HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — It’s been a year since a Harvard-educated professor opened fire during a faculty meeting in a conference room at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three colleagues and wounding three others. Ever since, those staff meetings have been held elsewhere.
Professor Debra Moriarity, who narrowly escaped dying that day, works in an office nearby and said it’s too much to go back in there.
“That conference room has been closed up since after the incident,” she says. “They went in, cleaned it and repainted it, but we don’t use it.”
She and the rest of the survivors of professor Amy Bishop’s Feb. 12 rampage are recovering, pulling each other through with the help of dozens of doctors, counselors, substitute teachers, relatives and friends.
“We talked to each other a lot, especially in those first few weeks,” says Moriarity, interim chair of the department of biological sciences, where the shooting occurred. “We’re at an OK place now, probably better than a lot of people expected us to be.”
Moriarity has awful memories from that day: She tried to stop Bishop and wound up with a gun pointed directly at her. The weapon clicked but didn’t fire.
