Laura Anderman

Of Massacres and Remembrances: The Shadow of Virginia Tech

I live on a college campus. I am far from alone in this; hundreds of thousands of students attend colleges and universities throughout the United States and around the world. Campus life sometimes feels more like reality TV than reality itself; certainly, as its own functioning microcosm, it’s easy to forget that the world continues moving beyond the boundary of the school. However, sometimes the veil that separates school from the real word is pulled away.

This time, it was the tragedy at Virginia Tech. A 23-year-old Korean man named Cho Seung-hui shot two students in a campus dormitory, then proceeded to another campus complex and systematically moved from classroom to classroom, firing at everyone in sight. After killing thirty students and wounding another twenty nine, the rogue student took his own life with one of his two handguns.

Within an hour of Cho’s death, news had already started filtering from the crime scene, leaking into television and radio briefs and postings on news websites. I saw a hastily written article on the BBC News website. “Shots fired at Virginia Tech...15 deaths confirmed so far,” the article said. There was little else it said. It was too soon for a more detailed account, and it appeared as though the reporter had spent all of his information on the grisly yet compelling headline. The sparse information gradually began to expand into something more substantial. News sources were clamoring for estimates of the death toll, grasping at eyewitness reports and desperately attempting to fit the first few pieces of the puzzle together.

Even with what little information had been released so far, I was stunned by the act. I remember the nation’s response to the Columbine school shooting years ago, and I knew that as the word leaked out, there would be a huge outcry. But for now, the only voices heard were the reporters, telling us what had been discovered so far.
Within the next few hours, things began to come together. The identity of the shooter and many of the victims were still unknown, but the events were forming a more coherent timeline. At 7:15 that morning, two victims were killed in West Ambler Johnston Hall. The campus police responded the emergency call, but believed it to be an isolated incident. They didn’t know then that the bloody footprints they saw leaving the building were not the end of the affair.

Two hours later, in the classrooms of Norris Hall, the murderer struck again. It started in room 206, a graduate class in advanced hydrology. The shooter didn’t give any warning or make a sound; he just opened the door and started firing. The first shot connected with the head of the professor, which sent the thirteen students scrambling for cover. He aimed two handguns around the room, picking off the students one by one, before reloading and moving on to the room across the hall.
The sound had filtered into the elementary German class, and students were starting to get edgy. Someone suggested pushing something in front of the door, just in case. It was then that the door opened and the shots began. Like the other classroom, the professor died first of a gunshot to the head. The gunman fired thirty shots before he stepped back into the hall. Three students seized the small opportunity, and they closed the door to the hall. It would not lock, so they wedged their feet against the bottom of the door to keep it closed. It saved their lives; a few minutes later the shooter tried to reenter the room. He threw himself against the door in an attempt to open it, and then fired four shots into the wood. Eventually he moved down the hall to next room.

In the brief break from the German class, he moved on to the intermediate French class next door. Like their neighbors, the students had suspected something was amiss. A panicked student pushed a heavy table against the door, and another student started to call 911. The desk did not delay him for long, however, and he forced his way into the room. He methodically fired his shots, before continuing his migration from classroom to classroom.

Between the noise from the gun and the muffled screams of wounded, the other people on the floor had a pretty clear idea that something was wrong. This feeling caused a girl in a ten-person computer class to peer outside her classroom door. She saw an Asian man “dressed like a boy scout” carrying two guns. He was headed toward her. She quickly alerted her classmates, and they secured a table in front of the door. Three students threw their weight against the heavy table, hoping it would be enough to barricade the entrance. The shooter rammed into the door from the outside, forcing it open about six inches, but was unable to enter the room. He fired two shots into the room, one embedding itself in the wall, the other connecting with the lectern. They heard the sound of an empty clip dropping to the floor, and a new one being inserted with a click. But the fresh bullets were not for them, and heavy footsteps continued down the hall.

A professor in his office on the third floor heard the commotion, and ran down the stairs to confront the shooter. He was quickly gunned down. Below, from an office on the ground floor, a professor and a research assistant attempted to flee the building. They rushed to the front doors, only to find them chained and padlocked shut. Several frightened students rushed toward them, looking for a place to hide. The group returned the professor’s office, and locked the door. They remained there until the police cleared the building twenty minutes later.

