I’m trying to think of the right words to express everything that’s going through my head right now.

Where do I begin? What can I even say?

It’s strange to be on the other side of the lens for once.

I’ve spent the past six years trying to make sense of local tragedies from around the world. I’ve studied the ins and outs of school shootings, domestic terrorism and the media’s involvement…

I know a lot about it, but its pretty much the one thing I’ll never talk about. I don’t like giving people who do terrible things any sort of attention. Because the more attention they receive the more likely someone else will be to try to top what the last person did.

Look at any serial killer or school shooter, almost every single one has had a copy cat. Someone who imitated the wrong doings of someone else and got a similar amount of news coverage.

Despite all of my hootin’ and hollerin’ last semester about the fire alarms getting pulled twice a night, every Thursday through Sunday, I’ve always felt safe here. I should still feel safe here. There’s really no reason not to feel safe.

If you’ve ever met Pip you know that setting those fires was completely out of character for him. He’s obviously really sick right now. He needs help. Something tells me that he never meant to hurt anyone, he just wanted to be a hero and he took matters into his own hands. There’s no way he can be anything but mentally ill because he was loved on this campus. He had friends he could talk to if he ever felt like things were out of control. I’ve lived in two dorms, I’ve had close to forty RAs throughout my time here. I’ve never seen a closer group of RAs than the six who lived in Hawthorn Hall last semester. If Pip could have asked for help in a different way then setting those fires, he would have.

I’m not excusing his actions in the least but I want to make it clear that one of the last people I thought would have ever set those fires would have been Pip.

When I heard about the arson in Hawthorn Hall, I wasn’t surprised in the least. When I heard about who was behind it, my jaw hit the floor.

For the first time in my life I can safely say that I did not see this coming. Maybe it’s because it’s the closest that a tragedy like this has hit so close to home

And before you comment that it really wasn’t a tragedy because no one was injured because of it and there was no damage done to the building then you obviously haven’t been on campus today.

There’s an overwhelming buzz of news crews and gossip flying around everywhere but underneath that, when you catch yourself alone, there is a silence so deafening it makes your head hurt.

People feel betrayed, lost, and scared and they have every right to feel these things.

But if you see the picture of Pip being taken into custody I’m sure you can understand that he’s probably feeling the same way.

That’s all I can say about this.

Stay strong, Hawthorn.

Later we watched the story together in the news.  My daughter and I spoke about it, she told me that she had thought about how close to home it was, and how she could have been out walking when it happened, and how scary it is to hear something like that happen, and to not really know what’s going on, she thought about her mother, and how scared I would have been, for her, if she had still been out there on the streets with those gangs.

She realized that I might have thought that maybe she might have been involved.  She felt it, thought about it and got a sense of what it feels like to be me.

The whole process was a great learning experience for my daughter, to think about gangs from my perspective, to realize how scary they are for other people, and how the possibility of an accidental shooting is real and sad, and traumatic for the families and mothers of those victims.