to the lounge talking to two students when they heard the shots.

One of the students, Peter Tsahiridis, got up, closed the office door and locked it. The trio huddled together, trying to figure out what to do. When the commotion in the lounge stopped, they ventured out.

In the doorway of the career services office lay Dales. Blood was pouring from her neck. Tsahiridis tried to help.

Short was lying nearby. The bullet had entered her back, ripping through her abdomen and liver.

Bean was also down, bleeding from the chest.

Brown, despite being shot in the abdomen, had been able to run to the library.

Outside, Mikael Gross was walking back from lunch with a group of friends when they heard a gunshot.

It seemed to have come from the second floor. The sound was as if something had hit tin, followed by a whizzing noise. Later, he would learn that it was the bullet that went through Sutin’s window.

But then, his focus was on the end of the building, where students were pouring out of the entrance to the Lions Lounge.

“Peter O’s got a gun! Run!” someone yelled.

Odighizuwa was known on campus simply as “Peter O” because most people could not pronounce his last name. The Nigerian immigrant spoke with a heavy accent that made him hard to understand - something that may have contributed to his sense of alienation on the campus. As students heard the news, many recalled the deep anger that Odighizuwa harbored.

“You never knew with him,” Rattan said.

Students were scattering. Third-year student Ted Besen crept along the side of the building toward Odighizuwa, who had just come outside from the lounge. Gross sprinted for his car, about 100 yards away, and retrieved a bulletproof vest and a 9 mm handgun. Back home in North Carolina, he’s an officer with the Grifton Police Department.

He ran back, gun in hand.

By then, Odighizuwa had placed his gun and a clip on a light fixture about four feet off the ground and put his hands in the air. He was yelling something unintelligible to the students, Besen said. Besen, a former Marine and Wilmington, N.C., police officer, told him to get onto the ground.

Besen had heard shots on the second floor while waiting for a class to start. He and fellow student Tracy Bridges, another former police officer, had ushered students down the back stairs to safety before Besen went to his car to get his own gun.

Now, outside the Lions Lounge, Besen was taking a punch on the jaw from Odighizuwa. As the two wrestled, third-year student Todd Ross ran up and tackled Odighizuwa in the legs, hard. All three went down.

More students had reached the scene, helping hold Odighizuwa. Bridges sat on him. Gross ran back to his car to get handcuffs.

Before he did so, he heard Odighizuwa muttering: “I had to do it. I didn’t know what else to do. I had nowhere else to go.”

Handcuffed, Odighizuwa lay outside the building while people rushed into the lounge to help the wounded. A Buchanan County sheriff’s deputy showed up and put the suspect into his car.

Ambulances were nowhere to be seen.

But inside the lounge, a rescue was unfolding.

Melissa McCall-Burton had just returned from the nearby Subway for her 1:30 p.m. class when she learned what happened. The former emergency room nurse took her medical bag from her car and ran into the lounge.

The first victim McCall-Burton saw was Dales, lying in the career services office doorway. Right after being shot, Dales had been talking, according to Besen. But as McCall-Burton worked on Dales, she went into cardiac arrest. McCall-Burton was performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation when Dr. Jack Briggs, nurse practitioner Susan Looney and registered nurse Carol Breeding arrived.

Briggs had been in his office, just a few miles down the road, when an announcement came over the speaker system: “Dr. Briggs, pick up the phone, stat!”

It was Hurley, still holed up in the career services office. She knew Briggs had a background in emergency medicine and wasn’t far away. And Briggs knew that a state police helicopter was waiting at Buchanan General Hospital to take one of his patients to Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn. He called for it to be held.

Then he rushed from his office, his nurses in tow.

In the lounge, Looney took over Dales’ care. The others checked Short and Bean.

Briggs figured that all four injured women needed blood. But he knew it would take too long for ambulances to arrive. Both Grundy ambulances were on other calls, and other units were 20 minutes away.

The women needed to go to the hospital - immediately. So some students volunteered their own vehicles.

Stephanie Mutter backed her Toyota 4-Runner to the lobby doors. Short was put inside on a table, which just hours earlier had held coffee and snacks at the student-faculty gathering. Now, the table was one of several makeshift gurneys; the leftover food was dumped onto the floor as the bleeding women were taken out, one by one.

Students Daniel Boyd and Rob Sievers, president of the student bar association, jumped into Mutter’s vehicle with Short and made sure she didn’t fall out the open back door. Others took Brown and Bean.

