10 years on: the Alumni Road shootings

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Newington lottery shootings  -- a.k.a. the "lottery massacre," or as I called it in The Living Room Times the next day, the "Alumni Road massacre." Disgruntled state lottery employee Matthew Beck shot and killed four co-workers, then himself, at the Connecticut lottery headquarters on the road behind the high school's athletic fields, with the last two deaths literally occurring in the NHS football parking lot.

There was a moment of silence at 8:45 this morning in memory of the slain employees: state lotto director Otho Brown; chief financial officer and former New Britain mayor Linda Mlynarczyk (formerly Blogoslawski); vice president of operations Rick Rubelmann; and information systems director Michael Logan. Governor Jodi Rell, who was lieutenant governor on March 6, 1998, issued the following statement:

On that horrible morning, four devoted public servants were killed and the lives of their colleagues were forever altered. Sadly, Connecticut has all too often seen state employees such as highway workers and state police officers killed in the line of duty. Yet the events of March 6, 1998, are etched in our memory with particular shock. I ask that state residents pause with me on Thursday morning to pray for the victims, their fellow lottery employees and their families.

Amen.

I was out sick from school that day, and slept till sometime after noon. When I woke up, I found several messages on the answering machine from my parents, telling me there'd been a shooting at lottery headquarters, near the high school. (If I remember correctly, they'd heard about it because the shooter had been a member of their union.) I quickly turned on CNN, to find live coverage of the tragedy in my hometown. Helicopters were hovering overhead; satellite trucks were everywhere. While I'd been sleeping, Newington had become the center of the nation's attention. I logged on to AOL and saw an article beginning with words I never thought I'd read: "NEWINGTON, Conn. (AP)." The article went on to describe Newington as a "small, sleepy town" -- my hometown was a cliché for a day.

This was during my junior year, only a few months after the deaths of Bob and Jen. Those tragedies had hit the NHS community harder, of course, since they were more personal and specific to the high school, rather than being a mere matter of traumatic proximity. Still, the lottery massacre certainly contributed to the overall sense of 1997-98 being a rather hellish year at Newington High School. It also came at a time when school shootings were becoming major news items: the Pearl and Peducah tragedies had occurred a few months earlier, and the Jonesboro massacre would take place 2 1/2 weeks later. (Columbine was over a year away.) Although the lottery shootings were not actually at the school, they were close enough that I'd say they definitely reinforced a general feeling of edginess about such things.

Long term, the shootings led to a new gun control law in Connecticut, which has since been used to confiscate more than 1,200 guns from "people who are considered a serious danger to themselves or others." Also, the Hartford Courant won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the shootings.