flea: (Default)
flea ([personal profile] flea) wrote2009-04-25 04:23 pm

unexpectedly homebound

We were planning to go downtown - there's a big bike festival, and evening race, the Twilight Criterium (which has nothing to do with sparkly vampires). But now we're staying in, I think, as a UGA professor shot and killed three people, one of them his ex-wife, at the community theater several blocks from my house. And he hasn't been found - left the scene of the shooting. Varying reports of sightings in multiple places (and now multiple cars) - people are listening to the police scanner and posting to Twitter. Ah, the internets.

My boss is very involved in the theater group where the killings took place, but was not there. Athens is such a small town; of my Facebook friends who are posting, one wrote a grant with this professor recently, and another knows one of the victims and the wife of another. (Names haven't officially been released but seem to be widely known; it's a small town.)

Student paper has better coverage than the local, but it's also been picked up in the AJC and Huffington Post. http://media.www.redandblack.com/media/storage/paper871/news/2009/04/24/News/Professor.On.The.Loose.Suspected.In.Saturday.Afternoon.Shooting.On.Prince.Avenue-3726106.shtml#more

Doing a lot of spelling so as not to let the kids know. Riding bikes on the back porch, though the odds of him ringing our doorbell are pretty slim. Odds are he's holed up and killed himself by now, which I sincerely hope, for the sake of the police and anyone else he might decide to take with him.

[identity profile] tskaredoff.livejournal.com 2009-04-25 08:57 pm (UTC)(link)
What a nightmare! Stay safe.

[identity profile] dxmachina.livejournal.com 2009-04-25 09:34 pm (UTC)(link)
That's horrible. I think you've made a good call.

[identity profile] ste-noni.livejournal.com 2009-04-25 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Scary. Stay safe!

[identity profile] forodwaith.livejournal.com 2009-04-26 01:55 am (UTC)(link)
How scary, and awful for the whole community.

[identity profile] gingerk.livejournal.com 2009-04-26 02:35 am (UTC)(link)
The more I read about this, the weirder it gets. I'm assuming he was after his wife and the others were collateral damage of some sort. Jealousy? Because they were her friends? Because they were in the theater? It's such a blow to a town like Athens.

[identity profile] calligrafiti.livejournal.com 2009-04-26 04:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, dear. I hope you and the Flea-fam stay safe and not too stressed.