Woman of Guyanese parents killed in Oakland University shooting rampage

Apr 05, 2012 News

…remains for burial in Guyana

With her job as a tax analyst outsourced to India, Willow Glen’s mother, Judith “Judy” Seymour, had been laid off. She decided to follow in her parents’ footsteps by getting a nursing degree.
She was just two months away from reaching that dream when the unimaginable happened: A bloodthirsty gunman burst into her Oakland nursing school classroom and shot her.
On Tuesday, a day after the shooting rampage that killed seven people and injured three others at Oikos University, her family in San Jose learned what they had begun to come to grips with the previous night: Seymour, 53, was among those who died at the school.
“You don’t think someone going to a nursing school is going to be killed by someone crazy with a gun,” said her fiancé, 55-year-old union rep Timothy Brown. “One moment she’s here, and one moment she’s gone.”
Brown first suspected something was amiss Monday when he called his girlfriend and didn’t get a response, which is something that never happened. When he got home around 8 p.m., she wasn’t there, and this increased his anxiety. But he figured she’d be home soon, and he turned on the news.
“I saw the picture of dead bodies laying in the grass covered up,” he said.
Then he learned the shootings were at his fiancée’s school, Oikos University. He prayed Seymour had already left, but then he found out the killings happened while she was scheduled to be in class. He called everyone he could think of, but the authorities wouldn’t tell him
anything.
The family used GPS to track her cell phone to her car in the Oikos parking lot.
Soon, a friend who had spoken to Seymour’s instructor called and broke the news, before Oakland police confirmed it Tuesday morning.
“(I’m) shocked, devastated, heartbroken,” Brown said. “She really loved her classmates. They called each other all the time, any time of night. She was proud and happy that she was going to be a nurse.”
Seymour was also passionate about her faith and, most of all, her family. Her son, Brian, and daughter, Camella, who are both in their 20s, joined her brother and sister in mourning. Her parents were nurses in New York before moving to their native Georgetown, Guyana, as U.S. citizens.
In her free time, Seymour enjoyed going to Reno to play the slots, and taking vacations to Virginia City and Lake Tahoe. But she was especially looking forward to seeing her daughter’s graduation ceremony for her master’s degree.
The family is preparing to send her body to Guyana, where her grandmother is also buried.
The man accused of gunning down the seven persons at the California religious college was reportedly expelled and he was expected to be arraigned in court yesterday.
One L. Goh, 43, sat in an Alameda County jail early Wednesday morning, booked on charges of murder and kidnapping.
Authorities said Goh was upset that he had been expelled from Oikos University, a small college in Oakland that caters primarily to the Korean-American Christian community.
On Monday morning, he walked into the single-storey building, took a secretary hostage and went looking for a particular female administrator, Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said.
Realizing the administrator was not in the classroom where he’d hoped to find her, Goh shot the secretary and ordered the students to line up against the wall, police said. Not all of them cooperated, Jordan said, and so he began shooting.
“I’m going to kill you all,” the gunman allegedly said.
“This was a calculated, cold-blooded execution in the classroom,” the police chief said. The suspect “just felt a certain urge to inflict pain on them.”
The first 911 calls came in at 10:33 a.m.
“Shots coming from inside the building; people are running out screaming,” a dispatcher says in one of the police radio exchanges.
After the shooting, the gunman left the classroom, reloaded his semiautomatic weapon and returned, firing into several classrooms, Jordan said.
He ended his rampage by driving off in a victim’s car, police said.

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Woman of Guyanese parents killed in Oakland University shooting rampage

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