If I Don’t Make It, I Love You

KAREIN EMAILS ME photos of her father, Christoph (Chris) K. Goertz. He was the leading theoretical space plasma physicist shot and killed at the University of Iowa on November 1, 1991, by a twenty-eight-year-old former graduate student. These photos are for a book I’m coediting about school shootings. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to download them because I struggle with seeing the faces of the murdered after working so closely with the families. But I remind myself I’ve already committed to the difficult task of assembling both the living and the dead’s stories.

So I move forward. Download the attached images she’s sent me. A folder zips about ten photos, some of Chris hiking out into the wilderness, some of him lecturing to a roomful of university science students, and there’s two or three happy family photos. But this photo. This one, writes Karein. I took this photo of him two days before his murder. It was the last time I saw my father alive. I fixated on Chris’s smile. He looks visibly content, perhaps secure and settled in his life. Happy. But I force myself to stop the conjecture, and consider where to place these photos in the essay Karein and I have been editing for weeks now. But I’m hesitant to start, and delay acknowledging her email (or the next round of edits on her essay).

The process of guiding people to speak their truths was isolating. At the end of every brainstorming session with a survivor, I felt powerless. Their family members were murdered violently and suddenly, and I questioned if this was all I could do to help. How will sharing their stories make an impact on schools safety? On gun sense legislation? On bringing awareness to the long-term effects of trauma on the living? I didn’t have the right to ask. My family was still alive.

A few days after receiving Karein’s email, I finally email her back, acknowledging receipt of the photos she’s sent me. It’s time to go through her photo essay and insert the images and captions.

Before I start, I text Amye, Karein sent me the photos of her father.

Oh boy, she replies.

I feel like the only girl in the world sometimes, I message her.

You’re the only one who understands what I’m going through, Amye replies.

I take a deep breath and focus on inserting the photos in her essay as we discussed. Afterward, I give myself permission to cry. I cried for Karein and her family because they live on without Chris as do the many survivors of Iowa. But I hope they will provide immeasurable amounts of hope in the aftermath of so much destruction.

LOREN KLEINMAN, EDITOR
DECEMBER 2018

The following students and staff were shot and killed at University of Iowa (not all ages are known):

T. Anne Cleary, 56, associate VP, academic affairs

Christoph K. Goertz, 47, professor of physics and astronomy

Dwight R. Nicholson, 44, chairman, physics
and astronomy department

Linhua Shan, 27, post-doctoral research investigator;
winner of the Spriestersbach Prize

Robert A. Smith, associate professor of physics and astronomy

FRAGMENTS: MEMORIES OF MY FATHER

By Karein Goertz

Karein Goertz is the daughter of Christoph K. Goertz, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa. Dr. Goertz was killed during the shooting at the University of Iowa on November 1, 1991. He was a renowned space plasma theorist, and the top in his field as noted by his colleagues.

Long before school shootings became an almost routine part of the American experience, a student with a legally purchased weapon and no prior criminal or mental health record went on a premeditated rampage through the University of Iowa, killing five, paralyzing one, and then turning the gun on himself. My father was among them. He was forty-seven years old, in the middle of his life and an illustrious career.

The author with her father Christoph K. Goertz in 1969. Photo provided by the author.

My father and I were very close: we shared the same birthday and people said I took after him. He was a role model, confidant, and mentor who supported and challenged me, talking me through problems and piercing through my self-deceptions with scientific precision. Even after leaving home, I would consult him on personal matters and his brutally honest opinion generally guided my decisions. After his death, I realized to what extent I depended on his sage advice.

I loved my father’s adventurous spirit, his inquisitive and critical mind, and his great capacity for enthusiasm. He was interested in so many things and his passion was contagious. My fondest memory is him telling stories. He was a masterful storyteller who could transform a boring highway into a monster’s endless tongue, pulling our family car into a treacherous adventure. My father was also a fabulous reader who introduced us to The Hobbit, Watership Down, and The Call of the Wild. He gave each character a unique voice. I can still hear his lisping version of Gollum in Tolkien’s trilogy. My father could be very funny, both sarcastic and goofy. He was a big Monty Python fan and came up with his own silly walks or hilarious outfits and hairdos to make us laugh. He knew how to throw a party, loved cooking and entertaining. We would often assemble in the kitchen to watch him make a bechamel sauce or his unbeatable zabaglione dessert.

Now at fifty-two, I am older than my father was when he was killed, and I have lived more than half of my life without him. In the years following his death, as I tried to forget what had happened to him, I feared forgetting him. Sure enough, he is not as present as he once was, but as a parent myself now, I find his ways coming back to me and I recognize bits of him in my own son. I know that if I ever need to summon him, Keith Jarrett’s soulful Kölner Concert recording can transport me right back to the concert hall where my father and I heard the jazz pianist play more than forty years ago. Or, I sit down at the piano myself and imagine him listening, urging me to play just one more piece.

Photo of aurora borealis, November 8, 1991. Photo taken by the author.

