Appalachian School of Law Shootings

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

Tue, 22 Jan 2002

HOSPITAL RELEASES 2 SHOT IN RAMPAGE

Wire Reports
Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio)

Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital and a third student was upgraded from fair to good condition. The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales, 33, were slain in the spree. Former student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, has been charged in the attack. Police said he recently flunked out.

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Students return to law school where gunman killed three, including dean and professor

Chris Kahn
The Associated Press

Ted Besen says he had yearned to become a defense attorney, but changed his mind in the wake of the slayings of the dean, a professor and another student at the Appalachian School of Law.

“I don’t ever want to defend someone like him,” Besen said.

The former Marine and police officer was among several students who tackled former classmate Peter Odighizuwa on the school’s front lawn after last week’s shootings.

When classes resume Wednesday at the school, Besen, 37, and others said they’ll return with mixed emotions.

“You just feel violated somehow,” Besen said Tuesday at a nearby restaurant.

“I’ve been having bad dreams,” said 42-year-old Mary Kilpatrick. “I guess there’s no more security in law schools than there is any other place.”

Kilpatrick said she and about 20 other students spent most of Monday in the school lounge, scrubbing blood stains from the rug and rearranging furniture.

“It’s therapeutic being back here; it keeps my mind off of things,” Kilpatrick said.

Police say Odighizuwa shot Dean L. Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas Blackwell in their offices last Wednesday, then opened fire in the school lounge, killing student Angela Dales and injuring three others.

Odighizuwa, 43, had recently learned he’d flunked out for the second time. He’s charged with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges. Prosecutors say they will seek the death penalty.

“We’re going to have an unofficial class reunion the day he gets the chair,” said Matthew Harvey, who spent the week driving between memorial services with other students.

The school reopened Tuesday, holding a two-hour counseling session and discussing the class schedule for the rest of the semester.

Outside, faculty and students wrote good-bye messages in memorial books that will be given to victims’ families.

“I keep expecting Dean Sutin to come back,” said 22-year-old Melanie Page. “I just miss them all so much.”

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Side effects of Sept. 11?;

Marlon Manuel
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

The murder-suicide Friday at Broward Community College in South Florida was more than the third school shooting in the past week, according to a Marietta counselor and other psychologists.

The Florida shooting — coupled with Wednesday’s fatal shooting at a Virginia law school and the Tuesday shooting at a New York City high school — may indicate that pent-up stress from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may be pushing the emotionally vulnerable over the edge.

Put another way: We may be unraveling at the fringes.

The cause, though, is under scrutiny. Is Sept. 11 by itself pulling at the fabric of our nation, or was U.S. society beginning to fray before the attacks on New York and Washington?

‘One more straw’

Michael Popkin, president of Active Parent Publishers and a family counselor in Marietta, said stress is cumulative and that the Sept. 11 attacks “added a point or two to everybody.”

“It was just one more straw on the camel’s back,” Popkin said. “For people on the brink, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People are striking back instead of coping with it.”

On Friday in Davie, Fla., a man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend before killing himself at Broward Community College, authorities said.

According to student and eyewitness Joe Fazio, “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.”

In Grundy, Va., on Wednesday, 43-year-old Peter Odighizuwa, a Nigerian student facing suspension, is charged with killing a dean, a professor and a student at the Appalachian School of Law. In New York, 18-year-old Vincent Rodriguez was arrested for allegedly shooting two classmates Tuesday because he believed they harassed his girlfriend, police say.

In December, a factory worker in Goshen, Ind., shot seven co-workers, then killed himself with a 12-gauge shotgun, several hours after he had quarreled with another employee over a female co-worker, police said.

Violence not new

Even before Sept. 11, internal violence strafed America’s psyche. The horrific shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 and the deadly 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City provided grim evidence of the country’s deep anxiety long before commercial airliners became diabolical weapons of mass destruction. v

Author and researcher James Garbarino, co-director of the Family Life Development Center at Cornell University, argues that recent shootings are more indicative of the country’s cultural path before terrorism planted itself here, notwithstanding more flag-waving, talk of reordered priorities and families reconstituting themselves.

“Looking beyond the ephemeral to the core is in order,” Garbarino wrote in an e-mail in response to an interview request. “Mostly, the violent events that made the news in the last week are part of ‘business as usual’ in violent America.”

In short, talk is cheap.

“Rarely does deep and enduring social and personal change come out of such declarations and resolutions,” Garbarino wrote.

Attitudes, not behavior

For instance, the heroic treatment of firefighters and police officers has not created a surge in applications nationwide. After the attacks, military recruiters reported more people interested in joining the service. Ultimately, however, it has not coincided with an increase in the number of contracts signed, a Defense Department spokesman said.

