Honoring the Sooner Boomer
"The University of Oklahoma has put outside the student union a patio stone engraved with the name of the student suicide bomber," Nolan Clay reports today in The Oklahoman.
OU's student affairs division arranged to have the stone placed, an OU alumni affairs employee said. OU officials say families pay for such memorials but the student's father said OU offered to place the stone and never billed him.UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more.
A stone costs $150.
Joel "Joe” Henry Hinrichs III, an engineering student, died Oct. 1, 2005, when his bomb went off at a campus bench a short distance from an OU night football game.
The FBI investigated whether the student, 21, tried or intended to enter the packed stadium but reported finding no conclusive evidence.
The student's father traveled from Colorado to Oklahoma to visit with university officials after the death. Joel Hinrichs Jr. said OU's dean of students, Clarke Stroud, offered to have the stone placed.
In an e-mail, the father told The Oklahoman the dean "very kindly understood that Joel's act was one of loneliness, not of aggression, and offered to have the stone placed in the memorial courtyard; he also indicated that the wife of the university president might select a tree to be placed on campus, also in Joel III's memory.”