As close as I felt to my father, I didn’t share his fascination with science. I’m more of a humanist, but I respect the scientific approach and recognize that science is key to solving our planet’s most urgent problems. In retrospect, I regret not having listened more to his explanations of the natural world. While he described the aurora borealis, the “northern lights” he witnessed on research trips to Alaska and Norway as highly charged particles released by solar storms colliding with the earth’s atmosphere, I would envision a paintbrush sweeping across an enormous canvas.

Finally, I experienced this auroral display myself—exactly a week after the shootings and a day after the memorial service for the victims. As my mother and I were taking an evening walk down an alleyway in our neighborhood, several cawing crows drew our attention up toward a fabulous spectacle of reds and greens in the sky. Our first reflex was to laugh and to interpret this lightshow as a cosmic farewell. Undoubtedly, my father was smiling down at us, mocking us for being so superstitious.

However, I recently read that the Inuit saw a connection between the northern lights and the dead: “A narrow and dangerous pathway leads across an immense abyss to the heavenly regions. Only the spirits of those who have died a voluntary or violent death, and the Raven, have been over this pathway. The sky-dwellers light their torches to guide the feet of new arrivals. This is the light of the aurora.” To the mind of a nonscientist like myself, my father’s auroral departure was an extraordinarily kind message: he was using his scientific vocabulary of the skies to reach out to the magical thinker in me, recalling our lifelong bond of storytelling. Although I have often thought about this strange experience, I didn’t find a language for this unconscious realization until now.

Even the scientific community drew a connection and regarded the aurora over Iowa as a “fitting tribute” to colleagues who had spent years studying the phenomenon. Today, a plaque outside the so-called “Aurora Room” in the physics department is dedicated to the memory of its four victims: Christoph K. Goertz, Dwight R. Nicholson, Robert A. Smith, and Linhua Shan.

Christoph K. Goertz in Alaska, 1980.
Photographer: Captain Bull Moose.

My father was such a strong intellectual presence and accomplished in his field that following his path into the sciences would have been intimidating. Both my brother and I chose professional directions that weren’t in competition with his. My brother became an architect, whereas I pursued an academic career in language and literature, earning advanced degrees in comparative literature. I’m continuing in his footsteps as a teacher, though, and perhaps living out some of his more literary ambitions. He was always an avid, critical reader and had once considered studying film instead of physics.

The mass shooting of November 1, 1991, happened while I was in graduate school in Austin, Texas. I had just been home a week earlier for the Thanksgiving break during which my father and I had a long, difficult conversation about my studies. I was having doubts about continuing beyond a master’s degree, and he was very frustrated by my desire to give up. It was a heated discussion to be continued over the Christmas holiday which, of course, never came to be. That unfinished conversation may have been part of the reason I continued my studies; I couldn’t let him down. The experience of his murder and its psychological aftermath had a profound influence on my subsequent studies. In the years to come, as I worked toward my PhD, I became more engrossed in Holocaust literature and the study of trauma’s impact on memory. I think I found a perverse comfort in reading about life experiences that were far more traumatic and far-reaching. It put my own pain into perspective and provided a language to articulate what I was feeling. Sudden violent loss was not an anomaly, but rather an experience many have had to endure. At the same time, the intense preoccupation with this subject matter may also have prolonged the grieving process. It took me several years to complete my dissertation because, in a way, it was connected with my father’s death, and completing it would also mean moving on, which I still wasn’t ready to do at that point. One night, however, my father came to me in a dream: I was following him through ruins of a charred city, hurrying to keep up with him. I would lose sight of him whenever I stopped to type a few pages on a typewriter in my trench coat pocket and would then rush to catch up with him again. This happened several times until my father finally said, “Karein, you don’t need to follow me. Just stop and finish writing. Don’t worry, you will always find me.” I completed my dissertation a few weeks later.

Since then, I have been a full-time lecturer at the Residential College, a small liberal arts college within the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, teaching language and literature courses in German, as well as freshman writing courses and seminars on a wide range of topics that have interested me over the years—Holocaust literature, cities, the art of walking, multiculturalism, modernism, film, literary translation, Berlin, memoirs. I love teaching and often feel very connected to my students. They keep me hopeful about the future. Perhaps my father would be disappointed that I never pursued a tenure-track position with a long list of academic publications to my name, as he had, but I have preferred a more modest path.

A remembrance published in the journal Physics Today (October 1992) relates how the beginning of my father’s career coincided with new advances in the field of space plasma physics and how he quickly became “one of the world’s leading theorists” in this area. He was also senior editor of the peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Geophysical Research and a visiting scientist at different laboratories in the United States and Germany which our family experienced as a series of frequent transcontinental moves. At the time of his death, he was elected as an external scientific member of the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. He had also just accepted a directorship position at the Institut für Physik in Berlin and Potsdam, newly configured after German unification, and would have moved back to Germany had he not been killed. Over the course of almost two decades, he published more than 150 scientific articles and continues to be cited today.

I wonder sometimes if my father’s “brilliant career” made him a target and that subsequently, unconsciously, I have chosen to exist more under the radar. But then I hear my father’s voice chiding me to be more rational.

The Goertz family, 1976. Photo provided by the author.

