UT ex who survived tower shooting reacts to Virginia Tech| Officer who stopped Whitman talks about Va. Tech

AUSTIN -- Monday’s deadly shootings at Virginia Tech conjured up thoughts of another horrible attack at a college campus.

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University of Texas Tower, the day after Charles Whitman's shooting rampage. August 2, 1966

Last summer was the 40^th anniversary of the infamous massacre at the University of Texas tower in Austin.

At the time -- that was the nation’s worst mass shooting.

On August first of 1966, Charles Whitman went to the 28^th floor observation deck of the UT Tower and began shooting at people below.

The UT student killed 16 people and wounded nearly three dozen before police killed him.

Whitman, 25, a Texas student who was a native of Lake Worth, Fla., was killed by a pair of Austin police officers who reached him about 90 minutes after he opened fire from the 28th-floor observation deck just before noon on Aug. 1, 1966.

Ramiro Martinez is one of two officers who made their way to the top of the tower on August 1, 1966 to stop Charles Whitman’s killing rampage.

Whitman had a small arsenal with him in the tower.

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Charles Whitman killed 16 and injured dozens more before an Austin cop killed him.

Officer Martinez stepped over the dead and dying victims as he headed to the top of the tower, armed with only a pistol.

“There was a problem up there that we had to take care of, and the quicker we took care of that problem, the quicker we could get those people out,” recalls Martinez.

Martinez wasn't even supposed to be on duty until later in that day but called in when he saw reports on television that a gunman had gone to the deck of the signature 307-foot University of Texas Tower and was firing at people below. He initially was sent to the scene to help direct traffic and wound up a piece of history when he took the elevator to the top, joined a handful of fellow officers and became one of two men who confronted the sharpshooting Whitman.

"I don't try to hide it," he said. "I don't go advertise it. But by the same token, if somebody asks me if that's true, of course, I'll admit to it."

Authorities later would discover Whitman also was responsible for fatally stabbing his mother and his wife in the hours before he went to the tower.

Whitman's own notes that he left behind indicate he killed his wife and mother to spare them the embarrassment of what he planned to do. He was having marital, financial and academic difficulties, was upset with the breakup of his parents and particularly angry with his father, a Florida plumbing contractor.

"There was no way he was going to come down alive," Martinez recalled in an interview. "I'm pretty sure he had predetermined he was going to die."

In 2001, Whitman's toll rose to 17 with the death of a Fort Worth man from what physicians said were complications from a gunshot wound suffered that day.

Signs of murderous onslaught remain at the top of the tower, where repairs in the Indiana limestone cover holes — as many as a dozen on the south side alone — made by bullets fired at Whitman from below.

"I guess like any major event in history, it goes through a metamorphosis," school spokesman Rob Meckel said Monday. "When it initially happens, it's very much a news event, like 9/11. Then as time passes and people of that era cease to still live, it evolves into a historic event."

The university's Center for American History was accepting the donation of some personal papers about the shootings discovered in a box by a relative of Allen Hamilton, who was the university's police chief back in 1966. The man recently brought the documents to an Austin bookstore, Half Price Books, and offered them for sale.

"He walked in with a couple of boxes with all these files," Steve Leach, collectibles merchandise specialist for the Dallas-based bookstore chain, said Monday. "Not all were related to Charles Whitman."

However, two manila file folders were.

Company officials declined to identify the seller by name and declined to specify the price they paid for the articles.

"He did say although he didn't mind us returning the files to UT, he didn't want to do that himself," Leach said. "We just figured the thing to do would be to get these, not lose the buy and do the right thing, which was give them to UT.

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"It was the natural choice," he said.

The university's Center for American History already has some Whitman-related materials. A formal ceremony to turn over the files was scheduled for Tuesday.

The papers include a number of photocopied documents pertaining to the shootings and some original reports submitted by officers who responded to the scene. There are also some original vehicle information documents signed by Whitman when he was a student in 1965, including numerous memos about unpaid parking violations that threatened to hold up release of his grades. There's also a parking fee receipt signed by Whitman.

One of the folders, with his name typewritten, also includes a handwritten notation, "Deceased," and the Aug. 1, 1966 date.