| | Sixteen years ago, I was sitting at the top of the stairs in our house in Logologo playing War with my friend Ryan. We were using Scooby-Doo playing cards; I recall. I also recall that we were discussing, in our nine-year-old way, the recent news from America: that in Gainesville, young nursing students were being murdered in their apartments.
It's one of very few memories from Logologo; I was too young to have been told, or to have understood, that the students were being raped and then dismembered. But I vividly recall talking about how awful it would be to live in a place as scary as America.
Several years later while we were on furlough in Gainesville, a man named Danny Rolling pled guilty to the murders and was sentenced to death. I recall little beyond that.
On the west side of campus is a large memorial to the murdered students; and over on the east side a grove of trees is planted in their honor. Their names-- Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Manny Taboada, and Tracy Paules-- are engraved on plaques and memorials all over town. A friend of mine used to live in the apartment complex where several of them were murdered.
Last night at 6:11 pm in Starke, Danny Rolling died in the same gas chamber where Ted Bundy was executed in 1989. When asked if he had any last words, he began to sing:
Thou art the alpha and the omega,
The beginning and the end.
The sound of thy voice stills a mighty wind.
None greater than thee, O Lord,
None greater than thee.
Rolling continued to sing after his microphone was cut off, and witnesses claim that his lips continued to move until the moment his chest stopped rising and falling.
The Independend Florida Alligator has an excellent site dedicated to the Rolling murders, trial and execution.
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| | Posted 10/26/2006 11:08 AM - 3 views - 1 comments
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