My father was also known as an “outstanding lecturer” and “popular teacher,” and after his death, we received beautiful letters to this effect from his former students. I, of course, only knew him as a father, but growing up with him meant growing up with a born teacher who always engaged us in intellectual inquiry. When my brother and I noticed a rainbow, he would encourage us to observe and describe what we saw, and then asked us questions to usher us through an explanation of how the different colors came to be.

Now, as a mother, I catch myself trying to do the same, just not as well. My father, it seemed to us, always knew a lot about everything and had such a wonderful way of sharing it. He believed that even the most complicated of phenomena can be explained in a clear and simple manner. If you truly know a subject, you should be able to talk about it so that both a specialist and a child can understand.

I heard about the killings on NPR news as I was driving home: “Gang Lu, twenty-eight, a graduate student in physics from China, reportedly upset because he was passed over for an academic honor, opens fire in two buildings on the University of Iowa campus. Five University of Iowa employees are killed, including four members of the physics department; two other people are wounded. The student fatally shoots himself.” It was the top story on the five o’clock news and just over an hour after the shootings, so they hadn’t released the names yet. When I heard that it had taken place in the physics department at the University of Iowa and that several were dead, I experienced momentary panic, but calmed myself down with rationalizations: the department was large, I reasoned, and the chance that my father would be among the victims was more unlikely than not. I tried calling home and initially no one answered. Eventually, a stranger picked up and called for my mother, who didn’t come to the phone. I could hear a lot of people in the house and began suspecting the worst. I don’t remember who told me that my father had been killed, maybe it was my mother. When I broke down at home, my dog came and did a wonderfully primal, protective thing: she quietly lay down on top of me. Her weight eventually calmed me. Years later, when I had to put her down, I remembered that moment.

I then became extremely calm and methodical, calling the German department, where I worked as a graduate teaching assistant, letting them know that I would not be coming in the next week. Then I called the airlines to book a flight to Iowa City. When they said they would need a death certificate to warrant a special airfare rate, I told them to check the front page of next day’s newspaper. Then I called close friends, asking them to come over as soon as they could. Eventually the apartment was filled with people. I don’t remember much about what was said that night, but I remember feeling immensely soothed by these friends. They cried with me, but we also laughed. In the middle of the night, we all took a walk. It was a clear night and I felt calmed by the sky and familiar Orion. For a moment things were in perspective: no matter what happens down here, whether we feel like our world is falling apart, the stars and planets are there, unmoved and unchanged.

My time in Iowa immediately following the shooting is a blur of fragmented memories. Lots of flowers, cards, people stopping by the house. A huge memorial service organized by the university which I attended wearing my father’s oversized shoes. Seeing his body in the hospital morgue and amazed to find hardly a sign of his violent death. Touching him to comprehend what “dead” meant. It must have been much later, my brother and I going to the room where the shootings took place to search for traces. Sorting through my father’s belongings in his office, finding poems he’d written, letters, notebooks filled with mathematical formulas.

My mother, brother, and I retreated into our separate emotional orbs. We were each too wrapped up in our own shock to be able to take care of each other. My mother responded with much more anger than I did, wanting to find who was to blame for what happened and launching herself into lobbying for stricter gun laws. I vaguely remember the two of us appearing on the local news, making a statement against the easy accessibility of handguns. She organized a successful boycott against local sporting goods stores that sold handguns. My grandmother, recently widowed, had been staying with my parents at the time. She was inconsolable about losing her youngest son and went around the house asking, “Why didn’t he just kill me?” Half a year later, she committed suicide. This was something I have never really processed.

I went into counseling shortly after returning to Austin and graduate school. The sessions were immensely helpful, although I do not remember much of what went on. It was just comforting to have a safe, familiar place to talk about all of the things that were coming up inside that I didn’t understand. I often could not remember what year it was or completely phased out and the therapist helped me understand that this was okay, that my mind was taking its time to sort through thoughts and feelings, blocking things out and letting them back into my awareness slowly and incrementally. Since I will never know, I forced myself to believe that my father died immediately: no pain, just a mere instance of surprise, hardly enough time even for regret. I wondered, did he see his life “flash before his eyes” or did the bullet too quickly destroy that part of the brain that stores memories? Was the explosion inside his head enough to drown out the sound of the other shots fired?

I also thought about the killer and wondered how someone could be so filled with hatred to kill another human being. How could he convince himself that he was, in his words, “doing what he was supposed to be doing” which was “making right what was once wrong.” The idea that he spent months premeditating this murder while continuing to interact with his future victims was extremely disturbing to me.

Christoph K. Goertz giving a lecture in the 1980s. Unknown photographer.

At the time, the University of Iowa was one of the nation’s top five universities in space physics. When Gang Lu, my father’s doctoral student, went on his shooting spree, he took out three core faculty members in magnetospheric physics, thereby wiping out that part of the department. How my father’s death impacted the science community is probably best answered by people in his field, but considering that colleagues described him as “extremely innovative and imaginative” and as “one of the most outstanding space plasma theorists of our time” (Physics Today, October 1992), I can only imagine that it dealt a significant blow to the community. He helped interpret data from space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and, at the time of his death, was “pioneering an entirely new area of space plasma physics concerned with the interaction of dust with hot plasmas.” Famed professor James Van Allen, who first recruited my father to the University of Iowa in 1973, is said to have considered him his favorite theoretical collaborator.