Every time Mutter hit a bump, Short cried out.

“We were just glad she was talking,” Mutter said.

Honking and screaming for help, Mutter pulled up to Buchanan General Hospital, a few miles from the law school. Emergency room nurses rushed to their aid.

Dales, meanwhile, was on her way to the hospital.

The Buchanan County Sheriff’s Office had called the Grundy Funeral Home, which used to run an ambulance service and still helps police during emergencies. Funeral director T.C. Mullins sent four men with a hearse. They weren’t sure whether they were going for a patient or a corpse.

Dales, still alive, was loaded into the hearse, but died shortly after reaching the hospital. Brown, Short and Bean were taken away in two state police helicopters.

“I wish we’d gotten Angela first,” Mutter thought when she heard the woman had died.

By then, Odighizuwa was locked up. By the next morning, he had been charged with three counts of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder. Prosecutors have said they will seek a death sentence.

Now, a man who once aspired to be a lawyer must rely on one to save his life.

Laurence Hammack can be reached at

981-3239 or laurenceh@roanoke.com.

Kimberly O’Brien can be reached at

981-3334 or kimo@roanoke.com.

Lindsey Nair can be reached at

981-3349 or lindseyn@roanoke.com.

CORRECTION-DATE: January 31, 2002

Correction

The Jan. 21 story on the shooting at the Appalachian School of Law reversed the roles of two of the students involved in apprehending the suspect. The passage should read: Ted Besen had heard shots on the second floor while waiting for a class to start. He and fellow student Tracy Bridges, another former police officer, had ushered students down the back stairs to safety before Bridges went to his car to get his own gun. (library note: the story ran Jan. 20.)

/nd/tackle/gun | 054

Law School Shootings Neither …

The Washington Post

Neither of them was from Grundy, a small, struggling town in far southwest Virginia. L. Anthony Sutin was a former Justice Department official and Harvard Law School graduate from Washington. Peter Odighizuwa, born in Nigeria, was an ex-cabbie, late of Chicago.

Both Sutin and Odighizuwa came to Grundy because of the Appalachian School of Law, a start-up school in a refurbished junior high building that was intended to bring outsiders to the depressed coal-mining area. Sutin was the school’s dean, Odighizuwa a failing student.

On Wednesday, police say, Odighizuwa shot and killed Sutin, a professor and a 33-year-old student. Three other students were injured in the rampage, which apparently began when Odighizuwa received bad academic news and ended when three students—all former police officers—subdued him. “I guess a good word to describe everyone is amazed and shocked by what they’ve seen today,” said Bill Neeley, who lives in town and works in the corporate office of Food City. “You read and you hear about things like this, but you never expect it to happen here.”

Police said that Odighizuwa had a conference with a professor about his academic standing and that as he left, he told the professor to pray for him. He then walked into the office of Sutin, who had worked for the D.C. offices of Hogan & Hartson as well as the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Sutin was shot at close range, authorities said. Odighizuwa then shot professor Thomas F. Blackwell in another office, walked downstairs and opened fire in a lounge, police said. Student Angela Denise Dales was killed, and the three others injured, before students grabbed Odighizuwa.

School officials, who had previously celebrated the life that the law school breathed into the town, were left wondering what the impact of Thursday’s events would be.

“We’ll go forward as we have since this school started,” said Joseph E. Wolfe, vice chairman of the board. “It’s certainly going to be something that’s going to be ingrained in the history of the school.”

Marty Schottenheimer was fired as head coach of the Washington Redskins last Sunday, and the next day former University of Florida coach Steve Spurrier was named his successor.

History will judge the import of these decisions, but Redskins fans were not as patient.

“A shame,” bartender Carl Monaco said. “Schottenheimer should have been given more of a shot.”

“I really think he could have turned it around,” building engineer Maurice Colter said.

Most Redskins fans said Schottenheimer wasn’t given enough time by team owner Dan Snyder. Snyder fired his coach after barely a year on the job—a year in which the team started 0-5 but came back to finish 8-8.

“I think Marty is a fine coach,” Snyder said the night of the firing. “But it became clear that the Redskins and Marty had irreconcilable differences.”

Schottenheimer mentioned the differences, too, at a cordial news conference in which he took the “high road” when asked about the firing. Schottenheimer said the disagreement with Snyder came when Schottenheimer refused to give up control over which players would be on the team.

The new coach, known for being outspoken while at Florida, told reporters that he had grown up a Redskins fan and that he looked forward to coaching in Washington.

