Tragic Connection Back Home
One shooter, two victims; all from a Virginia high school
Changes. Roughly 50 members of the 2006 Westfield High School class chose to attend Virginia Tech and remained "a fairly tight-knit group," according to Phillip Reamy, a member of that Westfield class. Samaha and Peterson were put in the same wing of Slusher Hall, a three-story limestone building that was eerily quiet by late last week. Samaha might have considered herself lucky to be there: The young Lebanese-American woman was evacuated from Lebanon by the State Department when a war broke out last summer. Samaha vacationed there every year with older siblings Omar and Randa. "It didn't faze her," says Virginia Tech sophomore Rachel Wunderlich, a close friend. Samaha "wanted to become fluent in French and Arabic because of her heritage," Wunderlich says. The irony was wrenching. Samaha survived Beirut. But not Blacksburg, Va.
Although Samaha's brother told CBS News "at first, she'd been a little apprehensive" about the large, 26,000-person university, both young women leapt into college life. "It's very rare for a freshman to do what Reema did and choreograph one of our dances," says Billie Lepczyk, the faculty adviser for the campus's storied Contemporary Dance Ensemble. She says Samaha, a member of the troupe, had "that pop, that presence" that made it "impossible to take your eyes off her." Samaha also did tae kwon do, was leaning toward majoring in urban development, and was, Wunderlich says, "the most popular freshman I met." For this year's International Fair, Samaha resurrected a traditional performance of the debke, a Middle Eastern dance. Her father watched her perform it the night before her death; at the end, as is custom, Reema circled him, softly urging him to join in.
Peterson, meanwhile, played intramural basketball and palled around with two young women so close they called themselves "the Trio." "She told us all the time that she loved us and ... would take a bullet for us any day," says one of them, Brittney Davis. "Now ... I realize I would have taken one for her as well." Peterson decided to attend Tech to be relatively near her parents; the family was close, and the parents had lost a child to cancer just before Erin was born. The weekend prior to Erin's death, they were all together on campus, celebrating Erin's election to Phi Sigma Pi, the campus honors society.
Cho, an English major, was on a different, darker track that's now been well documented. Cho would find the two students from his high school in their intermediate French class on Monday. So far, police haven't found an explicit connection.
Back in Centreville, classmates are promising to go on. Last week, dozens of alumni were planning to descend on their hometown for the weekend; a former Westfield prom king had organized a Friday-night vigil in a field on Frying Pan Road. On Tuesday, the basketball team and a group of theater students satin rooms cutting out pictures and making "memory books" about Peterson and Samaha; teachers used them to spark dialogue. Students and alumni of Westfield High will need a lot more of that in the weeks to come.
With Liz Halloran and Alison Go
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