Christoph K. Goertz in the summer of 1991,
just a few months before his death.
Photo provided by the author.

To confront these recollections again, I opened a box filled with documents I hadn’t looked at in well over twenty years: letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, scientific papers, a death certificate, my grandmother’s suicide note, program notes from the memorial service, my dream diary, the murderer’s statements, Jo Ann Beard’s story “The Fourth State of Matter” from The New Yorker. I’ve long feared this Pandora’s box with its blunt truths: “Manner of Death: Homicide. Date of Injury: 11/1/1991. Describe How Injury Occurred: Shot with .38 Caliber Revolver. Immediate Cause of Death: Gunshot Wound to Head. Signed by Johnson County Medical Examiner.”

I wasn’t sure if opening the box would unleash things I couldn’t put back in again. And although the notarized Certificate of Death filled me with a renewed feeling of dread, I was surprised by the overall sense of quiet I experienced in revisiting these remnants from what seems like so long ago. The many beautiful condolence letters I wasn’t able to fully appreciate back then have allowed me to buttress the image of my father with memories of others. I am reminded that my father did not believe in heaven or an afterlife; instead, he always said we live on in the memory of others.

SONYA ON THE IOWA SHOOTING
AND MIYA’S RECOVERY

The following was based on a phone interview between Sonya Rodolfo-Sioson, mother of Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, the only survivor of the University of Iowa mass shooting, and Loren Kleinman, editor, on Monday, July 23, 2018.

In August 1991 Miya Sioson returned from Central America. Since I had sold the house where Miya grew up, she emptied the storage space. She and her youngest brother cleaned the house and packed my effects. On August 22 Miya waved goodbye as her brother drove us to her middle brother, graduate student at UC Berkeley. We promised to attend her December graduation.

After shipping my effects, Miya returned to Iowa City. On October 29 I broke into her busy schedule by calling. This Manila native had time to say only that she took the oath of citizenship the previous day.

On Friday, November 1, a police detective rang the doorbell.

“Are you the mother of Miya Rodolfo-Sioson?”

“She doesn’t use that name! Why are you asking about her? She is 1,900 miles away!”

“She was injured.”

“Road accident?”

“Shot.”

“WHAT? They don’t shoot people in Iowa!”

I called family members and Miya’s friend. Made a reservation on the earliest flight from Oakland, California, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the next day. One brother, his wife, and daughter drove through the blizzard, arriving at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) as Miya was wheeled out of surgery. She mouthed her greetings over the endotracheal tube. The next afternoon my brother drove me from the airport to the ICU. Some Palestinian students were sitting on the hallway floor, eyes red from grief and sleeplessness. Their solidarity: “Miya is our sister,” consoled me.

The blinking instrument lights, Miya in a Stryker frame on a rota bed tilting back and forth, endotracheal tube in her neck, nick on her lower lip, upper face like her Dad’s, hit me between the eyes. As I reeled, my brother said, “Collect yourself, she can’t see you like this.”

When I bent over her, she mouthed “Mamma.”

“I’m here, sweetie.”

The next day her youngest brother was equally shocked.

Miya’s friend said she had been a caregiver for a young man whose neck was broken in a wrestling match. His mother paid caregivers from his insurance settlement. In mid-October she gave Miya a bad check before going on holiday. To meet her November rent, Miya applied to Manpower, which placed her in the UIC academic affairs office.

Ironies: Miya was safer in a war-torn area than in the ivory tower of an American university.

On Monday she became a new U.S. citizen; on Friday she became a nearly dead U.S. citizen.

Because she wasn’t paid for working with a quad, she became a quad.

After this grand finale of 1991’s disaster series, her uncle called the shooting “our personal Pinatubo.”

After Miya was upgraded from critical to serious, she was moved to the neurosurgery ward. Since the bullet hit two vertebrae in her neck, her diagnosis was C4-5 quadriplegia; no mobility below the shoulders.

The neurosurgery team coordinated the other services assigned to her care. Whenever the five-member white-coated team entered her room, I greeted them: “Ahoy, a flotilla of neurosurgeons!”

Since Miya could not press the regular call button, a “shrug” button was placed on her shoulder to pinch with her jaw to summon help. Since the button kept slipping, two friends and I took turns on the overnight watch.

The ward had a particularly rancid psychiatric nurse who accused Miya of manipulating us to socialize with her instead of getting her sleep. Her saying this to the least manipulative person on the planet, further saddened Miya and infuriated me into battle mode: I get up every morning to confound our enemies!

I told this virago that, since the ward had no reliable method for Miya to summon help when alone, her people would ensure that help. One night the respirator started to fail. As her blood oxygen fell and carbon dioxide rose, Miya’s panicked tongue click sent her watcher scurrying to the nurses’ station before calling me at the Union. Livid, I warned the ward staff that, if sloppiness undid the initial care that saved Miya’s life, her family would be glad to contact the media to give the university a second black eye!

