UVU spends a year vowing to 'continue what he started,' now confirmed too unprepared to have stopped it.

…(cont) Next page, one day later. September 11th. Thousands of people packed into an arena at Utah Valley University — the same campus — and the report says they vowed to "continue what he started." I remember that week because the car took its usual ten minutes to warm up, first cold morning of the fall, belt squealing the whole time, and I sat there thinking about that arena while I waited. Continue what he started. I wrote the phrase down twice in the notebook, which I don't usually do, so I must have thought I'd need it later.

Five days after that — and this is the part I keep flipping back to check, because it reads backward to me even though the dates don't lie — a notice of claim gets filed. September 16th. The family, moving toward a lawsuit against the state, the university, the campus police department. Same date, a headline — the headline's words, I want to be careful, not a quote from her directly — says Erika Kirk claims security failed him. The notice of claim comes after the arena filled, not before it. I had that backward in my head for the better part of a week. The pages don't move. I do.

So line it up plain: the vow to continue what he started, filed on the 11th. The complaint about what let him be stopped in the first place, filed on the 16th. Five days between a promise and a filing about the exact thing the promise was supposed to answer.

Last page, dated this week, September 26th. A review of campus security. Two words doing the work in that sentence, and I've been stuck on the second one since Tuesday night, which is probably the whole reason I couldn't sleep. It's a word you'd use about a test you didn't study for, a storm you didn't see coming. It showed up instead in a legal filing about a shooting.

I put the notebook down around five this morning. My wife was still asleep. I sat on the step by myself for a while and went back through the pages one more time. Proclamation. Ceremony. Vow. Claim. Review. Five entries, sixteen days apart at the widest, and the earliest one already had the word "tradition" in it.

Excuse me — before you go, one more thing, I almost closed the notebook without checking it. I've got both pages side by side on the table now, and they're describing the same thing. Unprepared.