Researcher Robert Putnam, who has been cataloging the country’s civic disengagement (voting less, joining less, reading less, trusting less), wrote for next month’s issue of the American Prospect that “though the immediate effect of the attacks was clearly devastating, most Americans’ personal lives returned to normal relatively quickly.”

“Generally speaking,” Putnam wrote, “attitudes [such as trust and concern] have shifted more than behavior has. Will behavior follow attitudes? It’s an important question. And if the answer is no, then the blossom of civic-mindedness after Sept. 11 may be short-lived.”

‘Desk rage’ up at work

Still, there’s stress out there. The al-Qaida threat remains. Osama bin Laden’s still out there — or not, who knows? The markets haven’t gotten traction and layoffs are real.

At work, so-called “desk rage” is popping up because of the Sept. 11-induced recession, according to a study by Integra Realty Resources, a New York real estate advisory and appraisal firm.

“Stress over America’s slowing economy is showing up in the workplace,” Integra President Sean Hutchinson said. The survey reports that 10 percent of employees say they work in an atmosphere where physical violence has occurred because of stress, with 42 percent saying yelling and verbal abuse occurs in their workplace.

The ingredients are in place for more drug use, alcohol abuse and cigarette smoking, said George Mason University counseling expert Fred Bemak. Under the surface of everything we do is the threat of more terrorism — even if a Jan. 7-9 Gallup poll shows fewer Americans fear terrorism than they did just two months ago, Bemak said.

“We’re one event away from having psychological and social and family chaos.”

For children and adolescents, the uncertainty is particularly perplexing because some see their parents unable to cope, Bemak said.

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SPAT OVER GAS MONEY LEAVES HITCHHIKER DEAD

The Augusta Chronicle (Georgia)

A white hitchhiker was run over by a black man who wanted him to pay gas money, authorities said Monday.

Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles, who investigated the 1998 case of James Byrd Jr. - a black man dragged to death by three white men - said race or revenge does not appear to be behind Friday’s killing.

Ken Bimbo Tillery, 44, went to a Jasper trailer park Friday night and asked for a ride home. Blake Little, 34, and three others offered him a lift in Mr. Little’s pickup after agreeing on a price of $5 for gas, police said.

The price increased to $50 by the time they arrived in Pineland, 130 miles northeast of Houston, police said. Mr. Tillery fled and was chased.

“A couple of the guys jump him and beat up on him, then the driver of the car runs over the guy,” Sheriff Rowles said.

Mr. Little was arrested Sunday on murder charges. The sheriff said all the men were suspected of drinking and smoking crack cocaine.

Two shot at law school released from hospital

GRUNDY, Va. -

Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital.

Rebecca Brown, 38, and Martha Madeline Short, 37, were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., hospital spokeswoman Amy Stevens said.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, was upgraded from fair to good condition.

School Dean L. Anthony Sutin, professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales, 33, were slain in the spree. Student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, has been charged.

Schizophrenic killer flees with young son

LITTLE ROCK -

Police and relatives searched Monday for a convicted killer diagnosed with schizophrenia and his 5-year-old son.

Police said Monday they have few leads on the whereabouts of Louis Peyton Sr., 35, of Maumelle, and his son Louis Peyton Jr., who goes by Luke.

Maumelle Police Chief Sam Williams said the father apparently picked up the boy from school Wednesday afternoon.

The boy’s mother, Amber Roach, of Ozark, has not lived with him and his father for the past few years. Luke and his father live with the boy’s grandfather, who said he was afraid his son’s medication was no longer working because a doctor told him it wears off after two days.

- Edited from wire reports

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News briefs

Charleston Daily Mail (West Virginia)

Gunman attacks Israeli civilians

JERUSALEM - A gunman opened fire on Israelis waiting for a bus on a busy, rain-slick downtown street this afternoon, wounding at least 20 people before he was shot dead by police, officials said. v

Palestinian security sources said the gunman was Saeed Ramadan, a member of the Al Aqsa Brigades, which is linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Israeli authorities said they held Arafat and the Palestinian Authority responsible and a strong Israel response was likely.

A source in the Al Aqsa Brigades said the attack was revenge for the killing - widely attributed to Israel - of the group’s leader, Raed Karmi, in the West Bank town of Tulkarem.

The shooting came hours after Israeli commandos killed four members of the militant Islamic group Hamas in a raid on their hideout and explosives lab in Nablus in the West Bank. The Islamic militant group said in a leaflet it would respond with an “all-out war” against Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Program seeking cure for anthrax

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A coalition of scientists and technology companies is asking people to use their computers’ extra processing power to help search for a cure for anthrax.

