Littwin: Dread and anxiety permeate Blacksburg

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 21, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More News Columns & Blogs

BLACKSBURG, Va. - If you cross the street, you come to the drill field. It's the center of the campus. And near the center of the drill field are the memorials, with the flowers and the teddy bears and the poster boards with handwritten messages for the dead and for the living. One person carries a sign saying, "Hokies Can Never Die."

But I don't cross the street just yet. On this side of the road is Duck Pond, next to an estate called Solitude. There's a sign - in Virginia, they love historic signs - saying the house was begun in 1802. It's hard to say whether the name Solitude mocks or comforts just now.

On the way onto campus, I had passed a sign that read: "Media Let Hokie Nation Heal." The cameras and microphones and notepads and satellite trucks are everywhere. They are too much, of course. And yet, 33 are dead, including the shooter, and attention must be paid. The real argument is about the killer and the photos and video he sent to NBC and whether they should have been released. The argument continues, but everyone I talk to here has watched.

I look up and there are two young men - students, I'm guessing - with fishing poles. I don't quite believe what I see, but there they are, right out of Norman Rockwell. I sit on a bench, which has a memorial on it for a Virginia Tech student who died last year, at 22. A plaque says, "Embrace that which defines you."

I watch the men as they try to bait their hooks. One is struggling. The other looks up at me and waves.

I call out and ask his name.

He shrugs. I can tell I've broken an unwritten rule. On this side of the road, on this day, names don't matter.

The pond is framed by the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is cloudy on a Thursday morning, and later the clouds would empty themselves of rain. But, at this point, the fishermen are lost in their work. A brook winds down to the pond. It's as if we're a world away.

A few minutes later, I get up. There's no more avoiding it. It is time to face the day.

Try to put it together

One of the lessons of Columbine is that you concentrate on those who were killed. You remember that they were real people. Their stories matter.

I met friends of Erin Peterson, a freshman who played basketball and went out for ice cream. She went to the same high school as the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho. I met a friend who told me about G. V. Loganthan, an engineering professor who left behind a wife and two daughters. I bumped -into Terri Gendron, a second-grade teacher whose daughter is going to Tech next year. Two children at her school lost parents.

"When there are 33 people in a town this size, everyone knows somebody," she says.

On Friday, everyone knew everyone. Across the state, people wore the school's orange and maroon. In The Roanoke Times, the headline reads "We Are Virginia Tech." You remember what that means.

I am standing next to Clifford Randall, an emeritus professor of environmental engineering. He is looking down at a photo of his friend, Professor Loganthan. The cell phone rings, and I hear him ask, "Have you heard anything about the Indian girl?"

Randall worked for 25 years at Norris Hall. He knows every inch of it. He knows that the classrooms have only one door. He knows they don't lock. He knows each of the doors that were chained by the killer.

He agreed with the decision to air the Cho videos, wanting to learn as much as he could.

"I was personally glad to see the videos," he says. "They showed me how . . . disturbed this person was. What you do is try to put it all together. That's how you work through it.

"If you noticed, everything he did was done in logical fashion, even though it was irrational. Everything he did was intelligently done, even though it was obviously a completely irrational act."

Randall has too much experience here. He tells his story.

"I was a Ph.D. student at Texas when (Charles) Whitman went up the Texas tower and killed 16 people. I wasn't on the campus that day, but I remember what it was like. It was pretty much like this one, a major, major trauma.

"Interestingly, in the case of Whitman, he was an engineering student. And in all the shootings, he never fired in the direction of the engineering classes. He fired in all other directions. And this Cho, he was an English student, and he targeted engineering classes."

Fear, sadness, anger

There are new landmarks in Blacksburg. There is the pawn shop where Cho picked up the second gun. There is the post office where Cho walked in to mail his screed, only to leave and kill 30 more people.

It's a college town's downtown of restaurants and clubs and bookstores and wi-fi coffee shops. I'm sitting in the More Than Coffee coffee shop with Jon Greene and Bhaba Misra, who were both undergrads at Tech and now both working on doctorates. What's different about Blacksburg, they're saying, is that in a town where people didn't lock their doors, there is now a general dread.

"I sleep with the radio on," Greene says, "if I can sleep at all. I have to have the radio on, the light on. It's not fear. It's more anxiety about what the world has come to. But for a lot of people, it's fear. I think we always thought of the campus as a very sheltered place."

There's fear and there's sadness and there's anger.

There is talk, of course, of guns. And of media and copycat crimes. But also there is talk of Cho and of the killer in their midst. How was a person so obviously disturbed allowed to become a mass killer?

We know now that several of his English teachers tried. They asked for help. They begged him to get help. The system failed - or maybe there's no system that could have worked.

"Why didn't the system work?" Greene asks. "I was arguing with my girlfriend about this for hours last night. She's a psychologist. There has to be a way this awful thing could have been avoided - but I don't know what it is. I go back and forth."

I head back to the memorial, where I'm talking to Hank Ingram, who works at Virginia Tech. He's with his 11 year-old son William.

Ingram leans over to tell me about a friend who is a Virginia Tech cop and about the trauma of going into those buildings.

"The worst thing," he says, "is when the cell phones were ringing. Those people on the floor, with their phones going off."

He shakes his head.

"You can't even believe it."

You can't believe it. And, each time, that's a lesson waiting to be learned.

littwinm@rockymountainnews.com

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News