“They’re the best fans in the NFL,” said Spurrier of his new constituents. “It’s so loud there.”

Fans in Washington also said they looked forward to Spurrier’s arrival, as well as his high-flying “Fun ‘n’ Gun” offense, which holds the promise of producing more touchdowns than Schottenheimer’s cautious system.

“I think it’s terrible to have abandoned” Schottenheimer, said Donald Tyghe, a patron at Mister Days sports bar in Arlington. “But I like the idea of having an air offense in town.”

The governors of Maryland and Virginia were both preaching frugality, as projected budget shortfalls caused them to suggest that their states dip into “rainy day” funds, cut spending and consider changes in tax policy.

Mark R. Warner (D), elected to the high office in Richmond this fall, made his first speech to the Republican-dominated General Assembly on Monday. Warner said that state budgets would have to be cut and suggested he would support a referendum on a tax increase to pay for transportation in Northern Virginia.

“I would like to tell you that our commonwealth’s finances are sound—but everyone in this chamber knows that they are not,” said Warner, speaking from the dais in the state’s House of Delegates. He formally endorsed dipping into the state’s rainy day fund for $ 467 million.

In Annapolis, Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) proposed his final state budget Tuesday. Glendening also proposed tapping emergency funds, and he said the state should delay a promised income tax cut.

Some in Annapolis criticized Glendening for using what they called one-time fixes. But Glendening said it was necessary to cut into the state’s savings to maintain social services.

“When the private sector is contracting, people turn to government for help,” he said. “We are the safety net.”

A four-legged, bushy-tailed intruder turned the normally staid U.S. Supreme Court building upside down.

A fox was seen scampering past the building’s security perimeter Sunday morning before it disappeared into a basement parking garage. Because foxes can carry rabies, court officials closed the building for a few hours while they looked for the animal. No luck.

Traps—humane, of course—were set to catch the animal. Fox-hunting dogs were brought in from an unnamed Virginia hunt club. One briefly picked up the animal’s scent in the basement, but then lost it.

Staffers were warned not to approach the animal, and (warily) court operations went on.

Foxes, apparently, are common in District parks, but have been seen more frequently in urban environments in recent days. Jim Monsma, of the Washington Humane Society, said the fox at the court could be a young male looking for his own territory.

“They’re real good at hiding,” Monsma said.

A D.C. slumlord, who agreed to live in one of his decrepit buildings to avoid a jail sentence, hasn’t been spending much time there after all, police said.

A D.C. police officer, assigned to make sure that Rufus Stancil really was living in the dilapidated building at 2922 Sherman Ave. NW, dropped by one morning to find that Stancil wasn’t there. Stancil admitted that he only was in the building from midnight to 5 a.m. most days.

That wasn’t good enough for District lawyers, who asked a judge to prescribe specific hours during which Stancil had to be in the building and to require him to wear an electronic monitoring device to ensure compliance. The Office of the Corporation Counsel specifically asked for Stancil to be in the building from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. weekdays, and all day on weekends except for blocks between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Stancil’s attorney insisted that “the court cannot worsen the sentence. There is a ton of case law on that.” He did, however, say that some compromise might be worked out that would require Stancil to be in the building by 10 p.m. weekdays. Stancil’s major objection was to the weekend requirements, the lawyer said.

Stancil pleaded guilty to 70 of 429 city housing code violations. His sentence also requires that he complete a renovation plan for the property.

* A Virginia laborer pleaded guilty to bank fraud Tuesday, admitting to charges that he bilked elderly people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to documents filed in federal court, Larry Henderson befriended people with “diminished mental capacity” in Northern Virginia, and convinced them to pay him enormous sums—such as $ 9,000 to mow the lawn or $ 20,000 to trim the shrubs. Henderson could face 30 years in prison on the federal charges, in addition to the six-year state sentence he’s already serving for similar crimes.

* Prince George’s County settled a lawsuit with a man attacked by a county police dog in 1998. The victim, Andrew S. Amann, received more than 200 puncture wounds, though he lay down and surrendered. The officer involved, Cpl. Anthony Mileo, has a history of brutality complaints.

* Dogwood Elementary School in Reston reopened Monday, 14 months after it burned to the ground in a fire caused by faulty wiring. The school’s 550 students endured long bus rides to other schools while Dogwood was rebuilt.

– David A. Fahrenthold

/nd/tackle/after18 | 056

Community embraces its new law school in time of crisis

Chris Kahn
The Associated Press State & Local Wire