The project follows similar efforts to hunt for extraterrestrial life and a cure for cancer. It is being launched today to help Oxford University researchers find ways to treat anthrax that can no longer be treated by antibiotics.

The project is based on the premise that the average personal computer uses between 13 percent and 18 percent of its processing power at any given time.

Participants download a screen-saver that runs whenever their computers have resources to spare, and uses that power to perform computations for the project.

The screen-saver can be downloaded at http://www.intel.com/cure.

Students hurt in shooting released

GRUNDY, Va. - Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital.

Rebecca Brown, 38, and Martha Madeline Short, 37, were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., said hospital spokeswoman Amy Stevens.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, was upgraded from fair to good condition.

The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales, 33, were slain in the spree.

Student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

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Latest murders highlight rise in campus crime

Mark Clayton
Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)

Violent crime on college campuses has taken a disturbing jump, forcing many schools to make safety a concern along with grade inflation and the food in dining halls.

Even before a recent spate of shootings, new statistics showed that the murder rate on college campuses almost doubled in 2000. Burglary and drug arrests were up as well.

Even so, the 20 people killed that year represented a level close to the annual average for the past decade. The number was accentuated by a low murder rate in 1999 - 11.

Although the latest figures are a year old, they represent some of the most comprehensive statistics ever released on crime on American colleges and universities. They come at a time when campus safety has resurfaced as a national concern.

Within the past week, shootings on two campuses have left five dead - three at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., and two in a murder-suicide at Broward Community College near Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“People forget that until 10 years ago people didn’t think crime happened on college campuses - an image that schools certainly wanted to project,” says S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus, a nonprofit group that promotes university safety.

The most recent statistics on campus crime, released Friday, come from the US Department of Education (DOE). Though figures for 2001 won’t be out until next January, the 2000 numbers give a sharper picture of violence on college greens and in dorms - and offer administrators and parents reason for both concern and consolation.

Safe still

The overriding observation from the latest numbers might be how safe schools remain. Despite the increase in the homicide rate, authorities point out that there were about .14 on-campus murders per 100,000 students compared with a murder rate in the general population of about 5.5 per 100,000 people.

“One murder is too many, but looked at in comparison to national crime data, college campuses are relatively safe places,” says David Bergeron, chief of policy and budget development at DOE’s office of post-secondary education.

While murders loom large, other categories of campus crime are raising concern, too. Burglary, for instance, rose about 3 percent and arson was up 9 percent between 1999 and 2000. Liquor arrests grew 4 percent while drug arrests grew 10 percent.

Each year, colleges are required to release statistics on crime as a result of the Clery Act, passed by Congress 11 years ago. Until recently, however, the data was not collected and disseminated by the federal government.

Changes to the reporting act in 1998 required DOE to start doing so in 2000. Mr. Bergeron says 6,270 institutions reported their data this year (available on the department’s website at www.ope.ed.gov/security).

Some of this year’s biggest increases may not be due to worsening crime, but simply better reporting and tougher enforcement on campus. That’s probably the case, for instance, with liquor and drug arrests, according to Mr. Carter.

Yet private, nonprofit four-year schools - normally considered sanctuaries of security - do have some reasons for concern.

Take robberies and burglaries. Even though the increase and overall number of them was small, the jump was sharper at private four-year schools.

Robberies on those campuses grew from 501 in 1998 to 581 in 2000 - a 16 percent increase. Burglaries went up a similar amount.

“The overall numbers are small,” says Mr. Bergeron. “But when we looked at it year after year it raised concerns that students at those institutions may be being identified for their potential as easy money.”

Assaults have been rising at private schools as well. While the number of aggravated assaults at all institutions dropped about 5 percent, private four-year schools saw an 8 percent increase.

What crimes are down

Still, there was some good news in all the numbers. Manslaughter and forcible sex offenses were about the same or down slightly from the year before.

All categories of hate crimes were mostly unchanged and at fairly low levels. Illegal weapons possession arrests dropped about 16 percent, and auto theft fell as well.

Many of these numbers, however, remain difficult to verify. Carter, for instance, calls the sex-offense figures, which have remained steady since 1998, “ridiculously low” when compared with private victimization studies.

“We’re still working on getting accurate, stabilized crime statistics,” he says. “This is the second year ever for having them collected by the federal government. We’ve seen some dramatic improvements, but it’s still somewhat early.”

In a bid to prevent bad publicity, schools still play down crimes by disregarding reports, miscoding files, or even refusing to maintain a public crime log, Carter and others say. Forcible sex offenses, for instance, are sensitive and still underreported - particularly at smaller schools, according to Carter.

By contrast, larger state universities seem to be reporting more consistently in the past. “Most four-year state universities are not having the same types of shenanigans,” he says.

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TWO WOUNDED LAW STUDENTS RELEASED

Associated Press
Daily Press (Newport News, VA)

Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital.

