Rather than face his descent into mental illness alone, Claire reached out to his biological father, who had been granted asylum in 1999. (Her ex-husband, Brian, had remarried and largely receded from Sirak’s life.) The rest of Sirak’s family—his mother, two brothers, and two sisters—had immigrated when Sirak was thirteen and settled with his father in Atlanta. Sirak had visited them nearly every summer since, and he and his siblings had forged an easy bond. Claire believed that Atlanta, with its big-city mental health resources, would be a better place for him than rural Colorado, and in 2008, it was agreed that he would go live with his Ethiopian family.
In Atlanta, a psychiatrist finally diagnosed Sirak with bipolar disorder and prescribed him lithium, a mood stabilizer. During long, discursive phone conversations with Claire, Sirak assured her that he was taking his medication, but despite his sincere longing to get well, he never consistently followed his treatment protocol. Though he managed to hold a number of menial jobs—he bagged groceries, worked as a drugstore clerk, cleaned out moving trucks, delivered auto parts—his employment was often cut short when a manic episode overtook him. By 2012, during one of many voluntary commitments to Georgia Regional, a large, state-run hospital with a psychiatric ward, his diagnosis was modified to reflect his worsening condition. “I have Bipolar One, manic severe, with psychotic features,” Sirak explained to me matter-of-factly, referring to the most severe form of the disorder.
When Claire saw Sirak on a visit last July, she was stunned. His doctors had put him on a powerful antipsychotic drug to keep his most serious symptoms in check, but it was plain that he was overmedicated. Sirak absently raised his feet, walking in place where he stood, and looked unfocused, his clothes rumpled, his hair uncombed. When he sat, he sometimes drifted off to sleep, and when he spoke, his voice was a curious monotone. “I’m not enjoying being alive very much right now,” he told her. Eager to find a way to dial back his medications, she moved him to Texarkana the following month and gave him her spare bedroom. She found a psychiatrist to fine-tune his prescriptions and arranged for weekly talk therapy sessions. The change of scenery seemed to help him, at least at first. “Today Sirak told me he no longer wants to die,” Claire emailed a handful of close friends in late August. “Rejoice with me.”
By the time of my visit, he had lapsed back into a depression, and he announced that he wanted to return to Atlanta. (Several weeks later, he did.) Though he had once devoted hours each day to the piano—in 2012 he even went to New York to audition for the master’s program at Juilliard—he had stopped playing, he told me, because he had lost his passion for music. “My doctor said I have something called anhedonia,” he said. “It’s like hedonism, but the opposite. It means I don’t feel pleasure anymore.”
He brightened only when he changed the subject to an obsession of his: his conviction that he will one day be reborn as a “child of prophecy,” or a sort of modern-day messiah. As he described the superpowers he would possess when the prophecy came to fruition, he grew elated, his face alight. Beside him, Claire sat in silence, staring down at her clasped hands.
What if Whitman’s bullet had never found her? Claire sometimes thinks about the intricate calculus that put her in his sights that day. What if her anthropology class had not let out early? What if Tom had lingered over his coffee one minute longer before they had gone to feed the parking meter? Such deliberations have never satisfied her, because each shift in the variables sets in motion other consequences. If she had not been shot, she might never have found God. If she had given birth, she would not have known the exhilaration, at 41, of becoming a mother, or the hard-won joy of raising Sirak. Sometimes she finds herself calculating the age of her first child, had he lived, and the number always astonishes her. She wrote it in my notebook one afternoon, carefully forming each numeral: 49. He would probably be a father by now, she observed, and she a grandmother.
She rarely gives much thought to Whitman, who remains, in her mind, remote and inscrutable. “I never saw his face, because we were separated by so much distance,” Claire said. “So it’s always been hard to understand that he did this—that a person did this—to me.” Paging through Life on her library visits all those years ago, she studied the photos of him, and one particular image—taken at the beach when Whitman was two years old—has always stayed with her. In the picture, he is standing barefoot in the sand, grinning sweetly at a small dog. Two of his father’s rifles are positioned upright on either side of him, and Whitman is holding on to them the way a skier grips his poles.
“That’s how I see him—as that little boy on the shore, still open to the world, just wanting his father’s love and approval,” Claire said. She cannot grasp how, in such a short span of time, “he became so twisted and decided to do what he did,” she said. “But I’ve never felt it was personal. How could I? He didn’t know me, I didn’t know him.”
It will have been fifty years since the shooting this summer, an anniversary that, for Claire, has brought the tragedy into clearer focus. A documentary that tells the story of the day of the massacre from the perspective of eyewitnesses and survivors, with an emphasis on Claire’s ordeal, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin in March; directed by Austin-based filmmaker Keith Maitland, Tower will air nationally on PBS later this year. (The documentary is loosely based on a 2006 Texas Monthly oral history; I served as one of its executive producers.) The film, and recent efforts to plan a memorial for August 1, have reconnected Claire to people she thought she would never see again. “I felt so isolated by the years of silence,” she wrote to Maitland during filming. “Now I feel restored to the community from which I was ripped.”
Last spring, Claire found herself at the Capitol once again to testify against legislation that would allow concealed handguns on college campuses. While the bills she opposed in 2013 had ultimately failed, this time her testimony did little to deter gun-rights advocates, who succeeded in passing a campus carry bill by a two-to-one margin. Though supporters argued that the measure would make universities safer, Claire was heartened when protests erupted at UT, where an overwhelming majority of students, professors, and administrators balked at the legislature’s actions. In what Claire sees as a grotesque insult, the law will go into effect on August 1, half a century to the day that Whitman walked onto the Tower’s observation deck and opened fire.
Like many survivors of the shooting, Claire will return to campus to mark the anniversary. The university, now a sprawling, multibillion-dollar institution whose shiny new research facilities dominate the landscape, is drastically different from the one she entered in 1966, but the unsettled legacy of that summer remains. Though the gaping bullet holes left by Whitman’s rampage were quickly patched over, not every scar was filled, and anyone who takes the time to look closely at the limestone walls and balustrades that line the South Mall can still make out tiny divots where his bullets missed their mark.
Claire longs to lie down in the shadow of the Tower, on the precise spot where she was shot. “It’s beyond me why I would feel comforted there,” she told me. “But I want to lie down, and remember the heat, and remember Tom, and remember the baby.” That wide-open stretch of concrete is the last place they were all together.