Seamus McGraw - From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

ALSO BY SEAMUS McGRAW

A Thirsty Land: The Fight for Water in Texas

Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change

The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone

FROM A TALLER TOWER

The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

SEAMUS MCGRAW

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Copyright 2021 by Seamus McGraw

All rights reserved

First edition, 2021

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McGraw, Seamus, author.

Title: From a taller tower : the rise of the American mass shooter / Seamus McGraw.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020034081

ISBN 978-1-4773-1718-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2263-5 (library ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2264-2 (non-library ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass shootingsUnited States. | School shootingsUnited States. | MassacresUnited States.

Classification: LCC HV6536.5.U6 M34 2021 | DDC 364.152/340973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034081

doi:10.7560/317181

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

IT COMES OUT of nowhere, this random act of unspeakable violence. Not twenty feet away from me, a manan indigent, timid, harmless wino but a man nonethelessis being savagely bludgeoned nearly to death. And for what seems to be an eternity, I just stand there. Mute. Motionless. Helpless.

Useless.

I freeze. There is no other word for it.

Its not the way I imagined I would react had I ever conjured a scene of such brutality. Ive always thought of myself as a bit of a hardassif not exactly heroic, at least brave enough and tough enough to step in and do something. Anything. We all imagine ourselves to be heroes in waiting, I suppose. Until were tested. But never in my wildest imagination had I dreamed up an image of an attack as senseless, as raw, as savage as this one.

Its the week between Christmas and New Years in the winter of 1978. Im all of nineteen, and Im heading back to my home in central New Jersey from an evening on the town in New York. As usual, Ive been drinking. And as usual, Ive missed the last connecting train from Penn Station Newark to points south. It isnt the first time Ive missed the train and will have to spend the night sobering up in the sooty, seedy old marble lobby of the terminal in Newark, waiting for the first train out in the morning. The nineteen-year-old me drinks a lot, and he misses a lot of things, trains included.

Theres a cadre of regulars, ten or twelve guys who haunt the train station when all the decent types are home abed. I know a few of them by sight and one or two of them by name. Or by nickname. One of them is this harmless old wino, a man in his sixties, perhaps, who had earned the nickname Bojangles. I assume hes called Bojangles because anytime I ever see him, winter or summer, hes wearing a stained and ragged black overcoat upon which he has tied and safety-pinned and otherwise fastened all his worldly possessions, everything from a gaudy ring full of keys to nothing in particular to a discarded folding baby stroller. Whenever he moves, usually using the wall as a support, he makes the most awful clattering racket. It echoes against the marble walls. I dont recall ever hearing him speak, but you always know when Bojangles is coming. You can hear him from across the concourse, and when he passes near you, slowly, painfully, he usually casts his bloodshot and yellow eyes downward, a signal that he means no one any harm.

Its about three in the morning when the heavy glass and brushed steel door on the east side of the concourse swings open, and a gust of frigid air stinking of diesel exhaust rushes in, and with it a tightly muscled man with a freshly shaved head who appears to be in his early thirties. He immediately catches my attention, in part because of his appearance and his dresshes wildly underdressed for the cold winter night, wearing only a pair of light slacks and a light-colored V-neck sweaterbut also for the purposeful, serious way he struts into the station. Hes carrying what appears to be a walking stick, though it clanks with a metallic sound that echoes against the marble with his every step. Even now, all these years later, I can still hear the echo of it. He has a rigid gait, the self-consciously aggressive strut of a man who thinks himself important, a man who demands with every step that you too see him as someone to be reckoned with, a man in a hurry to get someplace, even if that place is a train station in Newark in the middle of the night, filled with people who arent going anywhere anytime soon.

He strides past me, his walking stick clanking, and goes no more than ten or fifteen paces when he reaches the spot along the wall where Bojangles is staggering. He stops abruptly. He turns. And for the space of a heartbeat, he just glares at Bojangles. He does not know the man, Ill later learn. Hes never spoken with him, and Bojangles has certainly never given him any offense. Hes never given anyone any offense that Im aware of. But theres rage and fury in the bald-headed mans eyes.

And then, without warning, without provocation, he lunges toward Bojangles, raising his walking stick, which I now see is an iron bar. Before the first blow lands, Bojangles finally looks up. Theres terror in his eyes. And pleading. That means nothing to the bald-headed man. Again and again in a furious barrage of blows, he strikes Bojangles with the iron bar. Blood splatters. Broken teeth skitter across the marble floor toward where I am standing.

Im no more than twenty feet away from Bojangles and his attacker. I could close the distance between us in the space between the blows. But Im frozen where I stand. Mute. Motionless. Helpless. Useless. And Im not the only one. All the other late-night denizens of the Newark train station, who no doubt imagine themselves to be hard-asses too, are frozen as well, watching without understanding, staring in stunned horror as this innocent, harmless old man is savaged. It seems like an eternity. In truth its maybe thirty seconds, forty-five at the most, before out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the denizens flinch, and thats enough to jar me from my stupor. Almost as one, all of us, the regulars, lunge toward the bald-headed man, and he backs away, waving the iron bar at us and bellowing something unintelligible. For the next few minutes we hold him at bay, feinting toward him as if were baiting an animal, until police finally arrive and take him into custody.

But by that point, the damage is done. A harmless old man is critically injured in an act of irrational, wanton bloodlust. He will survive, though he will carry the scarsphysical and, Im sure, psychologicalof that attack for the rest of his life. And so will everyone else who was there that night.

For years afterward, I tortured myself for my inaction that night. I called myself a coward, and if Im to be honest, I still havent completely absolved myself for the awful sin of omission I committed. Indeed, to this day I am still compensating for what I didnt do instinctively that night. Im in my sixties and I still take reckless chances sometimes, at least in part to convince myself that I am not a coward.

But a larger part of me now understands, with the help of time and the wisdom of others, that it was something more than just fear that made me, and the others in that terminal, freeze.