Rebecca Brown, 38, of Roanoke, and Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Clintwood, were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., said hospital spokeswoman Amy Stevens.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, of Paducah, Ky., was upgraded from fair to good condition.

Stevens said all three were expected to make a full recovery.

The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales were slain in the shooting spree.

Student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, a native of Nigeria, is charged with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons counts in the shootings.

Police said Odighizuwa had recently flunked out of school.

The private law school, which opened five years ago in a renovated junior high school, has an enrollment of about 200 students.

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IN BRIEF

Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee)

Two students released from hospital

KINGSPORT - Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, of Paducah, Ky., was upgraded from fair to good condition.

Stevens said all three were expected to make a full recovery.

The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales were slain in the shooting spree.

Student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, a native of Nigeria, is charged with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons counts in the shootings. Police said Odighizuwa had recently flunked out of school.

The private law school, which opened five years ago in a renovated junior high school, has an enrollment of about 200 students.

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TWO LEXINGTON MEN DIE IN I-75 ACCIDENT;

Wire Reports
Lexington Herald Leader (Kentucky)

Two Lexington men were killed yesterday morning when the vehicle in which they were riding spun out of control on Interstate 75 and was hit by a tractor-trailer. At 2:50 a.m., a Geo Tracker attempted to merge onto I-75 at the Corinth interchange when the driver lost control and spun into the path of the tractor-trailer. The driver, Ty L. Cruse, 24, and a passenger in the back seat, John R. Wilkinson, 25, both of Lexington, were pronounced dead at the scene. A front-seat passenger, Adel S. Rayan, of Lexington, was taken to the University of Cincinnati Hospital. The driver of the tractor-trailer was not injured. Police are still investigating. Kentucky State Police said the front-seat occupants were wearing seat belts. Investigators do not know whether alcohol was a factor.

Grundy, Va.

2 law school shooting victims released: Two victims injured in a shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., last week were released from the hospital on Sunday. Rebecca Brown, 38, of Roanoke, Va., and Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Clintwood, Va., were discharged from the Wellmont-Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport. A third victim, Stacey Beans, 22, of Paducah, has been upgraded to good condition at the Wellmont-Bristol Regional Medical Center. Beans, a graduate of Berea College, is expected to make a full recovery. Three others—the school’s dean, a professor and another student—were killed in the shooting. Peter Odighizuwa, a former student who had flunked out, has been charged with murder and other offenses.

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FTC TO TARGET TELEMARKETERS

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)

WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission plans to propose today new rules for reducing the annoyance of unwanted telephone solicitations as it begins to push for the establishment of a national “do-not-call” registry.

With a registry, people could make a single call to get their names removed from many telemarketing lists. The agency is also expected to propose that telemarketers be barred from blocking any identifying information from caller-ID equipment so people could know who is calling.

If approved, the rules could be in place in a year. But first they would be subject to public comment, and the Direct Marketing Association has signaled its strong opposition.

FTC Chairman Timothy Muris says he envisions a toll-free number that people could call to opt out of solicitation lists.

Ex-con killer, son, missing

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Police and relatives searched yesterday for a convicted killer diagnosed with schizophrenia and his 5-year-old son.

Maumelle Police Chief Sam Williams said Louis Peyton Sr., 35, of Maumelle apparently picked up his son, Louis Peyton Jr., who goes by Luke, from school Wednesday afternoon and neither has been seen since.

The boy’s mother, Amber Roach of Ozark, has not lived with him and his father for the last few years. The boy and his father live with Fred Peyton, the boy’s grandfather and Louis Peyton Sr.’s father.

In 1989, Louis Peyton was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of a friend. He served two years of a 10-year sentence before he was paroled to a mental health facility. Psychiatric evaluations after the killing led to his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Least-affordable housing

SANTA CRUZ, Calif.—San Francisco no longer tops the list for least-affordable housing in the nation, a distinction that now falls an hour and a half to the south to Santa Cruz.

That result comes from the National Association of Home Builders, which compiles the list each year by comparing family incomes and home prices for metropolitan areas around the country. The latest survey is based on third-quarter numbers for 2001.

The Santa Cruz metro area’s median income is $65,000, and the median home price is $420,000, up $5,000 from the previous quarterly survey.

San Francisco dropped to second, as its median home price fell $10,000 to $520,000, still the most expensive median home price in the country.

In fact, nine of the 10 least-affordable markets in the nation are in California.

Rampage victims recover

GRUNDY, Va.—Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week that left three people dead have been released from a hospital.

Rebecca Brown, 38, and Martha Madeline Short, 37, were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., said hospital spokeswoman Amy Stevens.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, was upgraded from fair to good condition.

