96 Minutes
On August 1, 1966, CHARLES WHITMAN climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower and started firing—and the rest, literally, is history. Here’s what happened on that fateful day, in the words of more than three dozen people who got shot, fired back, lost loved ones, saved lives by risking their own, and otherwise witnessed the nation’s first mass murder in a public place.
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“THAT WAS THE MOMENT THAT SEPARATED THE BRAVE PEOPLE FROM THE SCARED PEOPLE.”
An armored car was used to evacuate some of the victims, but many had to lie in the line of fire for an hour or longer. EMS did not exist yet; ambulances were still run by local funeral homes, and drivers did their best that afternoon to treat the injured without getting killed themselves. Many students risked their own lives to help wounded strangers like patrolman Billy Speed, who lay dying on the South Mall.
BRENDA BELL: We were holed up in Parlin Hall when Billy Speed was shot, and he was close enough that I could have thrown my pencil on him. A couple of students crept out the back door and made their way to him. A girl took off her slip and used it to try to stanch the bleeding, but he was bleeding a lot. The guy who was with her had gotten a little tin cup and filled it with water. It was just like in the cowboy movies, right? You give the guy a drink of water from a tin cup and you rip up a sheet and you try to bind the wound. That was the moment that separated the brave people from the scared people. I realized that there was no way that I was going out there to help him. I didn’t want to get shot. That was a defining moment, because I realized I was a coward.
BOB HIGLEY: Clif Drummond and I wanted to see if there was anything we could do to help. We took an interior stairwell down to the bottom floor of the Texas Union and exited on the Drag. A lot of kids were standing there, hugging that west wall pretty good. Across the street was a student sitting against a parking meter, obviously wounded, his head slumped over. We later learned his name was Paul Sonntag. Nobody was going over to help him. Drummond said something to the effect of “Let’s go get him.” We looked each other in the eye and had a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid kind of moment. I said, “Are you going first or am I?”
CLIF DRUMMOND: It looked like a very long way across that street at the time, I’ll tell you. There was essentially abject silence except for the sound of the shooting echoing off the limestone. There was zero traffic. In fact, cars were sitting out in the middle of the Drag with their doors hanging open, motors running, no one in them.
BOB HIGLEY: Drummond led out. I went one or two steps behind him, and if he moved left, I moved more to the right, and we went straight across the Drag.
CLIF DRUMMOND: We got shot at as we crossed the street, but he missed. I remember the pavement flicking, bursting, as bullets were hitting it.
BOB HIGLEY: We got across the street and lay down behind a car for cover. We worked our way up, on our bellies, to Sonntag. Drummond felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one. Sonntag’s fingers were totally blue. I pulled him in close, and his head rolled over, and that’s when I saw he had been hit right in the mouth. He must have heard the gunshot and turned to look over his shoulder at the Tower as he was walking down the Drag.
CLIF DRUMMOND: A person we didn’t know in a station wagon—someone crazier than us—came wheeling around Twenty-fourth Street and roared to a stop in front of us. He got out and opened the rear doors and pulled out a gurney. We loaded Sonntag onto that gurney, and it was really difficult because he was deadweight. The cognition kicked in right then, and I remember thinking to myself, “This is really damned serious.” We had a dead guy on our hands, and we were standing still in an open place as we loaded him in.
BOB HIGLEY: There was no zigging, no zagging to be done. We were sitting ducks. It was right then that my fear gave way to anger, just pure anger. The whole thing was so unfair. I was still thinking that Sonntag had been badly wounded, that he was capable of being resuscitated. I couldn’t have gone on if I’d thought, “Gee, we just recovered the body of a dead student.” I couldn’t allow myself to believe that this kid was dead.
NEAL SPELCE was the news director for KTBC-TV. A retired anchorman, he lives in Spicewood.
Our radio news director, Joe Roddy, went to Brackenridge Hospital and read the names off the first list of casualties. As soon as he finished, Paul Bolton, who was back in the newsroom, grabbed the microphone and said, “Joe, hold it.” Bolton was the very first television news anchor in Austin, a good friend of LBJ’s. He was a gruff, hard-boiled newsman, but you could hear that his voice was wavering. He said, “I think you have my grandson on there. Go over that list of names again, please.” Well, his grandson was Paul Sonntag. His full name, we later found out, was Paul Bolton Sonntag—his namesake. Joe read through the list again, and Bolton pretty much broke down in the newsroom.
