On the Northern Virginia Community College Woodbridge campus, a student in a math class took out a high-powered rifle and shot twice at his math professor.
The teacher saw the gun, yelled for her 25 students to duck and then hit the floor herself. The student missed, put the gun down, sat on a chair in the hallway and calmly waited for police to arrest him.
Jason Michael Hamilton of Baneberry Circle in the Manassas area was charged with attempted murder…
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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Notes of a Neophyte
December 8th, 2009 at 10:39PM
Whoa! I got an emergency email at 3:55 pm informing me that the campus was closed. I don’t teach at the Woodbridge campus, but this was certainly a surprise!
December 8th, 2009 at 11:27PM
The article concludes with neighbors expressing surprise. Nobody ever expects it. The article mentions nothing about this student having a grievance with the professor. Stay safe.
December 9th, 2009 at 12:40AM
Stephen, Kerry: You both mention the surprise factor.
Maybe it’s just because I follow events like these too closely for the blog, but there are now enough of them that the math teacher at NOVA should be our model. Always be ready to hit the ground.
Especially in Virginia, where it’s insanely easy to buy guns.
As to the neighbors — If this story is like all the others, it’ll turn out that there were tons of warning signs. If this guy wasn’t a pretty well-established depressive/paranoid, I’ll eat my template.
December 9th, 2009 at 2:24AM
I agree that there probably will be warning signs. Our sociology department received a lot of help coming to terms with that. (Kazmierczak’s advisor was particularly startled when he figured out who did it.)
The article also reported that the room had a second exit. At Virginia Tech, students had access to windows, and in Cole Hall, there are two rear doors. Had this Northern Virginia room been laid out like our main classroom building, in which there is a peripheral corridor, one entrance to each room, and no windows in the room, hitting the floor would not be an option.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:57AM
I was, of course, wondering if I would have had the presence of mind to hit the floor. I don’t think of myself as an instinctual bullet-ducker, but then, I’ve had no experience with bullets. I like to think that in the same way that TV has taught me never to touch evidence at the scene of a crime or to move a dead or injured body, it’s also taught me the proper responses to a shooting spree.