“My name is Greg Gibson and I’m speaking with the man who killed my son,” Gibson (above right) says in a striking StoryCorps radio interview first broadcast last December.
It is one of the great horrors of our nation that gun massacre after gun massacre, with seemingly nothing done by our leaders to stop them, makes Gibson’s story of his son’s murder in a school shooting two and a half decades ago ever timely and topical.
The Gloucester writer and bookseller is the author of the 1999 book “Gone Boy: A Walkabout,” his account of his journey to find truth and meaning in the murder of his 18-year-old son Galen in a shooting at Simon’s Rock college in Massachusetts in December 1992.
As 25th anniversary of the killing approached, Gibson went to a prison to visit Wayne Lo (pictured above left) who was convicted of shooting dead Galen, murdering a second person and wounding four others when they were both students at the school.
“This is really exhausting isn’t it,” Gibson says frankly at one point in the conversation.
Later he says, “We’ve all suffered and we’ve all grown wise from out suffering. Some people do it one way and some people do it another way. I understand that.”
Lo asks Gibson if it bothers his family that he’s talking to his son’s murderer. “I think it bothers my son,” Gibson replies. “He just doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. And I respect that completely. So, yeah, I think they think I’m a little crazy. But they’re proud that I’m working for Galen so that people don’t have to keep doing this.”
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