Exclusive: In Blacksburg, Columbine Grads Relive Tragedy

"I was one of the extremely lucky ones [at Columbine]," Rohde said today in a phone interview from her off-campus home, which she shares with her fiance, Kenneth Elsner, who also attended Columbine. "I was able to exit the school prior to any of the mass casualties that happened."

"They're strikingly similar," Rohde says of the two attacks. "The shock and the emotions surrounding them, the confusion in the early stages, and stages of grief and anger that I see starting--and the community coming together as one to support the students."

Both Rohde and Elsner were freshmen at Columbine at the time of the shooting. After graduation, Elsner enlisted in the Marine Corps while Rohde attended Texas A&M University to study wildlife and fisheries sciences. Elsner served a tour in Iraq from June 2005 to January 2006, when he was honorably discharged, and now attends the New River Community College near Blacksburg. They began dating a year after finishing high school, and will get married in June.

"I've had my perspective of the world spun around a few times," says Elsner, whose family lives about a mile from Columbine High, in Littleton, Colo. He describes the process of coming to terms with a tragedy of such proportions as gradual.

"It really hasn't hit home," he says of Monday's shootings. "It doesn't for a few weeks, until things start getting back to normal. But it's a different kind of normal."

"I can truly understand what's going on in these students' heads," Rohde says of her classmates at Virginia Tech, where she's earning a masters degree in wildlife sciences. "I know what that pure terror is when you're fleeing for you life, and I can understand the grief and the anger."

Rohde says the sense of communal healing that develops from such a tragedy endures for years after the event.

"Even going back to Littleton any time, there's that sense of community that will never be gone. I have a very close bond with all of my classmates."

But the feeling of safety that Virginia Tech students once felt, Elsner warns, will be a long time in returning.

"You lose your security," he says. "I went to Iraq and I saw how bad people were living, and I came back to the United States and I felt secure again. You can drive along the road and not worry about things blowing up. It gives me a feeling of placement in the world."

Now, he says, that sense is once again in jeopardy.

--Chris Wilson