How a snowball fight ended in tragedy and prompted University of Tennessee to ban snow days

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2012.

Here's the history behind why the University of Tennessee seldom closes for inclement weather.

The university does close the Knoxville campus for weather, but not often. The policy goes back to a tragedy almost 60 years ago and a vow by the university's president at the time, Andy Holt, to always hold classes, even during a blizzard.

First the snowballs flew. Then the bullets. The University of Tennessee's deadliest snow day started with a crowd of students laying out of class to throw snowballs at passing cars on the Cumberland Avenue Strip.

It ended with one student dead, a trucker accused of murder and a city enraged. "Apparently something happens to young people in this ordinarily rather mild climate when a heavy snow falls," the News Sentinel wrote in an editorial the next day. "They come close to being primitive savages."

The truck driver, William Douglas Willett Jr. of Greeneville, Tennessee, swore he fired in self-defense at a snow-slinging mob bent on dragging him from his truck. Some students claimed Willett jumped out of the truck to aim his gun and a string of curses into the crowd.

Either way, Marnell Goodman, an 18-year-old UT freshman from Swampscott, Massachusetts, lay dying with a bullet through his brain and his blood staining the snow.

Fellow students carried him to a nearby drugstore to wait for an ambulance, while others snatched Willett's gun and beat, kicked and held the driver until police arrived. Emergency room doctors pronounced Goodman dead on arrival. Police charged Willett with second-degree murder.

"We have so many versions of what happened, it is going to be difficult really to get down to the truth," Fred Scruggs, a Knoxville police captain, told reporters.

UT officials had kept classes going the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1965, despite freezing temperatures and as much as half a foot of snow. That didn't stop a crowd of 300-400 students from gathering on the Strip to uphold the time-honored campus tradition of pelting cars with snowballs - some of them stuffed with rocks - and of staking out red lights and stop signs to yank open car doors and douse drivers with snow.

Willett, 27, had been hauling a load of frozen chickens from Ellijay, Georgia, to Cincinnati that afternoon when he stopped for the red light at Cumberland Avenue and 17th Street around 3:30 p.m. Police said he cried as he told his version of what happened.

"I didn't want to shoot them," Willett told the newspaper later. "A gang of people surrounded my truck and began jerking my doors open ... They hit me with some snowballs and then some of them started pulling at me. ... Another snowball hit me between the eyes and I couldn't see. I fired the gun. I thought it was pointed in the air. When I got the snow out of my eyes, the boy was lying on the street."

Goodman's friends claimed he was running away when Willett fired, but police determined the bullet struck Goodman from the front or side - just above the right eye - and passed out below his left ear.

Other witnesses and a flood of letters to the editor told of students mobbing every car and truck that came along the Strip. A bus driver accused the crowd of shattering a dozen of his windows. Police speculated a fatal wreck on Cumberland two hours before the shooting, caused when a 58-year-old driver suffered a heart attack behind the wheel, might have been triggered by panic at running the gauntlet of snowballers.

A Knox County grand jury listened to the various stories and ultimately declined to indict Willett. News Sentinel columnist Carson Brewer, who endured the snowball barrage that day, shared the jurors' sentiments.

"There may have been a dozen persons in that line of cars angry enough to shoot a student," Brewer wrote. "But they didn't have guns and they're glad now they didn't."

UT officials conducted their own investigation but failed to find many cooperative witnesses.

President Andy Holt settled for promising greater cooperation between city and campus authorities and for vowing to hold classes even during blizzards. As the snow melted away, so did Knoxville's outrage.

"Ultimately, Monday's tragedy will become an unsavory legend, while UT itself will be here from here on out," a News Sentinel editorial observed.

"We are convinced a strong lesson has been learned; we seriously doubt if another outbreak will occur."

The tradition set by Holt still stands. Students at UT still grumble as they tramp to class through snow and ice while drivers travel the Strip in relative peace, rain or shine.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: University of Tennessee snowball fight and why campus rarely closes