There was only one remaining classroom on the second floor: solid mechanics, taught by Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor. It is in this room that one of the most lasting stories of the incident’s heroism started. The gunshots and screams had given all the warning the students needed, and most of the twelve students were crouched on the concrete window ledge outside the building. They were prepared to take their chances jumping onto the grass and shrubs below. It offered more of a chance than a crazed shooter who had already killed almost everyone on the second floor. Librescu was positioned against the door, holding it closed because it wouldn’t lock. Eventually the elderly man was overpowered, and the killer forced the door open. The professor stepped between the shooter and his students, giving them a split-second of protection before the man killed Librescu with one clean shot to the head. Three people jumped to the ground below. Several others lowered themselves along the ledge before attempting to drop gently onto the grass. The remaining students were shot several times each, just as in every other room. Yet again, the killer stepped into the hallway, and out of sight.

It was now 9:45 AM. The whole rampage had taken around 30 minutes from start to finish. By now, the survivors in the building and bystanders in the surrounding area were flooding the local 911 call center with a deluge of reports. The Virginia police and SWAT teams were already on their way to the building. Their progress was slowed by the chained doors, but they entered the building within ten minutes. While searching through the building for survivors, they discovered the killer sitting in one of the classrooms, surrounded by the bodies of his victims. He had taken his own life. The time was 9:55 AM.

We now have a timeline for the horrifying events, but it doesn’t mean much to me. This is not what I have been looking for, or what I hope to read. As Joseph Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” There are numbers of people who have been killed, but we don’t know anything about them. We don’t know their names or their stories, their hopes or their dreams. And without that information, the story seems hollow. Without information about the participants, I cannot mourn those lives lost. So I do the only thing I can do: wait a bit longer.

Initially, the most crucial player in the story was the most enigmatic. The gunshot that had taken his life had disfigured his features too terribly for reliable facial recognition, and he carried no identification cards or characteristic items at the time of his death. So the infamous shooter, for the time being, remained a mystery. The first two victims identified were the first ones shot, at the initial shooting in the campus dormitory. Emily Hilscher and Ryan Clark were killed nearly two hours before the massacre in Norris Hall. Slowly, they identified the victims in the classrooms and hallways of Norris. A list was released of professors and students killed that day: Alameddine, Bishop, Bluhm, Cloyd, Couture-Nowak, Granata, Gwaltney, Hammaren, Herbstritt, Hill, Lane, La Porte, Lee, Librescu, Loganathan, Lumbantoruan, McCain, O'Neil, Ortiz, Panchal, Perez Cueva, Peterson, Pohle, Pryde, Read, Samaha, Shaalan, Sherman, Turner, White. They came from many different countries and all walks of life. Essentially the only thing they had in common was that they were in one place at one time. The wrong time, it seemed.

Now there was but one person left to identify: the killer himself. After withholding the information for a day, the media finally named the culprit. His name was Cho Seung-Hui. He was a Korean citizen with a United States green card, and he was a student at Virginia Tech. He also had a history of mental problems and instability. He had stalked several women on campus; written plays about torture, death, and social alienation; and even been committed to a mental asylum back in 2005. Everyone claims they could have predicted Cho stepping over the edge and lashing out…but they didn’t. Investigators believe that he started planning the murders in February, when he bought the first of the handguns and started working out. I wondered what had set him off; what could have triggered him to do this. I wondered if it could have been avoided.

It has been several days since the shooting, but I still can’t get my mind off of it. It wanders around my brain, providing me with a constant preoccupation in classes and in social circles. I sit in economics wondering what the students sitting around me would do if a murderous gunman came in shooting. In Japanese class, I wonder how one best translated the phrase “multiple fatality school shooting”. I neglect my schoolwork to browse the news sites, constantly loading and refreshing the webpages, waiting for the next tidbit of information to soak into the mainstream. I wait for the moment that new reports are posted; I crave the tang of the adrenaline flowing through my bloodstream when I se the latest update. But even as I watch the stories unfold on the screen, my own reactions scare me.

I’ve always had an interest in forensic science, and the step-by-step processes of solving and recreating a crime. But even so, my sudden, macabre interest in this particular case disconcerts me to the point of distraction. Usually I am attracted to a case that has a peculiar mystery or burning question attached to it. There is no such problem here. Although Cho cannot legally be called the murderer – technicality states that he must be brought to court and found guilty before such a moniker can be attached to his name – almost all of the evidence supports him being the sole perpetrator of the act. There is, then, no question of guilt, or any extenuating circumstances that usually otherwise draws my attention. I can’t understand why a mass murder in a place I’ve never been literally has brought my life to halt. This is the core of my problem: I’m not sure what it is about Virginia Tech that has grabbed my attention so entirely, and the implications of it worry me. I certainly hope I’m not another Cho, interested in plotting the murder of complete strangers for bizarre and unintelligible reasons. All the while, I cannot help but listen to that little voice inside my head asking Why? Why do you care so much? There must be something wrong with you to be this concerned about something like this.

