Filler: A campus shooting long before colleges had 'threat assessment' teams

In the wake of the Colorado theater massacre, a debate has begun raging on whether the University of Colorado’s “threat assessment team” failed in not stopping alleged shooter James E. Holmes.

But it’s the fact that universities even have to have threat assessment teams to sniff out such issues that makes us feel we’ve catapulted into some sort of violent, dystopian fantasy world.

Several universities established such groups after the killing of 32 people at Virginia Tech five years ago. That wasn’t the first violent college rampage, but it’s become the standard by which others are measured, and it was the first that was the subject of a modern media-social media extravaganza.

Before that, the most infamous campus kill spree was when Charles Whitman killed 14 people with a sniper rifle from the bell tower at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. In between there was a rampage at my college, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, in Great Barrington, Mass., where student Wayne Lo killed a student and a professor and wounded three more students and a security guard with an SKS rifle in 1992.

I attended Simon’s Rock from 1987-89. Lo brought his madness down on the mostly idyllic campus on Dec. 14, 1992. I didn’t know the students killed or injured. I did know the professor, Ñacuñán Sáez, a beloved figure on campus who joyfully jousted with me whenever our political ideas clashed, which was whenever we spoke.

Simon's Rock typically had about 300 students (more than 400 today), so these killings were magnified in scope by the tight-knit nature of the student body and alumni.

The way Lo’s attack went down is, through the prism of later experience, extraordinary.
He was an outsider, an outcast even, from the first month of freshman year. At one of the most liberal campuses on the universe he espoused fascist ideas and wrote a paper claiming that the solution to AIDS was the segregation of homosexuals.

On the morning of Dec. 13, a campus employee sorting mail saw a package for Lo  from a weapons company. She opened it and found 7.62 mm ammunition, but the package was closed and delivered to him. Already, we’ve entered the world of the unimaginable.

Lo was allowed to have the ammo after he claimed it was a present for his father. A later search of his room by the residence director turned up neither a gun nor that ammo. That night an anonymous caller told school officials Lo was going to kill the residence director.

She and her family went to stay at another school official’s home that night, and a dean was called and told to locate Lo, but nothing came of it, and police were never notified.
The following morning, Lo took a taxi to Dave’s Sporting Goods and bought an SKS semi-automatic rifle. That night he started shooting. When authorities showed up on the scene he quietly surrendered. He is now serving two life sentences in prison.

It was all big news, for a few days. To anyone connected to the Simon's Rock community, it will always be momentous.

And now we live in a world where we realize colleges need teams to assess such threats.

They won’t always work, and whether the team at the University of Colorado should have worked better isn’t going to be decided quickly, easily or unanimously. In truth, we are all still 500 or a thousand times more likely to die in a car wreck than this type of violence, and no one’s going to stop riding in cars because of it.

But such violence can touch us personally. It touched me personally. And it is, every time, so unexpected in its occurrence and stark in its horror, that we search for a way to make it all stop, and fail.