UC Santa Barbara cancelled classes Tuesday for a Day of Mourning and Reflection to mark the deaths of six students killed in last week's Isla Vista rampage.
An estimated 20,000 members of the campus community gathered in the late afternoon in UCSB's Harder Stadium. They heard from UC President Janet Napolitano, UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang, student speakers and the father of one of the murdered victims.
The names of George Chen, Katherine Cooper, James Hong, Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, David Wang and Veronika Weiss were read during the service.
“We come together this afternoon with heavy hearts — our UC Santa Barbara family is in mourning,” said Yang. “We grieve the loss of these precious lives … we remember the joy and the light that they brought to this world.”
“Many dark and difficult days lie ahead,” Yang continued. “But we will continue to draw strength and comfort from each other and we will become an even stronger university and community.”
“It is important that we not lose sight of the lives we have gathered to remember … that we not let the arithmetic of this atrocity define them,” Napolitano told the crowd and viewers of a web live stream. “These were individuals who each left a mark on the world around them … the good they did, their personal triumphs and their personality traits, the grace notes they brought to their everyday lives, their character, even their quirks.
“There are stories to cherish and to tell and to tell again,” she added. “For as long as we hold them in our hearts, they are not gone.”
Richard Martinez, the father of Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, spoke of his son's life and made an impassioned plea to the crowd to take political action against gun violence, inspiring a rousing, stadium-wide chant of “Not one more,” a slogan he coined spontaneously during a weekend press conference.
More at the UCSB Current news site.