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2 OF 3 HURT IN RAMPAGE DISCHARGED

Rex Bowman
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)

Two of the three students wounded last week in a shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy have been discharged from the hospital.

Rebecca Claire Brown, 38, of Roanoke, and Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Grundy, were released from Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., on Sunday, a hospital spokeswoman said yesterday.

The third wounded student, Stacey Beans, 22, of Paducah, Ky., remains at Bristol Regional Medical Center in fair condition, according to hospital officials.

Brown was shot in the abdomen and arm, Short was shot in the back, and Beans, initially identified by authorities as Stacy Bean of Berea, Ky., was shot in the chest.

All are expected to recover.

The three women were on the first floor of the law school last Wednesday when a gunman shot them. Three other people - the law school’s dean, a professor and a student - were killed in the shooting rampage.

A student who had been dismissed for poor grades has been charged with three counts of capital murder and three counts of attempted capital murder.

The law school, closed since the shootings, is scheduled to reopen today when the faculty, staff and students gather for a “town hall” meeting to discuss plans for the remainder of the semester.

Regular classes will resume tomorrow.

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HOSPITAL RELEASES 2 SHOOTING VICTIMS

Shawna Morrison
Roanoke Times & World News (Roanoke, VA)

Two women who were injured in Wednesday’s shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy have been released from the hospital, and a third victim’s condition has been upgraded, officials said.

Rebecca Clair Brown of Roanoke and Martha Madeline Short of Clintwood were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., spokeswoman Amy Stevens said.

Brown, 38, spent many years working as a licensed respiratory therapist before entering law school last year. Short, 37, earned a master’s degree in urban planning from Virginia Tech and worked for the Mount Rogers Planning District Commission in Marion. She later spent six years as a grants writer for the town of Wytheville.

Stacey Bean, 22, of Paducah, Ky., has been upgraded to good condition at Wellmont Bristol Regional Medical Center.

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Et cetera

The Seattle Times

Two students wounded in a shooting rampage last week at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., have been released from a hospital. A third student was upgraded from fair to good condition.

Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners yesterday that an electronic ear implant has partially restored his hearing. Limbaugh went deaf last year because of an autoimmune inner-ear disease.

People

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is out of office, but he won’t be leaving the public stage soon. His first book, focusing on management principles, is due out this summer, and he’s scheduled to appear in a Super Bowl television ad thanking Americans for helping New York after the terrorist attacks.

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Take action to end school violence

Bob Warring
University Wire

Lake Worth, Fla. Deming, N.M. Mount Morris Township, Mich. Does anyone know what these American towns have in common?

You should.

Each was the site of school gun violence that resulted in a loss of life during the past three years.

Who really cares?

You should.

The recent tragedy at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., should sicken and frighten us all. A dean, a professor and a student are dead and three others are wounded after a suspended student opened fire there with a semiautomatic handgun last Wednesday.

Does it need to be said that this incident could just as easily have happened at the University of Pennsylvania? Surely, with our Ivy League snobbery, we understand that such a tragedy, if anything, is more likely at a place like Penn: “If a student at the Appalachian School of Law could care so much about his education, clearly a Penn student…”

Nonetheless, what’s even more sickening and frightening is the way in which we have simply come to accept gun violence—including and especially gun violence at schools—as a part of modern American society. Columbine shocked us, both in its scope and its efficiency. But since then, school shootings seem prosaic. Like a bad storm, we expect to get one every few months. Then—like after a bad storm—we clean up the mess and forget about it.

Does anyone remember the names of three California towns—Oxnard, Santee and El Cajon? These were some of the bad storms of 2001.

I will admit that in my position it’s very easy to paint oneself as the crusading moralist, blasting one’s peers for their contemptible apathy. No doubt most of you are apathetic, and that is contemptible, but to be perfectly honest I’m not much for crusading or morality. Adherence to either is much less glamorous in practice than in thought.

But gun violence is an issue important enough to demand the attention and energy of everyone—including the apathetic. We are all aware of the facts. “A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than it is to be used against an intruder.” “On average, 10 children a day are killed in the US by guns.” And my personal favorite: “57 percent of handguns are stored unlocked, and 55 percent are kept loaded. 30 percent of handgun owners keep their guns unlocked and loaded.”

Many of us are cognizant of the “American cowboy” image abroad, too. In 1996, there were 9,390 handgun deaths in the U.S., compared to only 30 in Great Britain, 15 in Japan and two in New Zealand.

Some of us might even know that studies show a strong correlation between guns and the incidence of suicide and domestic abuse.

Has there ever before been such an extensive body of incontrovertible evidence or a people so reluctant to take action?

Or counterarguments so stupid?