The answers come in a strange, sudden epiphany. It is not the case itself that attracted my attention. It is the people. I see myself in the participants that day. The victims were around my age. They were college kids, like me, attempting to find their way through a constantly changing and unfamiliar world. They had dreams and aspirations and fears and problems. There was nothing that specifically held them to that foreign world of Blacksburg, Virginia. They could have easily been anyone, anywhere. This day, this crime could have been anywhere in the world. The victims could have been my friends. My brothers or sisters. My professors. Me.

As I hear more details of that day, I realize that I aspire to be like these people. They showed bravery, quick thinking, and a sense of compassion even in the face of tragedy. Stories of heroic acts and lucky breaks continue to appear on television reports and websites. Professors confronting the gunman in a final attempt to save their students, if only by buying them a few crucial seconds. Students pulling strangers into closets or locked rooms away from the shooting. The slightly wounded providing first aid to those who were gravely injured, trying desperately to save their lives. It did not matter in those moments who you were, so long as you were there, together.

This sense of human connection is what captivates me. In most cases, these people were not the best of friends. In fact, some of them were complete strangers. The survivors tell of their time under fire, and they don’t tell you the names of the people who helped them. They can’t; most of them didn’t know each other prior to the incident. But even though these figures were nameless, they certainly won’t be forgotten any time soon.

Most professors are remembered by their students for their lectures in the classroom. But the professors at Virginia Tech made the ultimate sacrifice for their students. The five faculty members killed in the attack did what they could to protect their students. Especially Liviu Librescu, whose tale is both inspiring and saddening. He survived the Holocaust, only to die during another mass act of hatred and violence. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, nonetheless. Although Librescu’s tale is the most widely publicized, he was not alone in protecting the students. Take Kevin Granata, the professor who rushed down from the third floor to confront Cho. Granata probably would have survived the attack if he had stayed in his office. But he cared about the students far too much to stay out of harm’s way. He put himself in the line of danger in hopes of contributing to the greater good.

Another tale comes from Clay Violland, from the French class. As Cho fired around the room, Violland fell to the ground, acting as though he had already been shot. While on the ground, he made eye contact with another girl on the ground. They stared at each other, focusing on the living and not on the dead, until Cho left the room several minutes later. Violland did not know who she was, but for that moment it did not seem to matter. They provided each other with a moment of connection, of support, in the middle of a catastrophe.

It seems I am not the only one drawn in by the strength of this universal human connection. On the Virginia Tech memorial website, there are over 600 pages of comments from concerned individuals. Most of them never knew the victims. A lot of them have never been to Virginia Tech. Some of them have never even set foot on US soil. But they heard the tale of this random act of hate and anger, and they care. They send out condolences to the families and friends and communities. It does not matter anymore that these people are strangers; it simply matters more that they are people who care.

Yet this human connection serves as a somber reminder of the one who perpetrated these acts in the first place. Cho was a loner, and the outpouring of care and support is something he probably did not know in life. It seems to be the ultimate irony: the person who could not understand and appreciate such things in life unintentionally created a fresh start for them in death.

I’ve heard many people say that Cho was “an evil man” and that the events at Virginia Tech “proved that people are capable of atrocious things.” Indeed, people sometimes do terrible things to each other. However, the events of April 16th proved to me that people are capable of great kindness and compassion as well. And Cho…he did a terrible thing, to be sure, but I don’t think he was inherently evil. He was misguided, perhaps. And lonely.

Virginia Tech is a tragedy because so many young lives were lost without rhyme or reason. Their promise and potential were snuffed out in an instant. The faculty, too, their professors and mentors, had done great things in their fields of study, and they were still easily capable of more. Yet, despite these losses, I find it somehow comforting that people can band together and express hope for the future when things seem bleak.

I’ve heard so many negative reactions to this event, but I don’t believe any of these dour assertions to be true. You can tell me all you want that the world is rotten and corrupted. But I’ll be damned if I’m not awed and humbled by the number of people who shed a tear over the death of thirty strangers.