Over the years, the open office on the first floor of the Harshbarger Building in the University of Arizona campus became a happy place.
The three staff members of the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences who worked there tried to make it a homey spot for students and faculty to stop by. They decorated for holidays like Halloween and Christmas.
They put out sweets. They got along.
When Prof. Thomas Meixner became department head and occupied the adjacent office, they laughed at his voice that boomed ever louder as his excitement grew.
โWe decorated the whole thing so you could barely even walk through the building,โ executive assistant Erma Santander recalled. โWe loved the students. Weโd bring cookies and have candies there, to bring them into the office.โ
Her colleague Kathy Varin, the departmentโs business manager, was known for burning scented candles.
โIt was a very homey, friendly office.โ Varin said Thursday. โWe lost all of that.โ
Varin, Santander and Lupita Romero, the three women who shared that office in fall semester 2022, were among the hardest hit by the killing of Meixner on Oct. 5 last year. The department chair fell in front of Varinโs desk when he was shot, allegedly by a disturbed former graduate student. From her vantage point at her standing desk, Santander โsaw everything,โ she said.
They tried to help him. Santanderโs trembling fingers could barely tap 911 into the phone.
They prayed over him.
Surprisingly, all three still work for the department, struggling in their own ways to take back their lives from the gunman who shattered them. And this semester, theyโre back in the same building where it happened.
Door locks and panic buttons
In the stunned months after the killing, the whole department left the Harshbarger Building. For much of last year, they decamped to the Environment and Natural Resources 2 Building, scattered among its folds.
The bad associations with Harshbarger were strong: Not only was Meixner killed there, but a graduate student had died by suicide in the building three weeks earlier.
โIt was difficult for everyone to move out, in short order, of the building, but we had to because of the immediate psychological trauma,โ interim department head Christopher Castro said. โIt was the right thing to do.โ
But over time it became clear there were no real alternatives for the department, which has hired new faculty and kept a similar number of students. They would have to move back to Harshbarger until new digs in the Shantz Building become available, probably in 2026.
That meant the women, who had seen their friendly office defiled by violence, would have to go back into the building to work.
The university put about a million dollars into renovating spaces in Harshbarger, Castro said. The open office downstairs became a place for faculty emeriti, and the staff moved to their own separate offices upstairs.
They have lockable doors, doorbells, even panic buttons. Itโs all helpful, but the struggle is more psychological and personal than it is about these physical features of their new digs.
Santander said she only left her house once in the two weeks after the shooting. When she went into Costco, she had a panic attack.
โChris (Castro), thank God, really pushed me and encouraged me to seek therapy. I just wanted to basically fall in a ball and not deal with anything.โ
โIโm not going to let myself fall apartโ
Among the things Santander started doing, with the guidance of a therapist, was returning to Harshbarger even before she had to go back for work. She was trying to desensitize herself to being in the place where it happened.
โI walked right through Harshbarger to get to ENR 2. I said to myself, โIโm not going to let him take this from me. Iโm not going to let myself fall apart because of this person.โ โ
But even now, she acknowledged, small things can trigger her. Last week, it wasnโt just the UA presidentโs email announcing memorial events for this week that sent her into a tailspin, but also the subsequent emails from friends asking how she is doing.
And Santander, who has worked in Harshbarger for about 20 years, still avoids the front area on the first floor where it all happened.
โI come through the back, I go up the stairs. I feel like Iโm in a different place because I donโt go through downstairs. What Iโve done to fight him (the murderer), is to get through being back and have my life here again.โ
Varin, too, has worked hard with therapists to move forward after the blow of that day. She started with one, then added a second who specializes in trauma.
Varin took a three month leave of absence, which started with her missing work and ended with her wishing she didnโt have to get back. Now she rotates days in and out of the office. And she, too, has her own way of dealing with being back in Harshbarger.
โI donโt go in and out of the front door if I can avoid it,โ she said. โI come in a side door and come right up the stairs to this office. I avoid the office downstairs.โ
โI obviously replay it a lot in my mind. I canโt help it,โ Varin continued. โIt helps me to talk to people, and obviously therapy can help. Thereโs just a lot of things that happen that remind you heโs not here.โ
Trust in university lost
For their colleague Romero, the graduate program coordinator, returning to Harshbarger is often unsettling, she said.
โWith the anniversary coming up, itโs been more difficult. A lot of things are triggering right now,โ she said. โAll of that grief and trauma from last year just accumulated.โ
Itโs been especially hard for Romero to lose faith in the university where she got her bachelorโs degree and has spent her entire professional career. Her pride in and trust for the university has slipped, she said, and sheโs struggling to recover it.
Thatโs something all three women share: An anger toward the university as an institution, tempered by appreciation for members of their own department, such as Castro, and other departments who have reached out and helped.
The anger stems from the fact that the university knew the former graduate student posed a threat but police and other officials didnโt do enough to stop him. It was aggravated by the fact that it took until December for the president to meet with these front-office victims, and that it was difficult for some of them to obtain deserved benefits, such as workers compensation, in the aftermath.
Still, theyโve chosen to stick with their department, helping sustain it in the building where their lives were shattered, even if it canโt be what it was before.