I’ve seen some strange headlines the past week and a half: “Pres. Bush Chokes on Pretzel” and “Punxsutawney Phil a Terrorist Target?” But show me “Kung Fu Master Kills [insert any number greater than one]” or even “Knife-wielding Maniac Kills [insert any number greater than two]” and I’ll rethink. Until then, I’m decided: Guns kill people a hell of a lot better than people do.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the Constitutional argument. You show me a member of a well-regulated militia that is popularly recognized to be necessary to the security of our free state, and I would gladly vote to allow him to have his pistol or rifle for use against our government in the event that they attack us with their bombers and tanks.

The problem of gun violence in schools merely highlights a larger problem in our country’s gun laws. Right now, most states don’t even require a permit to purchase either handguns, rifles or shotguns. Nor do they mandate registration or licensing. We are so far from where we need to be.

Allowing ourselves to grow accustomed to school gun violence—and all gun violence, for that matter—will not fix this problem. It won’t just go away. Our moral outrage, if kept to ourselves, will do nothing.

Instead, Americans favoring better gun control must pledge their support for organizations, like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Anti-Gun Coalition of America, and hold state lawmakers accountable for their votes on current legislation aimed at closing the so-called “gun show loophole” that allows unlicensed gun sellers to circumvent required background checks.

Let’s stop being the silent majority.

Who really cares about gun control and the safety of our schools?

We do.

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Victim expected to return to law school this semester

The Associated Press State & Local Wire

Stacey Beans plans to be home in a couple of days to recuperate before returning later this semester to the Virginia law school where she was shot last week, her mother said.

“It’s been positive just watching her,” Bobbie Wrinkle said of her daughter who was released from Wellmont Bristol Regional Medical Center in Bristol, Tenn.

Two other students injured Rebecca Brown, 38, of Roanoke, Va., and Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Clintwood, Va., were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., said hospital spokeswoman Amy Stevens.

Beans, a 1997 Paducah Tilghman High School graduate, was shot once in the chest during a shooting rampage at Appalachian School of Law last Wednesday in Grundy, Va. The dean, a professor and a student were killed.

Beans has remained positive, her mother Bobbie Wrinkle said. “She’s been a real trouper,” she said. “I am proud of her.”

Classes at the law school are scheduled to resume this week. Beans will recuperate in Paducah before returning to school as soon as she can, Wrinkle said.

A couple of her professors who visited Beans over the weekend offered to provide tutoring if needed. Beans was one of the top students at the school, Wrinkle said. “She’s looking forward to going back to law school,” she said.

Beans still plans to do an internship in May with Circuit Judge Bill Cunningham, whose circuit includes Caldwell, Livingston, Lyon and Trigg counties.

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With mixed feelings, students return to law school

Chris Kahn
The Associated Press State & Local Wire

Ted Besen glares over the crumbs of his sandwich, still angry about the former classmate who police say killed his school’s dean, a professor and another student in a shooting that shattered the peace of this tiny coal town.

“You just feel violated somehow,” Besen, 37, said Tuesday at a restaurant near the Appalachian School of Law. The former Marine and police officer was one of several students who charged Peter Odighizuwa, tackling him on the school’s front lawn, after the shootings last week.

When classes resume Wednesday at the Appalachian School of Law, Besen and others said they’ll return with mixed emotions. For certain, they said, nothing will be the same. v

“I’ve been having bad dreams,” said Mary Kilpatrick, 42, a third-year student from Kingsport, Tenn. “I guess there’s no more security in law schools than there is any other place.”

Odighizuwa, 43, is accused of gunning down Dean L. Anthony Sutin and Professor Thomas F. Blackwell, 41, in their offices last Wednesday, and of opening fire in the school lounge, killing Angela Dales, 33, and injuring three others, police said. v

Odighizuwa, a former teacher from Dayton, Ohio, had recently learned he’d flunked out of school for the second time. v

Authorities have charged him with three counts of capital murder, three counts of attempted capital murder and six weapons charges. Prosecutor Sheila Tolliver is seeking the death penalty.

“We’re going to have an unofficial class reunion the day he gets the chair,” said Matthew Harvey, 24, who spent the week driving between memorial services with other students.

Kilpatrick said she and about 20 other students spent most of Monday in the school lounge, scrubbing out blood stains in the rug and rearranging furniture.

“It’s therapeutic being back here; it keeps my mind off of things,” Kilpatrick said. v

The school reopened on Tuesday, holding a two-hour counseling session and discussing the class schedule for the rest of the semester. President Lucius Ellsworth announced that Marquette University Professor Jeffrey Kinsler has been hired to take over Sutin’s class on constitutional law.

Kinsler, who was planning to join the law school staff in the fall, will share teaching duties with both schools this semester, Ellsworth said.

