A Camden woman who wrote a book-length tribute to her granddaughter – killed in the nation’s worst mass shooting – has died.
Mary Carlson’s charmed life on the Maine coast suffered a sudden, devastating blow nearly 20 years ago when she learned that Emily Jane Hilscher had suddenly died.
Emily was only 18, a freshman animal-and-poultry sciences major, when she became the first of 32 victims of the Virginia Tech campus-wide killing, the deadliest-ever campus massacre and largest mass-casualty shooting in U.S. history.
She was the first member of the Virginia Tech family to be cut down in a hail of gunfire from a deranged 23-year-old fellow student on April 16, 2007.
Emily had become a proud member of the Virginia Tech equestrian team just weeks before the mass shooting.
She had joined the Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association and competed successfully in her first show at Virginia Intermont College on February 12, 2007.
Around 7:15 a.m. on April 16, 2007, Seung Hui Cho began what quickly began a murderous rampage.
He first gunned down Hilscher in a fourth-floor elevator of West Ambler Johnston Hall, a high-rise co-ed dorm.
Investigators later determined that Cho’s shoes matched a blood-stained print found in the hallway outside Hilscher’s room.
Early media reports speculated that he was obsessed with Hilscher and became enraged after she rejected his romantic overtures.
But police found no evidence that Hilscher knew her killer.
Promising equestrian Emily J. Hilscher was scheduled to compete in her second horse show on April 21, 2007, which would have been just five days after the campus massacre.
Emily’s maternal grandfather, Gil Carlson, a Cold-War U.S. Navy submarine commander she called “gramps,” died in 2014 in Camden, where in retirement he built model ships and donated them to local organizations.
His widow, having lost two grandchildren and her husband, found some solace in her piano.
Mary Carlson enjoyed playing at Quarry Hill, a senior community in Camden where she spent the last twelve years of her life.
Carlson’s survivors include her daughter, Elizabeth Hilscher, who is Emily’s mother.
