Tragic Connection Back Home
One shooter, two victims; all from a Virginia high school
CENTREVILLE, VA.-At a packed gathering at the Centreville Presbyterian Church here on Tuesday, it wasn't just the words that were searing but what was left unsaid. More than 250 people came together to mourn the loss of two graduates from nearby Westfield High School, Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson, both 18 years old. The audience dissolved into sobs and gasps as they watched a concluding slide show of the former high school basketball captain and the star dancer-two of the 32 victims of last week's massacre at Virginia Tech. But not a word of the hour-long service dealt with the gunman, Seung Hui Cho, who also graduated from Westfield High, class of 2003.
It was a harsh glare indeed that fell last week on this 3,232-person high school in Chantilly, part of the swath of affluent, sprawling Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C. It wasn't the first bout of unwelcome attention; about a year ago, another Westfield grad shot and killed two police officers in a station parking lot 5 miles from the school. But this felt more personal. The deaths of the two former students were announced on the school's public address system; two "spirit rocks" near the parking lot-boulders routinely painted and repainted to promote school events-became shrines. The shooter's seemingly innocuous Westfield High history was dissected for clues. No one really knows why the lives of three students from this school came to so tragically intersect again. And no one yet knows how, even with counseling, the classmates of the Westfield High victims will heal their wounds.
When Cho attended Westfield, it was a brand-new school, having only opened in 2000. "Nothing was special about us," one 2003 graduate, Jennifer LeVay, wrote on the social networking site facebook.com of her class. "We weren't the FIRST! graduating class, we weren't the first class to go ALL THE WAY through WHS. We were just there." In the 2002 yearbook, Cho was listed as a member of the Science Club; there's no mention of him in his senior yearbook. One classmate recalled the largely silent, South Korean-born Cho as being teased and told to "go back to China." No one seems to have known him well.
Friends of Samaha and Peterson say they doubt Cho singled them out or even knew them. Regardless, he couldn't have picked victims more starkly different from himself. "Erin was a magnetic kid with a smile and laugh you see once and never forget," says Pat Deegan, Peterson's high school basketball coach. He says she was also a 6-foot-1 "mother hen" to others: When one basketball player transferred in from another school, Peterson sat by her every single day at lunch. Samaha, meanwhile, was a star member of the dance team and an award-winning performer in Westfield's 2005 production of Fiddler on the Roof. By then, the school was changing, growing seriously overcrowded, with many classes held in trailers. But the spirit remained. On the weekends, Samaha's friends threw alcohol-free dance parties with dress-up themes like cowboys and Indians.
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
This story appears in the April 30, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.