Outside, faculty and students wrote good-bye messages in memorial books that will eventually be given to the victims’ families. They stepped out on the school’s front steps and released yellow and green balloons, watching quietly as the balloons rose above the hills and disappeared into a clear blue sky.

“I keep expecting Dean Sutin to come back,” said Melanie Page, 22. “I just miss them all so much.”

Wounded students Rebecca Brown, 38, of Roanoke and Martha Madeline Short, 37, of Grundy both have been released from the hospital. Stacey Beans, 22, of Berea, Ky., was discharged from Wellmont Bristol Regional Medical Center Tuesday. All three plan to spend time with family before returning to school.

But the memories will last forever.

Besen said he can still hear the shrieks of fleeing students when gunfire first ripped through the school. His wife had applied to Appalachian Law School in hopes of also pursuing a legal education, but now it’s likely they’ll move away after he graduates in June.

Besen said he was thinking of working as a defense attorney when he applied to the Appalachian School of Law. But Odighizuwa has changed his mind.

“I don’t ever want to defend someone like him.”

/nd/tackle/after18/byline | 027

Mon, 21 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.

/nd/tackle/after18/byline | 029

Two wounded in Va. law school shooting released from hospital

The Associated Press

Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital.

Rebecca Brown, 38, and Martha Madeline Short, 37, were discharged Sunday from Wellmont Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn., said hospital spokeswoman Amy Stevens.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, was upgraded from fair to good condition.

Stevens said all three were expected to make a full recovery.

The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales, 33, were slain in the spree.

Student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, has been charged with murder and attempted murder. Police said he had recently flunked out of school.

/nd | 030

Waynesboro native recalls shooting

Dawn Linsner
The Daily News Leader (Staunton, VA)

Seidle heard gunshots

By Dawn Linsner

Staff Writer

WAYNESBORO - “Go, go, go … now!” shouted David Seidle’s classmate, bursting through the doors of the computer lab just after lunch Wednesday afternoon.

The frantic warning was the last thing the Appalachian School of Law student expected to hear after settling down at a de-stressing computer game after lunch at the McDonald’s down the street Jan. 16.

But within minutes, Seidle was rushing out of the building through a back exit and into a parking lot, where he crouched behind cars for protection.

“We heard three or four big bangs and then we kind of thought it was over, but then there were a couple more, so we kept going,” said Seidle, 23, a second-year student at the college where another student killed three people Wednesday.

“When something so foreign is happening right beside you, you just act on instinct.”

Seidle, a Waynesboro native, was in disbelief when he learned that his professor, Thomas Blackwell; L. Anthony Sutin, dean; and classmate, Angela Dales, were slain in the rampage.

“Everybody knows everybody here … and we pretty much get along despite our differing political views,” he said.

According to the Associated Press, former student Peter Odighizuwa opened fire, killing three and injuring three other students after his notice of his dismissal from the school.

“Peter O,” as he was known to classmates, was being held in the Buchanan County Jail on three counts of capital murder and three counts of the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

When Seidle’s parents got his phone message about the incident, they made the five-hour drive to meet Seidle and his friends in Grundy.

After four days of candlelight vigils, memorial services and lots of talking, Seidle said he and his close-knit second family of 170 students are ready to hear definitive news about the continuance of classes - both Blackwell and Sutin were teaching this semester - and safety at the school.

“They have really pulled together in this tiny town with only one street and a small school,” said Seidle’s mother, Martha.

The tragedy rocked the intimate school and small town more than it might have a large university, Martha Seidle said. The perpetrator wrote occasionally for the underground student newspaper that her son co-edits.

“He’s been to a few parties here, and I used to sit behind him in some classes,” Seidle said.

He fears that some of his classmates and friends will leave the school because of the incident but hopes they won’t because they are all each others’ support system.

“I’m confident that we’ll bounce back from this and that it won’t mean the end of the school,” he said.

Gradual Return

n Appalachian School of Law will reopen Tuesday, when staff, students and community members meet to discuss coping strategies for the rest of the year.

n Regular classes will resume for the 170-person student body Wednesday.

Inside

n Community embraces law school.

Page A3 A

The Associated Press

The hallways of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy were deserted Friday afternoon.

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APPALACHIAN LAW DEAN REMEMBERED FOR HIS WIT

Associated Press
Daily Press (Newport News, VA)

Friends and colleagues said they will remember the dean of the Appalachian School of Law for being a brilliant lawyer, but the fondest memories, they said, will be of his wit.

L. Anthony Sutin, 42, was one of three people shot to death Wednesday by a disgruntled student at the small law school in the mountains of western Virginia. v

“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, a former Harvard Law School roommate and one of about 500 people who attended a private memorial service Sunday afternoon in an auditorium at Grundy High School. “He was trying to help the sons and grandsons of coal miners.”