As Thanksgiving neared, Christoph Goertz’s widow Ulrike and daughter Karein stopped in. I reported our conflict with the psychiatric nurse: her care produces psychosis. Indignant, Ulrike volunteered to contact Dean Judith Anderson, who had befriended Ulrike after Christoph’s murder. Dean Anderson supervised the medical school and teaching hospital. The next Monday the hospital staff received the Dean’s memo: Leave the Sioson family alone!

Our nemesis entered Miya’s room, barking, “You went over our heads!”

I smirked, showing a hundred teeth, “No, your attitude motivated Mrs. Goertz to report to her friend Dean Anderson. SHOO!”

Miya accepted the nursing staff’s invitation to offer input as they set her care schedule for the week. Shortly the problem of getting her released to rehab came to a head. Her doctors had declared her infection-free, but her costs had to be paid in full. The donations she received fell far short. Manpower and the University remained deadlocked. So her boyfriend resorted to their activist tactic: Call the media!

Almost overnight, Manpower acknowledged that Miya’s being shot at work in a state university qualified her for Iowa’s workers’ compensation. The insurance arm ordered a Learjet to fly Miya and me to Midway airport. We left on December 9 and caught the ambulance from Midway to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). Luckily, my brother and his wife’s condo was near the L stop opposite the Chicago Circle campus, where they were professors. We deeply appreciate their hosting me during Miya’s three-month RIC program, as well as Miya’s visiting brothers and Iowa City friends.

SONYA ON GANG LU

Though Lu’s family idolized him, he didn’t stay in touch. He began to feel that he was bamboozled to sign into the physics program. He wanted to shift to business, to stay in the U.S. to earn dollars instead of returning to China to earn yuan. His counselor’s saying that changing his major would lose him the scholarship angered him. Linhua Shan’s receiving both the Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize of $20,000 and the post-doctoral position fueled Lu’s rage. All his job applications were fruitless. Lu made a list of administrators and physicists he blamed, and applied for a gun permit in May 1991. Johnson County Sheriff Carpenter said that he denied Lu’s application because he was not a U.S. citizen. Lu applied to Iowa’s Attorney General’s office, which issued him the permit to own (not carry), “because he had no criminal record.”

After buying the .38 Taurus, this jobless man had all day to spend at the shooting range, aiming at dummies’ heads. As the summer passed, he wrote fruitless letters to the University of Iowa grievance officer and the Des Moines Register. Fed up, he awaited a Friday-afternoon opportunity to carry out his final act.

On Thursday, October 31, Lu learned that President Hunter Rawlings III would leave the next morning for Columbus, Ohio, for the Hawkeye–Buckeye football game on Saturday, November 2. Vice president of academic affairs Peter Nathan was at a regional meeting. Only the associate vice president of academic affairs/grievance officer Dr. Anne Cleary, Miya’s supervisor, was in town. As midnight neared, the frustrated Lu wrote to his elder sister: “By the time you see this letter, I will no longer be in the land of the living. You should not be sad, because I earned the PhD, and I found some companions to accompany me to the grave.”

Friday, November 1—a howling blizzard blew into Iowa City. TV news showed whited-out landscape. The weather and the “weekend mode” distracted people on campus, giving Lu the advantage of surprise.

At 3:30 p.m. Christoph Goertz, internationally renowned space-plasma physicist, convened his group’s weekly meeting in a conference room in Van Allen Hall. No one reacted when long-time attendee Lu looked in. Goertz, Lu’s major professor, sat at the table’s head, flanked by Spriestersbach winner/post-doc fellow Linhua Shan and Bob Smith, Lu’s PhD committee member. Lu ran downstairs to check on physics chair Dwight Nicholson: at his desk facing the door. GAME!

3:40 p.m.: Lu ran upstairs to the conference room and shot Goertz and Shan in the head. As Smith ducked, Lu hit his shoulder. As people scattered to call the police, Lu ran downstairs and shot Nicholson in the face, then returned to the conference room where Smith moaned, “Someone tried to kill me.” Lu administered the coup de grâce to Smith, then shot the dead Goertz and Shan again. Within five minutes he had dispatched some of the world’s best plasma-physics researchers! Since Lu’s whereabouts were unknown, police urged people including emeritus professor James Van Allen, to lock their doors. As the stopwatch in Lu’s head ticked on, he raced to complete his mission before the police arrived. He ran to Jessup Hall, where Dr. Cleary was holding a meeting. Receptionist Miya was proofing a document on the computer. Later, Miya said Lu seemed nervous as he asked for Dr. Cleary. Miya went to her, and she hesitantly preceded Miya to the counter as Miya returned to the computer. Shortly the gunshot pop triggered Miya’s reflex to rise as Lu aimed at her forehead and fingered the trigger; the bullet entered her mouth. Why did he add her to his list? A sudden yen for a female to accompany him to Hades? An extra bullet? Since Miya had no role in causing his rage, his bullet’s producing only paralysis seems fair. He exited as people ran to Dr. Cleary on the floor, hole in forehead. Someone espied Miya slumped on the floor, back against desk leg, mouth bloody. The police found Lu in a conference room, Taurus in hand, blood oozing from his temple, as he expired.

