Peter Walks for Democracy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this because I knew a shooter, Jillian Robbins. Not really well. We were in math class. I remember her as a generally quiet and quirky girl who wore flannel shirts and drew pictures of faeries and magical worlds. She painted a really great mural in our school, the Delta Program. If my memory isn’t faulty, it was a Robotech Beta Fighter in battloid mode. After I graduated from high school I saw her at the Old College Diner from time to time and we had some mutual friends who played roleplaying games. I think I remember some other things about her hair, but I’m not so sure. Memories have a way of inventing themselves after more than twenty years.

On the cool damp morning of September 17, 1996, dozens of students milled near Penn State’s HUB. Some headed home after their first class, others went off to get breakfast, some headed to their next class. Administrators, staff, and professors were walking to work or looking down on the lawn from an office. I was half-heartedly starting a Music degree and had just finished either theory class or ear training. It was a lovely morning in Happy Valley.

Jillian was hidden in a cluster of thick shrubs and trees. She could see out on the lawn but no one could see her unless they were looking for her. Briefly, she was an Army reservist; she was discharged after failing to graduate from high school. Intense psychological problems plagued her. She was filled with “insane rage.” “When I woke up that day, I decided I was going to die. I could not handle the stresses of life. I could not handle the hallucinations, the delusions any more.”

She was armed with a 7mm high-power Mauser rifle she’d gotten from her father. She took aim. Robbins murdered Melanie Spalla, 21, with a shot that entered Spalla’s back and exited her neck. Nick Mensah was injured. A couple of backpacks. A building.

21-year-old Brandon Malovrh found Robbins, ultimately disarming her after she tried to stab him but stabbed herself. The police arrived. The community was shocked.

The Texas tower shooting was decades past, a thing we learned about in sociology class as an aberration in American history. Columbine came soon. But the assault weapons ban was in place.

What if Robbins had an AR-15? Her five shots could have easily been dozens. She would have murdered 8, 10, or 15 people before Malovrh took her down…had he been able to. The easy access to rapid-fire weapons would have made the HUB lawn shooting into the HUB lawn massacre.

How senseless.

*This post was corrected. It had said 1992.