“THE EMERGENCY ROOM LOOKED LIKE SOMETHING YOU’D SEE IN VIETNAM.”
Thirty-nine of Whitman’s victims were taken to the emergency room of Brackenridge Hospital in the span of ninety minutes. The first victim arrived at 12:12 p.m., and patients continued arriving at the rate of one every two minutes for the first hour.
ROBERT HEARD: I don’t remember being unloaded from the ambulance. The only thing I remember is waking up on a cot on the lower floor of Brackenridge. There was blood everywhere. The doctors and nurses were slipping as they scurried across the floor.
CAMILLE CLAY was a nursing supervisor at Brackenridge. Now retired, she lives in Austin.
The emergency room looked like something you’d see in Vietnam. I had never seen anything like it in my life, and I never want to see anything like it again.
HOWARD HUGHES was an intern at the hospital. He is a physician at the University of Texas Health Center in Austin.
The casualties came pouring in. Initially there were only ten interns, two surgical residents, and our supervisor. Many of the wounds were bleeding out quickly, so we shouted back and forth, trying to decide which patients should go to the operating rooms first and doing whatever we could to stabilize the gunshot victims. There was blood everywhere, patients in the halls, not enough operating tables or available doctors.
PATSY GERMAN was a graduate student in history. A retired teacher, she lives in Richardson.
I remember the nauseating feeling when they kept reporting the death toll on TV. We all went to the blood bank near Brackenridge, and the lines of cars went on for what seemed like miles. Kids lined up on the median to donate blood.
CAMILLE CLAY: It was a horribly hot day. And some of the kids that had been shot and had to lie out on the cement for a while had first- and second-degree burns.
HOWARD HUGHES: Many of the victims seemed to have well-placed shots through the chest, with the exception of the pregnant lady, who was shot in the abdomen.
CLAIRE JAMES: I knew immediately that I’d lost the baby. By the eighth month, your baby’s moving a lot. And after I got shot, the baby never moved.
CAMILLE CLAY: We put the victims who we believed to be deceased in one room, on the floor. You just couldn’t believe it, all those dead teenagers lying on the floor. They were shoulder to shoulder, with just enough room to step between them. We started trying to identify them. You see, they didn’t come in with their wallets and purses and things. One in particular I remember was a boy who was wearing a class ring from Austin High School that was engraved with his initials. I called the principal and asked him to pull the records for the class of 1966.
ROBERT PAPE was the hospital’s director of medical education. A retired physician, he lives in Seguin.
Doctors who were experienced in trauma started arriving at the hospital and offering to do whatever needed to be done. General practitioners, psychiatrists, dermatologists came too. Fifty-eight doctors signed the ledger in the emergency room and volunteered their help.
CAMILLE CLAY: There were a lot of hysterical people trying to get into the emergency room. Finally the police had to go outside and put up a barricade.
ROBERT HEARD: The AP sent its Austin correspondent, a reporter named Garth Jones, to my hospital room. Garth Jones couldn’t write home for money. But he faithfully took down the notes I gave him. He came to my room and he stood over against the wall, and I recounted what happened to me. The story was only about seven or eight inches long, but it ran around the world.
“THE SNIPER STARTED GOING DOWN …”
Police officer Ramiro Martinez was at home, off duty, and cooking himself a steak for lunch when he turned on the TV and saw KTBC’s noon news bulletin. He immediately called in to the police department and was told by a lieutenant to find an intersection by the university where he could work traffic. Martinez put on his uniform, jumped in his 1954 Chevrolet, and drove to campus. When he saw that there were more than enough officers directing traffic away from the university, he decided to head for the Tower.
RAMIRO MARTINEZ was a patrolman for the Austin Police Department. A retired Texas Ranger, he lives in New Braunfels.
When I reached the South Mall, I could see people hiding behind trees and hedges. There were wounded people, dead people, people whose conditions I did not know lying on the sidewalk. There was a pregnant woman who was twisting, wilting, in the hot sun. I ran as fast as I could, zigzagging toward the Tower, and somehow made it without getting shot.
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