Warning chill

From the News Star:



Warning chill to the world
It is every parent's nightmare, the worst turn imaginable, when we bundle up our children and send them off to school.
That's how it is with our toddlers in pre-K, our growing children in elementary and high schools.
It is no less the case when our sons and daughters leave the nest and head off to college. We want them to succeed, and we want them to be safe. It's a dangerous world, and there are so many things that can go wrong.
At the University of Central Arkansas, the world intruded on idyllic campus life Sunday night when four men — none of them were students — unloaded their weapons. That's the storyline police, who hold four suspects in custody, are investigating.
Dead in the wake of the mayhem were Ryan Henderson, 18, and Chavares Block, 19, both UCA students and Arkansas residents. Police believe they may have been simple bystanders when the shooting commenced.
"This is an incredibly heinous case," local prosecutor Marcus Vaden said. "When you have a situation where it appears some, if not all of the victims, were innocent bystanders, that's bad."
Bad on the two young men who lost their lives. Bad on a third young man, a non-student, wounded in the leg. Bad on a student body that believed their scholarly corner of the world was same from the heresy of random crime. But not now.
It was bad, too, on Monroe-area students at UCA, among them Matt Dickerson and Darrius McNeal, Neville High graduates, who fielded inquiries throughout the night from friends and family who worried for their safety. Everyone, it seems, knows somebody there.
Dickerson called his father to assure him he was OK. McNeal said he had class with one of the shooting victims.
Both young men described the mood on campus as somber, as authorities sifted through the wreckage of Sunday's events to solve the crime. Somber at UCA. Somber in Conway, a pleasant town some 30 minutes from Little Rock.
But the tragic events that played out there have likely shaken the confidence of parents of all 12,500 UCA students. No one bargains for this when they search with their sons and daughters for colleges, drive them to campus and decorate their dorms rooms.
Come Monday, UCA parents might have been a million miles away from the alleyway where one victim died, finding his final rest on a sidewalk between a dorm and the fine arts center. But their thoughts had to drift to what had happened.
It's not a long ride from Central Arkansas to northeastern Louisiana, where three colleges and a community college are located. It doesn't take a great stretch in imagination to consider that no matter how hard campuses try to ensure safety, bad things can happen.
They know that at Central Arkansas, where a cold-blooded crime sent a warning chill to the rest of the world.