About 20 students, most members of an Ohio State campus prayer group, gathered Tuesday night for a vigil in front of the maintenance building that was the scene of a campus shooting Tuesday morning.
Shortly after 10 p.m., members of 24/7 Prayer gathered in a circle and lit candles across the street from the building at 2000 Tuttle Park Place. Early Tuesday morning, custodial worker Nathaniel Brown shot and killed his supervisor Larry Wallington and injured another manager, Henry Butler, before shooting and killing himself.
Janika Pittman, president of the non-denominational group, said members were praying for the victims, their families and their co-workers.
“Sometimes we forget about the maintenance people,” she said. “We don’t really think about them. We see our clean classrooms. We just assume that they come that way.”
Some workers looked out from open third-story windows as the group sang “Amazing Grace.”
Others stopped to look on their way to clock into the building across the street, which had remained a crime scene for most of the day.
One third-shift worker, who asked not to be named because she said she had been told not to speak to the media, said she happened upon the vigil on her way into work.
She said she wasn’t working in the area when the shooting occurred but found out about it from her supervisor.
She added that the night before the shooting, she saw Butler, who is now in stable condition after undergoing surgery at the OSU Medical
Center.
“He was in my office area and looked right at me. He said, ‘hi,’ and I waved and said ‘hi’ to him. And then just to think that he could die. Everybody was just shocked,” she said.
Larry Wallington, the supervisor who was killed, was “just a sweet guy — easygoing, easy to talk to,” she said. He was a boss who didn’t just give instructions, she said. He worked with his crew.
“I saw him Sunday night. He had the carpet machine and he was out there cleaning the carpet himself, right there with his employees,” she said.
She said she was touched by the students’ vigil.
“It’s flooring me that they’re so concerned about custodial workers,” she said. “I feel like they’re praying for every employee that was on third shift and everybody that knows Larry.”
