• Sign in to favorite this
• Discuss Comment, Blog about
• Share this Email, Facebook, Twitter

Read the story.

It’s 3:45 and I’m at Campus Lodge signing for an apartment this summer. Saved some money, too. Great day so far, now I’m running late to the newsroom for a mandatory workshop at 3:30.

My phone rings and I answer. It is my editor. Oh dang...I’m in trouble.

“I don’t know why you aren’t in the newsroom right now, but a student pulled a gun on a teacher, we need you here now!”

Click.

I’m immediately in my friends car and we take off. I get dropped off and enter the chaos that I have come to know as “The Newsroom”. Except this time, the chaos would have registered on the Richter scale. I’m immediately sent out of the newsroom to go chase down police cars all over campus. I find one report of a kid (God bless, man) who was playing basketball at the Huffman and hurt his neck. I run down more police vehicles that are on call for a kid who had a seizure.

In a matter of one hour, I find myself Facebook creeping on the suspect of the attack on the professor after Boren released his name in an e-mail. The cop cars, while they were doing their job, were of no help to the current mystery of this attack.

I finally find a source - a professor here at OU.

I run to Dale Hall Tower. Right when I get into the tower, I see someone and ask, “Do you know [name of the professor]?”

“Yes, that’s my name..what’s wrong?”

I felt simultaneously lucky and terrible. I had no idea what to say, but in the end I just told it like it was.

“Are you aware of the attack today?”

“No...”

So I tell her everything I know.

I tell her a professor in the Japanese department was attacked by a student who reportedly had a gun and how a big commotion was caused in which many professors came down from their offices and said the suspect was trying to throw the professor down the second-story staircase.

I tell her the suspect reportedly got into his car and fled the scene. I then tell her the suspect’s name.

As soon as I say his name, the professor falls to her knees. I think she’s going to cry, but she is obviously much stronger than I am.

It is heartbreaking and a moment in my life that I won’t soon forget.

I remain for about 10 minutes and talk to the professor as we discuss what I know. She asks not to be named.

She leaves me with a chilling final statement.

“I hope they (the police) catch him, because if they don’t, then something terrible could happen.”

— Clark Foy, Police Beat Reporter

Read all of Clark Foy's stories here.