Writer recalls time at Virginia Tech
It’s a piece I wrote for the Daily Press, but which they ended up deciding not to run. I added the name of the now-identified shooter to the piece as edited by Daily Press Managing Editor Keith Jones. (No point in wasting a good edit.)
It’s ironic, but the fact that it’s now the #10 most-read story across Freedom Communications today makes me irrationally angry and frustrated. I’m tired of hearing familiar names like McBride or WUVT or Ambler-Johnston or Norris Hall or the Duck Pond or Smith Mountain Lake in the national media associated with this sort of thing. I don’t want to see Blacksburg in the AP video crawl on the bottom of the Hesperia Star site or hear NPR calling for reports from WUVT (which they never refer to as “woovit,” as those of us who worked there did).
The longest I’ve lived anywhere in a continuous stretch was my six years in Blacksburg, and it feels like a violation to have this be what my school will be known for forever. It must be how Kent State students must feel.
To me, Norris Hall is where my college girlfriend (an industrial engineering student) studied and it was the building across the Drill Field from my original dorm, West Eggleston. It was at Norris Hall that I heard that my friend Aislinn had died, when I was waiting for my girlfriend to get out of class.
Ambler-Johnston is where I went to study and get away from the chaos of the fraternity house, but ended up making good friends. It was the place that I first heard Nirvana, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam and where I first logged onto a BBS in those primitive days before the World Wide Web.
This is probably an awful admission, but I’ve never cried for 9/11, although thinking about the passengers on Flight 93 calling their loved ones always brings me to the brink. But I keep crying about what’s happened in Blacksburg and getting angry at everyone and everything, rebuffing my family when they call me on the phone.
I know the real victims are those who have been shot and their families, but this is going to stick with me for a long time to come, I think.
Of all the stories to come out of Blacksburg this week, perhaps the most remarkable has been the life and death of mechanical engineering professor Liviu Librescu.
When Cho Seung-Hui came to his classroom in Norris Hall, looking for more people to kill, Librescu, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, put himself between the shooter and his students, and told his kids to run for it.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
Inside Norris, the attack began with a thunderous sound from Room 206 – “what sounded like an enormous hammer,” said Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior who was in a solid mechanics lecture in a classroom next door.
Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks to make hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said.
“I must’ve been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last,” said Calhoun. He landed in a bush and ran.
Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at his professor, who had stayed behind, apparently to prevent the gunman from opening the door.
The instructor was killed, Calhoun said.
Erin Sheehan, who was in the German class next door to Calhoun’s class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of about two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.
What an amazing final lesson to teach his students, whether they had the Monday 9 a.m. class with him or not.
CNN has the first few names of the Virginia Tech dead listed.
I think the picture of Ryan Clark may be the hardest on me: I’m used to seeing the band in such high spirits at football games — even when we were on NCAA suspension much of my time at Tech, and had suffered a major drain of good players and were consistently losing — that it’s hard to reconcile those memories with him being gunned down for the crime of being a good resident advisor.
Not among the dead are anyone from my fraternity, which sent out an e-mail reassuring everyone:
To All Friends, Family, and Members of Pi Kappa Alpha,
As you may or not be aware, there were tragic events that took place today on the Virginia Tech Campus. We have confirmed that no members of our chapter have been injured or deceased. However, this tragedy will undoubtedly have a great effect on us and the entire Virginia Tech Community. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by this tragedy.
We have received numerous phone calls and e-mails expressing sympathies for all of us here at Virginia Tech. It means so much to have your support during this tragedy. We are currently working with the campus and community to support them in any way we can.
In the bonds of Phi Phi Kappa Alpha,
Tyler Greene
SMC Epsilon Chapter