Sutin, a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law School, left a position at the U.S. Department of Justice to help start the fledgling school to ease a shortage of lawyers in the region and to foster economic renewal in Appalachia.

Former Attorney General Janet Reno said Sutin had a knack for lightening intense moments with his humor.

“Tony could make me laugh at the tensest of moments,” she said in a letter read at the memorial service. “He could make me smile in the saddest. And he knew just which to do and when to do it.”

Sutin held several positions in the Justice Department between 1994 and 1999. He first founded and served as deputy director of the Community Oriented Policing Services, which was created to carry out former President Clinton’s effort to put 100,000 more officers on the streets.

He was serving as assistant attorney general for legislative affairs when he left the Justice Department.

/nd | 033

KILLINGS ROCK PEACEFUL TOWN

William Turner
Winston-Salem Journal (Winston Salem, NC)

Peter Odighizuwa left his impoverished homeland of Nigeria nearly 20 years ago, seeking, like others before him, the American Dream.

Two years ago, he found his way from Chicago to the coalfields of southwest Virginia. His purpose was to attend the Appalachian School of Law, founded by people who envisioned a need for a center of learning and a way to bring economic development into this impoverished region.

Since its founding in 1994, the tiny law school in a former junior high school has become a magnet, drawing to its two-building campus an unusually diverse mix of faculty and students, most outsiders from the coal country. Odighizuwa was one of about 200 students, being led into the legal profession through a curriculum that emphasized community service and conflict resolution. Odighizuwa shattered that dream last Wednesday when he shot and killed three, including the law school’s dean, and wounded three others in a tragedy that left this community and law school reeling, asking why, and wondering about their future.

Grundy is a tiny town of about 1,300 tucked into the razor-back hills of southwest Virginia. It is hard to get to, and hard to forget.

Zeke Jackson, a second-year student and president of the law school’s Black Law Students Association, said: “Peter was welcomed here, like the rest of us, with open arms by people who go out of their way to help us - this law school and town embraced Peter and his family because they were strapped, maybe more than most of us.

“This is a second-chance school, with a first-class faculty, and the people around here take to you, once they know you’re a student here. This whole thing is a real setback for everybody. If only I had known he was that far out, I would have done something,” Jackson said.

Odighizuwa and his wife and children were known throughout the town. He was called “Peter O.” He worked at the Food City, and his wife worked at the local hospital.

Those who share the law school’s dream are trying to figure out what went wrong. James Wayne Childress, a lawyer and graduate of the law school’s first class, said, “This calamity runs against the thread of our basic mission, which stresses how the law is an instrument for alternative conflict resolution.”

Childress described himself as “a country lawyer,” and he is a member of the school’s Alumni Association board. Like others involved with the school, he worries that the shooting will harm the school’s reputation and efforts to help the local economy, which “was just getting beyond growing pains.”

Sue Ella Kobak, a local lawyer who defends indigent clients, said that the tragedy “reinforces the image of Appalachia as a violent place.”

To her, “the bigger picture is more important, the lesson to be learned from this, how law schools, everywhere, put an inordinate amount of competitive pressure on students.”

Odighizuwa is said to have been disgruntled because he had been expelled from the law school for bad grades.

Odighizuwa is black, his victims white. But most students said that race wasn’t a factor in the shootings.

Kenneth Brown, a first-year student and graduate of N.C. Central University in Durham, said: “I came here thinking this was hood country, as in the hoods the KKK wears, but I have found this to be a most welcoming place. There is nothing racial about the fact that all of the victims of Peter’s crime were white. This is just another, the latest human tragedy, only magnified by where it took place.”

At a memorial service last week, mourners started with a prayer, read aloud in unison: “Almighty God. Give us all new life, new laughter, new awareness of the beauty of life. Raise us up, as images of hope to the despairing, and bring us to a softness in a world hardened by evil.”

Later that day, Childress put the prayer in simpler terms, more in keeping with the humble surroundings of Grundy and its little law school.

“When the fan blades get cleaned off and things cool down,” he said, “we’re going to be a stronger and better law school and community because of this.”

/nd | 037

Two wounded released from hospital

The Associated Press State & Local Wire

Two students wounded in a shooting rampage at the Appalachian School of Law last week have been released from a hospital.

A third student, Stacey Beans, 22, of Paducah, Ky., was upgraded from fair to good condition.

Stevens said all three were expected to make a full recovery.

The school’s dean, L. Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell and student Angela Dales were slain in the shooting spree.

The private law school, which opened five years ago in a renovated junior high school, has an enrollment of about 200 students.

/nd | 039

Sun, 20 Jan 2002

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