I’m working at home today, having returned to meet the HVAC guy and finding out we need a new air conditioner. I was upstairs “since the upstairs AC unit is still okay, touch wood” and kept hearing what sounded like helicopters overhead. I went outside to look but didn’t see any.
After a while I was sure I heard one, then it sounded like two or more. I asked a question on Facebook and Twitter: “Okay, at the risk of sounding like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, why have I been hearing a helicopter in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area for the last hour or more? It’s almost never a good sign.”
I assumed it would be bad news. The only time a hovering helicopter is welcome, in my experience, is when UNC wins the NCAA championship.
Several folks responded right away to let me know what I could have found with a news search, that a light plane had crashed at Horace Williams Airport, not too far from where we live. Sadly, the news is reporting that one person was killed and two injured. One of the passengers is the brother of the American killed in the recent bombing in Uganda that targeted viewers of the World Cup final. He was flying home to be with his family. Thankfully, from what I can tell, he’s okay.
I’m sitting here in my bedroom now, listening to what sounds like several news helicopters, flying back and forth, no doubt broadcasting the same image of a crumpled airplane.
In 1995, a UNC law student named Wendell Williamson shot and killed two people near downtown Chapel Hill, UNC sophomore and lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt and Chapel Hill resident Ralph W. Walker, Jr. He also shot and injured two other people, including a young Chapel Hill police officer who was shot through the open window of her car as she rushed to the scene. As this 1999 article in Time points out, everybody who was in Chapel Hill at the time has a memory of that event. I had two friends who were downtown at the time and hid from the shootings in a parking garage. Another said Williamson shot at him and missed.
I was in Durham during the shootings. I don’t remember why, but I know it was after I had started working for myself because I had my first cell phone. I was driving back into Chapel Hill when my mother called. “Don’t worry,” she said, “your father is fine.” Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about because I hadn’t heard the news. My dad worked at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time, having retired from Nortel and taken an associate dean position at the School of Education.
I called and talked to him, then I pulled the car over, turned on the radio news and was overwhelmed by a deep sadness. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill since 1989. We moved around a lot when I was young, and Chapel Hill quickly felt like home when I moved here and took a job at The Chapel Hill News. Inside a year I knew lots of people, from the mayor to the door guy at The Cat’s Cradle to bank presidents and bartenders and musicians and town council members and business owners.
It turns out I probably also knew Williamson, as he and I were both regulars at the Hardback Cafe. I don’t really remember him, possibly because I was usually there in the evenings and he was a daytime regular.
Everybody says the same thing in the aftermath of senseless violence, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen here. If you’ve ever been to Chapel Hill, it’s a fairly typical, picturesque college town. When it gets mentioned in books, it’s usually called “leafy” or “sleepy.” It’s grown a lot in the 21 years that I’ve lived here, but it’s still a pretty laid-back and friendly place. The kind of place where tragedy feels more personal.
My apartment was near downtown. I found out later that Williamson had parked his car in the lot of the adjacent apartments, and walked into town via the same route I used. Sitting on the couch watching the news, I could see the helicopters outside my window. They would hover there, motionless, for as long as they could, then zoom off abruptly to refuel. Then they would come back. That went on for a long time; in my memory they were there for hours.
I remember wanting to shout at them to go away. The longer they hovered there, the more ghoulish, inhuman and robotic they began to look, like mechanized vultures.
That’s what I’m thinking of now, as the helicopters hover outside my window again. I can’t quite see them through the trees, except when they climb to get a different view, or, I assume, leave to refuel. I suppose they’ll be there through the evening news broadcasts, and we’ll be eating dinner to the sound of rotor blades.