I didn’t know anything was happening because I was two buildings away from the shooting. Eventually, a security guard told my team to take shelter in the “tank” (a secured steel Faraday cage where the classified computer hardware I worked on was isolated from the outside world–this was before the Internet). We were let out after police had surrounded the building and isolated the shooter. I had to call my wife to come pick me up because the SWAT team was staged behind my car in the parking lot.

I knew Laura Black only slightly, my department softball team had played hers several times. She was a lovely young woman, intelligent, athletic, much more beautiful than the actress they picked to play her role. She survived her injuries and came back to work. Eventually, she transferred to Southern California after TRW bought us out. I hope she’s doing all right.

ESL fell apart after this. I’m not sure if it was the incident, or the end of the Cold War which pretty much put us out of the intelligence technology business. I went to work at another firm in Mountain View about a year later. The company did its best to give us closure, with counseling and ceremonies, but there really isn’t much they can do after something like this. Some of my fellow employees were emotionally damaged by this incident. I have never forgotten it, even though I was only on the fringes of it all. It was all so sad, so pointless. What a waste.

Somebody made a TV movie about it, starring Brooke Shields and Richard Thomas.

One of my coworkers turned white, started trembling, and had to leave.

I found out that he’d been at ESL that day. I suppose I couldn’t have known, but since then I’ve been a bit more careful about my “humor”.