“I was still at Texas A & M, and I was driving to work, I had just pulled up to the last light where I was going to make a left turn into campus, and I heard the news about the twin towers. At that moment. I thought was this a terrible accident? How did this happen? It took me about 5 minutes to park the car in the garage, and walk to the office. Finally we were starting to understand that it wasn’t a terrible accident, that in fact it had been an attack.
Being from New York, I was worried because I have a twin sister that works in Manhattan. One of my brothers is a retired NY police officer and he is in retirement fixing ATM’s. And I knew that the twin towers were on his route. Certainly I called them right away. My sister was in school, and they had already started going through records of the kids to find out whose parents worked at the world trade center. So they didn’t have the TV’s on yet; so the kids didn’t know what had happened.
My brother wasn’t initially down there at the time, but he had a colleague who was. I think all New Yorkers and people from New Jersey would say they had some connection. My experience now is almost everybody knew somebody who was touched by it.
There have been a variety of things that have happened. We spend a lot of time now on disaster preparedness, and most of it is. A lot of it is: what happens if there is a bomb? What happens if there is an active shooter, and what happens if a group comes on campus and creates a violent situation?
Since that time, we have spent more time thinking and preparing and practicing and talking about campus shootings. The level of preparedness is a lot higher now than it ever was on a university. I think we are more watchful of social media, things that might suggest kind of radical threats.”