Bill Giorda

Station Manager, KUT Studios

00:00 / 10:20
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Bill Giorda was manager of KUT Radio in 1966. He was on campus at the station during the shooting.

When he heard that the shooting was happening, he immediately called his wife, a graduate student at UT-Austin, to tell her to stay home. After the phone call, he ran into another graduate student. They decided to find a camera and start recording the shooting.

The two were able to record camera footage from a courtyard access through the back of the KUT studio. They had a direct line of sight to the tower’s observation deck, from the east side.

“The thing that was rather galling when we thought about it later was that Whitman, if he had decided to come around to that side of the tower, would have had a direct line of sight to pick one, or the other, or both of us off,” Giorda says.