Some officers finally came up with a plan to end the threat from the tower. Police were able to fly over Whitman in an airplane but they quickly retreated due to gunfire. The Police did not have any plans for incidents such as this one because situations like this rarely happened and there was no need to have a specialized unit assigned to handle situations as this. They also could not attend to the wounded lying on the ground. Upon their arrival, the officers couldn't get close enough to do anything to neutralize Whitman. While Whitman was still inside the tower shooting at innocent people, the police were notified of the incident. When rescuers attempted to aid the wounded, he would allow them to get close and then shoot the rescuers. He even shot a pregnant woman in the abdomen killing her eight-month old unborn child, and then began shooting people as they hid in doorways or looked out of windows trying to see what was happening. Whitman had no mercy on the people below him. Back at the tower, Whitman first shot a young black male riding a bicycle and later shot a young girl in the head. He would return to his residence where he stabbed his wife to death while she lay in bed. Actually, Whitman started his spree at his mother’s house, shooting her in the back of the head. The rampage did not start at the tower, as most people would believe. Whitman had an arsenal of 3 rifles, a sawed-off shotgun, 2 handguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a 5-gallon container of water, some sandwiches, and a can of gasoline. Whitman took an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, killing a maintenance worker and later took up his position. The tower stood 308 feet tall in which Whitman could see for some distance. on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman posed as a maintenance worker and used a dolly to roll a footlocker into the clock tower building on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. This incident is best known as the Texas Tower Sniper and is credited as being the sparking event for "The Birth of SWAT."Īt approximately 11 A.M. A man named Charles Joseph Whitman, a honor student, used a high-powered rifle to randomly kill over a dozen people and wounded over thirty more from the University of Texas Clock Tower Building in Austin. It was August 1, 1966, a tragic event occurred in Austin, Texas. The following article was written for and gives a brief synopsis of the incident, which many officers feel, was the catalyst for our current SW.A.T.
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