Within twelve minutes Lu ran stairs at Van Allen Hall, killed four victims, ran two blocks and up stairs at Jessup Hall, and shot two people and himself. Dr. Cleary was in a persistent vegetative state, so her brothers pulled the plug, raising the number of corpses to six.

All hail the American way!

SONYA ON LOSS AND LOVE

The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. —Lao Tzu

The year 1968 began with Miya’s birth, followed by Iowa State’s offer of a full professorship to her father. The previous August my immigrant-U.S. citizen mother had petitioned for a green card for me. We anticipated a bright future, not realizing that the universe was keeping a ledger. Our credit column had received the birth of our only girl, her dad’s job, and the processing of my green card. So the debit column had to receive Miya’s Dad’s cancer, Miya’s intestinal obstruction, and their surgeries. People who receive great joys should be prepared to pay the price: lifelong sorrow.

I hitched my wagon to the star: a man who was my ideal life partner. I never dreamed that a then-unrecognized melanoma would appear after eight years and cause the star to morph into a comet that would zoom into the cosmos at age forty! I hitched another wagon to the star of his look-alike daughter. Due to the gunshot that paralyzed her, she could not fight an aggressive cancer, so she morphed into another comet and zoomed after her father, also at forty!

People ask: If you could live your life over, would you do it differently? While I might envy people in long-term happy marriages, healthy children unmarked by gunshots, I cannot imagine trading places with anyone.

Miya’s dad touched the lives of many students for whom he unraveled the mysteries of mathematics. Miya touched the lives of many who benefited from her work against injustice: anti-apartheid, rape-crisis center, battered-women’s shelter, Central American campesinos, and Palestinians under assault in their ancestral lands. Lastly, her role in Berkeley’s 1998 Measure E campaign, that won property-tax funding that started in 1999, for the emergency services of Easy Does It. Any disabled person in Berkeley who needs an emergency attendant can call EDI, whose attendants are on standby. We hope this service will shine Miya’s light far into the future.

SUDDEN, VIOLENT, AND PUBLIC:
INTO THE CRUCIBLE

By Jane Nicholson

On November 1, 1991 Jane Nicholson’s husband, Dwight, was shot and killed at the University of Iowa. Dwight was chairman of the physics and astronomy department, and one of Gang Lu’s dissertation committee members.

DEATH CERTIFICATE:

DWIGHT *** *********

DIED IOWA CITY, IOWA

SINGLE GSW TO HEAD

AGE 44

Jane, he is dead. He is dead, Jane.

I balked at the repetition. The friend and colleague on the other end of the line was speaking as though he had rehearsed. If this was true, I assumed professionals were at my husband’s side. I was filling in all the blanks of this improbable story line.

This colleague said something about Dwight’s having been shot. Somehow, despite how preposterous that was, I knew, knew, knew that it was accurate . . . accurate as an outcome for high school sweethearts, undergraduate lovers, twenty-two-years marrieds? For the pacifist and physicist who had not accepted funding from the Department of Defense? No, never, not at all—and yet you don’t get a call like that from a colleague like that unless things are out of order. Yes, it mattered to me that I knew that man, that he considered my husband a dear friend.

I realized his tone was utterly different—because of the message, because of the task of delivering it. Yet it was him through and through, ending the call with the repeated phrase: You must call a friend now, as soon as we hang up. Call a friend, Jane, right now.

Dwight and I could’ve figured right from the start that schooling would be a basis of who we were. We met in high school. I strolled into the homeroom we shared till graduation. I was not thrilled to be a new girl. I can’t think how I didn’t jump out of the family Buick as my father drove out of Beloit for Racine. As it happened, two months into year two, the boy in homeroom asked me out. That’s when I really met him, a boy who didn’t come from the same sort of place I had, but would take a chance on a guarded new girl.

Where you come from makes quite a difference in schooling worlds. I learned that by being the new girl in a larger, more class-conscious high school. I might have guessed he, too, was an outsider, because he presented himself as different. My odd and powerful attraction to him was my unique desire in that new place and it was elemental. You see he was muscular and he wore his hair in a way that had no name that I knew of. I didn’t yet know that he was an outsider because he was bussed in from his rural home. As a student who had attended two large urban high schools, I couldn’t fathom this. What? The buses really whisked them off directly after school so that they never attended or participated in after-school activities!? I learned that his circle of friends existed outside our high school, a group from his earlier school days. Maybe some of them also wore their hair in a flattop with fenders rather than the more usual rural buzz cut.

Undergraduate days taught us other lessons in pecking order; there were so many students from New York City at Wisconsin. Madison enjoyed a great reputation and was less expensive for out-of-state students than Ann Arbor. The two of us marveled at the cosmopolitan views and academic advantages of our East Coast friends. We just had more to learn, that’s all. We called it our edge—we were only laughing at ourselves.

When we headed to the University of Iowa, we were both new kids on the block, with high stakes—for him in a tenure-track position in physics and for me in the program in comparative literature PhD studies. We were intrigued and enthused about Iowa City. We bought our first house, a modest place. It sat on a heavily wooded ridge and across the street, our neighbors all had properties that dropped off, too, and the terrain did not level off until it hit the floodplain for the Iowa River. If our campus, that straddled the Iowa River, could represent the quintessential Midwestern campus, then our place similarly called to mind the proverbial serene neighborhood.

