Shocked Students Stand Vigil for the Murdered
Twenty-one-year-old Brandon Stiltner, a senior at Virginia Tech, never could have dreamed his old refrigerator box would become a schoolwide totem of comfort. Reacting to the most violent shooting incident in American history, Stiltner took the box–which he had carved into a giant cutout of the letters V and T for the University of Miami football game months earlier–and laid it outside the War Memorial Chapel on Monday evening, dozens of red and white candles placed at its feet.
"I was just trying to do anything to boost the morale," said Stiltner, who's from tiny Bundy, Va., near the Kentucky border. Students grabbed silver and black pens and scrawled messages across the giant letters–notes that would overflow into a binder hours later when every inch of cardboard had been papered over .
"May God be with you all," read one note.
"Lest we forget," added another.
Less than 24 hours after a shooting spree took at least 33 lives here, dozens of students straggled across the Drill Field, many holding hands and embracing friends as they tried to while away the hours before morning. Campus police lingered nearby on the sidewalk, their cars' blue lights flashing silently. Other officers held vigil with students in front of the TV screens set up in dining halls. Inside the chapel, two cadets stood silently on the altar, sentinels on either side of an orange-and-red memorial wreath.
Chris Mesrobian, a senior in engineering sciences who'd been in Norris Hall's third-floor computer lab during the second shooting rampage, stood in front of the cardboard cutout memorial and said he would rather be with fellow students on the campus green than inside talking to counselors or attempting to get sleep.
"I have no anger and I don't feel afraid," said Mesrobian, who's originally from Northern Virginia's Fairfax County, where shooter Cho Seung-Hui also had lived. Mesrobian credited SWAT team members–who he says found their way into Norris through "an obscure construction entrance"–with saving his life. "They were there just moments after the shots were fired."
Mesrobian said one professor he described as "well respected" and "loved on campus" was shot in the head on the scene.
Other students, like 18-year-old freshman Jacquelyn Dessault, waited for more details on friends.
"We have friends that we still don't know what happened to them," she said. Still, she emphasized quickly, no matter what, she planned to return next semester.
"The people here are incredible," she said. "I have a great support network."
Nearby, huddled on a bench in front of War Memorial Chapel, Robert Bast, an 18-year-old freshman from Mullica Hill, N.J., just south of Philadelphia, was visibly shaken. He said a local news report back home had mentioned that a Virginia Tech student from his suburban area was shot and in critical condition. The piece referred to a female student three years his senior.
"When you go to school this far from home, it's easy to think that everybody from high school will forget you," said Bast. "People I hadn't even talked to for years were reaching out to me all day just trying to make sure I was still alive. ... It makes you really appreciate things."
Bast's mother, in fact, had had trouble getting through to him during the day over jammed cellphone lines. When she finally did, Bast says, she was "hysterical."
"My dad, who's not emotional, was choked up," he added. "My younger brothers just kept telling me how much they loved me."
As a strong gust of wind ripped through the unseasonably chilly campus, Stiltner, standing guard over his memorial, hunched his shoulders and shivered.
"It kind of feels like everything is against us tonight," he said, adding that his pride and love for the 26,000-student school was unflinching.
"More than anything, I just hope people know that this is a good place," he said, glancing around the field. "This is a good place to go to school, and the people of southwestern Virginia are very good people."
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