There is an interesting article in the other site about a man who lives in the Villages and was a school administrator when a flight with 16 kids and their 5 adult chaperones went down. They were from his school.
Quote:
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His nightmare is not due to a deranged killer, but from the explosion and crash of Trans World Airlines’ Flight 800 over the Atlantic, about 12 minutes after takeoff from New York’s Kennedy International Airport, July 17, 1996. All 230 people on-board perished in America’s third-deadliest aviation accident.
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As many know my high school English teacher's daughter, Michelle Mitchell, was murdered on my birthday (2-24) when I was a Junior at Earl Wooster High School in Reno, Nevada in 1976. I was a favorite of the teacher and that family gave me very small Memorial Scholarship in her name. I had been taking correspondence courses to skip my Senior year so I used that small scholarship at the University of Nevada, Reno for my Freshmen year. You never get over traumatic experiences especially ones that are repeated in the media for years. And the murder occurred on my birthday which also made and makes it very hard to just push aside.
I did get four degrees though and helped maybe 40 prisoners with their legal matters as a student then Student Co-Director at Legal Assistance to Minnesota Prisoners (LAMP) Minnesota Correctional Facility--Stillwater so this baggage did not slow me down all that much. It actually made me more determined to be objective about things and dig into matters as well as I could given the resources available. Law school trained me to be critical. And try to look at things from many perspectives. I was at the U of MN while in LAMP.
The community's need for closure did lead to the wrongful conviction of a paranoid schizophrenic woman, Cathy Woods, who had confessed falsely to the murder of Michelle Mitchell. She did at this at the time to get a better room in the mental institution she was in located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This was around 1979.
I had immersed myself in reading Philosophy and History as well as great literature during my stay at the University of Nevada, Reno while getting BAs in each of these.
I have been contacting through Facebook the last four years or so some of the former students from Wooster High School from around this time and some have prospered.
I hope that the students affected by the Valentine's Day shooting can use this terrible tragedy to make the changes needed. The solutions probably will be very complicated if they are to work but I hope that the wisdom you see in many Villagers can be applied.