For Andrew Boldt and family. Our prayers and thoughts are with them tonight.

Today during the course of one of our usual workday back-‘n’-forth email volleys, I thought it odd when my wife sent me another, separate email with a new title: “Purdue Shooting”. She knew she’d have my full attention.

Within the same minute that I opened her email, my son the Purdue freshman texted me. In case I heard about a shooting at Purdue, he wrote, he wanted me to know he was fine, even though he’d been in the same building where and when the shooting occurred.

That disrupted my concentration for a while.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

…in mid-August my son moved into his own apartment up at college, living alone for the first time. Naturally we underwent various bouts of grief, panic, pacing back and forth, imagined scenarios of endless possible disasters, and a sort of loving numbness that I wouldn’t necessarily call acceptance.

We’re not yet to the lurid part of the news cycle wherein the media are ready to guide us through a dramatization of the full timeline of events, but what I’ve been able to gather looks like this:

The incident was a single targeted murder, not an ambitious massacre cut short. Close to noon today, a shooting occurred in the Electrical Engineering Building on the northeast corner of Purdue’s campus. (I’m told it happened in the basement, but no official sources have verified this in public.) At least three shots were fired. A teaching assistant named Andrew Boldt was killed. Meanwhile on the second floor, my son was listening to a professor’s lecture about the 19th-century Opium Wars.

The shooter — also a TA under the same professor as Boldt — exited the building, waited for the authorities to arrive, and turned himself in without resistance. The police set off the fire alarm, evacuated the building, and conducted a standard room-by-room search. My son, who heard none of the gunshots, began to suspect at this point that something was amiss.

The entire campus was on lockdown for a while so the authorities could do what they needed to do — i.e., confirm whether or not this was an isolated incident, locate any collaborators, possibly prevent another Columbine or Virginia Tech, and so on. Some professors immediately dismissed classes; others pressed on and remained in session, to the incredulity of many alarmed students. A couple hours later all classes were suspended and my son headed back to his place, unharmed but rattled.

We’ve kept in touch throughout the night. He had no idea the event would make headlines beyond West Lafayette. A candlelight vigil was held on campus this evening. Purdue President Mitch Daniels cut short his business trip to Colombia and should be back in Indiana shortly if he isn’t already. Classes will remain suspended tomorrow. Meanwhile, the discussion between students on Reddit (where Boldt frequently hung out) remains bustling, respectful, informative, and stunned. My son has spent the evening contemplating the disturbing fact that a life was cut tragically short not two floors away from him.

The guy. (Source: uploaded to Imgur, which wouldn’t give me a source to credit.)

The shooter’s name has since been made public. So far I’ve seen his Facebook page, a grainy photo of him lying on the ground in surrender, his online check-in at the Tippecanoe County Jail, his weekly lab schedule, and bits of an EEG project to which he contributed, much of which was gobbledygook to me. For now, that’s enough about him.

Meanwhile, around Indiana and nationwide, several thousand parents of Purdue students spent the day sitting or standing helplessly at their internet access points, exchanging alarm and frustration and grief and baseless rumors, wondering why this happened, counting down the minutes until justice is served, pondering if maybe attending Purdue was a bad idea (as if every college is a third-world guerrilla state where murder is a daily routine), tallying the myriad ways in which Purdue either allowed this to happen or failed to respond in an omniscient and omnipotent manner.

All of them worried sick about their kids who are no longer kids. Some have been adults longer than others. Virtually all of them are beyond their parents’ zone of protection. The parents can lend sympathetic ears, pray for all involved from afar, keep the communication lines open, and/or continue to console and share outrage with each other. Best-case scenario: they can send their kids extra cookies this week.

For the majority, there’s not much else they can do. That we can do, I should say. We can’t actually be there physically for our kids, to hug them or smother them with parenting. We have to keep reminding ourselves we won’t be able to shield our offspring from everything. In a broken world where the worst can happen without notice and without our consent, all of us will have trials and tribulations to face. That means they will, too.

Like the rest of us adults, they’ll need to acquire the life skills to cope with adversity, to weather the worst of times, and — if we’ve performed any aspect of our jobs well — figure out how to support, comfort, and lift each other up as a community without us wise old folks around to do it for them.

In retrospect, I’m really glad we all got cell phones before he moved up to school, and that he was thoughtful enough to keep us posted today.