Ceremony honors memory of Louisiana Technical College shooting victims

BATON ROUGE – Mourners clutching candles gathered to remember the nursing students shot to death Friday in their classroom at Louisiana Technical College.
At the end of Sunday evening’s ceremony, some of the classmates who witnessed the shootings stood on a stage in front of the technical college, a few hundred feet from the second-floor classroom where Latina Williams, 23, opened fire on two of her classmates at 8:30 a.m. Friday.
Williams fatally shot Taneshia Butler, 26, and Karsheika Graves, 21, before turning the .357-caliber revolver on herself, police have said.
“We never expected to stand here today being the survivors of a class shooting,” nursing student Helen Pham said on behalf of her classmates. “We never fathomed that we would have to say goodbye to our classmates, our friends.”
Pham said she and her classmates believe the victims were not specifically targeted.
“We believe that the shooting was not provoked by Taneshia or Karsheika, and that their proximity (to the shooter) determined their fate,” Pham said.
Butler and Graves were sitting in the rear of the classroom, near the door through which Williams entered.
“These two students were enrolled in nursing, probably one of the most noble professions that we know of,” said Jim Henderson, a senior vice president with the Louisiana Community & Technical College System.
Bouquets of flowers, teddy bears and balloons accumulated at an impromptu memorial by the flagpole in front of the school.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff told the crowd he had been discussing Thursday’s Missouri City Hall shootings that left five dead Friday morning when the call came in he has always dreaded – a shooter in a school.
Two days after the shooting, no motive has emerged.
“I walked up here and I sat in a corner of that room where these three children were laying, and I wondered why,” LeDuff said. “The theme of that day was ‘why?’ ”
A toxicology report on Williams is pending. Also not made public at this point is where she got the gun.