Animated Documentary Film 'Tower' Recounting UT-Austin Mass Shooting To Air On PBS

AUSTIN, TX — The darkest day in Austin history will be explored on PBS stations on Tuesday with the national broadcast of "Tower," an animated documentary film about the nation's first campus mass shooting that occurred half a century ago.

While the event took place in 1966, its after-effects are still felt to this day. The iconic tower that looms over the 40-acre campus at the University of Texas at Austin stands as a symbolic beacon of accomplishment today, bathed in orange light matching the school's official color when students or alumni reach particularly key accomplishments.

But just over 50 years ago, the tower served as a perch for madman Charles Whitman, who would ultimately kill 14 people from his vantage point just above the clock atop the structure before being shot by police. In addition to those killed, 31 others were injured. He killed his wife and mother before heading to the campus, armed to the teeth, to complete his unthinkable crime.

Today, a younger generation not even alive during the time of the tragedy walk through the busy campus oblivious to the horror that visited the ground upon which they walk to and from classes. But for those who survived the tragedy, the scars are not yet fully healed.

But even members of the generation before them seem to take the tragedy for granted now, as if some occurrence from the ancient past. The Republican-championed "campus carry" law took effect on the same day as the anniversary of the shooting, a day celebrated by gun lovers but adding a pall at a university readying to honor victims and survivors of the shooting.

Even after having survived the attack, many survivors questioned the wisdom of calling for more guns on a crowded campus, and noted the vulgarity of the timing of the new law taking effect.

Through interviews with people who were there, "Tower" offers a gripping retelling of the horrible day in depicting the survivors and heroes alike who emerged from the darkness.

There's Claire Wilson James, then an incoming, pregnant freshman who would become the first person to be shot by the deranged gunman. She survived to tell of her ordeal, but lost her unborn baby and her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, in the shooting.

Patch caught up with James during the 50th anniversary of the UT-Austin shooting last August, when survivors and police and other emergency responders who aided the wounded were honored guests of university officials in unveiling a memorial to mark that dark day.

"I've asked myself many times over the last several years: how can it help to have a memorial?" she said at last year's memorial. "But for the many people who have come to the university to see these fallen where they breathed their last, it will be reassuring and comforting. But truly it is not the stone we dedicate, but ourselves."

She asked those gathered to make a pledge as antidote to the evil that took place when she was a hopeful teenager in the bud of her life who now walks with a pronounced limp after having boned removed to save her from infection after being shot.

"I ask you to join me in making a vow to treasure the ones we walk with right now each moment," she said. "Let this memorial remain here on this campus and in our minds as a reminder to the power we have each moment to become a community of love and reverence for life."

The documentary "Tower" airs Tuesday on local PBS affiliate KLRU during the program "Independent Lens" at 9 p.m.

The 2016 animated documentary film directed by Keith Maitland is based on a 2006 Texas Monthly article by writer Pamela Colloff titled "96 Minutes."

The shooting at the UT-Austin campus represented the first time for a mass shooting on an American campus, coming at a time in history when America herself began to lose her innocence — the awful day wedged between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and just preceding the shooting deaths of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was an unfathomable act for its time, an unspeakable evil that seems, for many, so very long ago. But tragically, the UT-Austin massacre is less an anachronism than it was precursor, with mass shootings now commonplace when we seem perennially braced for the next one to come along and break our hearts all over again.

>>> Photos taken during 50th anniversary of shooting at UT-Austin, August 2016, by Tony Cantú