On that same campus, gunfire from a .38 Taurus semiautomatic pistol rang through Van Allen Hall where a dedicated and respected faculty, student corps, and staff pursued or supported the study, experimentation, or theoretical exploration of physics. Physics explains the universe and its workings and has a philosophical side to it although physicists are all mathematicians to a degree. You understand why his colleagues would say about their department in Van Allen Hall, anywhere but here. You comprehend that their understanding of the beauty of the world’s workings was torqued and so were their beings. And one of them called me at about 4:00 p.m. on November 1, 1991.

What happened after the shootings, beyond the detectives and record-keepers, which come into most homicides, was unique to an educational institution. Whether an elementary school or a high school or university, these are institutions that house a meaningful number of people who have roles, goals, and shared expectations—and preparedness for various endeavors. Yet the size of a Big Ten university campus makes a small city unto itself. That large body makes a self-regulating community which is prepared many times over to serve its members’ needs. However, crises do not allow for preparation. Imagine the intrinsic capacity for mass disruption in an ordered place with common purpose; gunfire is amplified, ringing through ears, halls, media. This orderliness had placed people in the right place, right time—knowledge that offers to an insider his possible human targets.

These institutions are made up of sizeable buildings that resemble a maze—for a shooter to follow or to get lost in. These institutions also are home to halls and auditoriums that can be turned to the purpose of memorial services. At Iowa, the disproportionate shock waves that rocked the campus and town, launched many public memorial services. These answered needs to do right by those killed and their survivors, the desire to show that “this” was not who we are, and the outright desperation to take stock of who was left. Eyes locked and arms reached out.

But who were the dozens of people who sprang into action by mobilizing equipment and space for people to mourn in large numbers? It comes to me just now, a jogging of the memory, that I have met a few of them and in very disparate circumstances so that I had to work a piece into a fuzzy puzzle. And in the moment of meeting them, I felt their readiness and availability. The presence of each of them was solid and unswerving. Could my gratitude all these months and years later strike a chord?

I have mentioned that it matters in schooling where you come from. In one sense, it means your academic records and experiences, but also where you call home and what that place offered. Although information is gathered by institutions, it just lays there. Despite the records, academe is unlikely to foster foreign students as it should; the welcoming campus does likely not know how much preparation any student is given before heading there. I, too, was a foreign student and though in a place not so strange, remember horrendous headaches from concentrating on how my hosts did things. At a later date, I viewed a film that counseled foreign students to the U.S. always to leave a dime near the coffee cup—a pedestrian but revelatory clue to larger scenes unfolding awkwardly in a new life. I had witnessed a foreign student do just that when much more would have been an appropriate tip. Why this lapse? Do we mistakenly feel that Americanness is fully available everywhere through pop culture and increasingly so with ubiquitous webs of media—though access to these is not democratic?

There’s unimaginable propinquity at work in the Chinese graduate student meeting the professor from Wisconsin: both were farm boys and each likely already knew how much it matters where you come from in schooling. There is likeness here, but not equivalence. Knowing that gun violence strikes virtually every community, I know that this propinquity, too, is not an equivalence: some murders are hardly investigated and others receive the disproportionate amount of publicity. This is unjust and unsettling as both too little scrutiny and too much of it are intolerable.

My resistance to hearing his story, our story told by others led me to want to know people in their own words. I have spent nearly two decades in peace or talking circles, in universities, high schools, and community centers. Each person tells the story they need to tell and want others to hear. Each of us claims the moral authority to speak for ourselves. “A family of strangers,” one student declared—a young man who hadn’t dared to speak on day one. I’ve sat with joy and sorrow, with those who’ve lost someone and those who have taken life. Each circle values safe listening and telling and honest connection. In circle, it matters who we are; it matters where we say we’ve come from. As little of an idealist as I am, I assert that I can live with what has happened and this in part by granting some symbolic immortality to my beloved together with others and their beloveds. A bullet makes a straight-line trajectory, grief makes a circle.

COWBOY JUSTICE

By Mary Allen

Mary Allen was working in Van Allen Hall at the time of the shooting, where the physics department is housed. She was an editorial assistant to Christoph Goertz, editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

It’s November 1, 1991, Friday afternoon, the day after Halloween. I’m sitting alone in an office on the fifth floor of Van Allen Hall, where the Physics Department at the University of Iowa is housed, when I hear a loud noise on a floor below: POP POP POP. What I heard must’ve been a staple gun. There must be construction somewhere. This seems plausible, especially because after the POP POP POP I hear what sounds like heavy furniture being rearranged. Later I’ll learn this was the sound of people scrambling to get under desks, shoving tables aside, and rushing out the door.

But at the moment I don’t have a clue what’s going on and I sit there at my desk and continue working, printing out labels for envelopes and folding a pile of letters signed by my boss, Christoph Goertz, editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research, before he left for the Friday afternoon theoretical space physics meeting downstairs where he has just been shot along with two other people. When I finish sealing the envelopes, I go down a long dark hallway to the bathroom where I stare at myself in the mirror, then stop at the water fountain outside the bathroom door and fill a little plastic tube with a removable pink sponge on the end, which I plan to use to seal the envelopes.

