One Week
BLACKSBURG, VA.-By week's end, a solemn, weary quiet had settled over grieving Virginia Tech and this small, tight-knit community snug in the Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia.
Student dorms had emptied, and the media had largely moved on. And here in the heart of campus, surrounded by stately neo-Gothic buildings of local limestone, the expansive Drillfield was nearly empty. The usual springtime throng of softball players and students cramming for finals had been replaced by a handful of mourners wearing Tech orange and maroon.
They laid roses at the foot of simple memorials erected at the edge of the grassy field, where earlier in the week thousands of students stood in the dark, raised candles in remembrance, and filled the night with cathartic shouts of "Let's go, Hokies!" They wrote out their emotions-"You were taken too soon"-on wooden placards. They held one another in silence.
And, in the pall of the precise, deadly savagery carried out April 16 by senior Seung Hui Cho, they reasserted the vitality and resilience of "Hokie Nation," the unusually close community and sense of pride that define this big state school, its alumni, and the small university town just outside its gates. "We will stay strong," one man scrawled in black ink. "Hokies unite."
At the Drillfield's highest point-within view of Norris Hall, where Cho roamed second-floor classrooms and shot to death 30 of his 32 victims before committing suicide-small gray blocks of local limestone from the university's own Blacksburg quarry were arranged in a gentle arc to memorialize the dead. There was,
however, no stone for Cho, a powerful statement from a school that longs to quickly separate itself and its surging reputation from the deranged, broken young man who carried out the worst domestic massacre in U.S. history, leaving unpleasant questions about whether he could have been stopped (stories begin on Page 42).
"Let's find out what happened, move forward, and always remember those who died," said Bryan Daughtry, a senior and member of the university's military Corps of Cadets, one of only three such public university programs in the nation. "We need to unite and stick together."
No place wants to be known as another Columbine.
But, even in death, Cho haunted the campus. Just when the Tech community had begun to emerge from the fog of tragedy, disturbing photos and videos the 23-year-old mailed on the day of his rampage-in between his murder of two in the West Ambler Johnson Hall dorm and his fury in Norris Hall-became public. First broadcast on NBC, the recipient of Cho's collection, photos now seen around the world included a self-portrait of the young man draped in ammunition and staring malevolently into the camera. Some poses were reminiscent of a bloody South Korean movie, Oldboy; in others he brandished his murder weapons-a .22-caliber handgun he bought from a pawn shop and a 9-mm semiautomatic purchased at a gun store.
In a rambling screed, Cho talked about getting even with nameless enemies and about undertaking his deadly plan for "my children, for my brothers and sisters," and, disturbingly, he anointed as "martyrs" the two Columbine High School shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who on April 20, 1999, killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide.
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