Posts Tagged ‘workplace violence’

We’ve all been stuck in a boring meeting where someone was droning on and on while we thought about all the things we could be accomplishing if we weren’t stuck in a boring meeting. When called to a faculty meeting, college ecology professor Robert O. Lawton had the foresight to bring his manuscript. As other participants debated tenure issues, he quietly worked on his book about trees. The last thing he expected was that another professor would end the boredom by pulling an automatic weapon and opening fire.

When the shooting stopped, three of Lawton’s colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were dead and three others wounded. “It was an ordinary faculty meeting,” Lawton told reporters. “And then it became unordinary.”

Unfortunately, Lawton’s “unordinary” experience isn’t all that unordinary.

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