As I’m wandering back down the hall to my office a young woman, a secretary I know, appears at the top of the stairs and says, “DWIGHT’S BEEN SHOT! HE’S DEAD.”

Dwight Nicholson is the chairman of the physics department, who, I will later learn, was shot in the back by the gunman while he was working at his desk facing the wall. The gunman was Gang Lu, a recent PhD recipient angry his thesis didn’t get an award he thought would increase his chances of getting a job, and not having to return to post–Tiananmen Square China. After he killed Dwight, he went back up upstairs to the meeting room where a few minutes earlier he shot Chris Goertz and two other people: Bob Smith, another professor, and Linhua Chan, the young man who won the award. Chris and Chan died immediately—Chris was the first victim, shot in the head at close range at the front of the room; in the first few seconds, before reality sank in, some people thought it was a Halloween prank—but Bob Smith was only wounded.

Two men were kneeling on the floor beside Bob when the gunman came back. Gang Lu told them to leave the room and then he shot Bob again, finishing the job. Then he left the building, walked over to the university administration building and killed Anne Cleary, the university’s grievance officer, who did not respond favorably to his complaints. He also shot Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, a first-day temp worker who got in the way. She was an activist, a dancer, a beautiful spirit, as we learned later, the only survivor and Gang Lu’s only impromptu victim. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down. Afterward Gang Lu found an empty schoolroom on the second floor, took off his tan jacket and folded it neatly over the back of a chair, and shot himself in the head.

I go back to my office and call my friend J., who shares this job with me. Her line is busy, so I hang up and sit there wondering what to do. There is nothing to do, so I keep working, sealing the envelopes containing the letters that will never be sent. I’m confused instead of scared. I’m too confused to be scared. I don’t close the door. I don’t do anything about the fact there could be a murderer somewhere in the building. I seal a few more envelopes, then I get up and stand in the doorway, looking down the hall. I see a Chinese student with a backpack emerge from the stairwell and I run back into my office. Nothing happens. I try to call J. again. This time she answers and I tell her that Dwight’s been shot and he’s dead. She’s shocked and stunned. We don’t even know yet that there are other victims, people we work with directly; she knows them better than I do—I was hired four months ago but she’s been working here for years—one of them is our boss. She tells me to close the door of the office.

But soon, someone comes running down the hall, pounding on doors and yelling, “Everyone get out of the building! They’re evacuating the building!”

I go all around the room, turning off the postal meter, the Xerox machine, the computer, the printer. My hands are shaking so hard I can hardly press the buttons, and that’s when I realize, the first time I realize, how scared I am. I walk down the long dark fifth-floor hallway to the elevator. All the doors are closed and I don’t see anyone, there’s no one to share this terrifying moment with. I hold my breath in the elevator, all the way to the first floor, worrying it will stop and a graduate student with a backpack full of guns will get on. That doesn’t happen. On the first floor I see flashing lights beyond the exit and policemen by the door waving guns and shouting, Everyone out! Out of the building!

It’s snowing outside, large white flakes whirling madly in the air. I don’t have a car, and during my entire twenty-minute walk home, up a long straight sloping tree-lined street, I feel like a murderer is following me.

I go to J.’s house. News drifts in over the radio about the shooting. The ten o’clock news confirms five people are dead and someone was wounded, but is still alive. They announce the victims. The first face that appears on the screen is Chris Goertz’s face.

The aftermath is more or less predictable. There are memorial services, articles in the paper and then editorials, the whole community grieves. Everybody talks about where they were when the shooting happened. Things come out about Gang Lu. He bought his gun at Fin and Feather and target practiced for months. He wrote a long rambly letter to his sister in China, single-spaced on white typing paper, and mailed it the day of the shooting. It was intercepted by the authorities at the Iowa City post office; it says he’ll be quantum leaping through the universe and tells his sister not to be sad for him because he’s going to take a few traveling companions with him to the grave. On an old Greyhound-bus-ticket envelope the police found in his apartment, he had scrawled, “Cowboy justice is the only action against corporate crime.”

People continue speculating about why this happened. There’s talk in some circles about how hard life is for graduate students, suggesting that Gang Lu was pushed to his limits by the pressures of academia. A group of us forms to take action on gun control and we meet for about a year. In 2009, a movie is made loosely based on the story; it shifts the onus of the bad guy onto the graduate adviser Chris Goertz character and casts the Gang Lu character in the role of the underdog.

The whole story is rife with misunderstandings. Gang Lu thought Chris ignored his thesis in favor of Linhua Shan’s: Chris actually recommended both theses for the award and an outside award committee made the choice. Gang Lu told the grievance officer, Anne Cleary, that the UI space physics group had unfairly passed him over for the award; Anne Cleary didn’t do anything because Chris reported that Gang Lu had been recommended for the award.

I learned the truth is subject to shape-shifting and misinterpretation, that the farther you are from a public event the more mythical proportions it assumes, that popular mythology—the illusion of cowboy justice, for instance—can be deadly, that there is no rational reason for murder.