A 'somber' campus deals with emotional aftermath

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The day after the most brutal attack ever to take place on an American college campus, Virginia Polytechnic Institute students struggled to come to grips with their new reality.

And though the student body largely remained in shock, there is still no doubt that things are different.

"For the first time ever here, I walked outside and the darkness actually scared me," sophomore Mike Woods said of the evening after the shootings.

Woods was walking out of his dorm for class on Monday morning when his girlfriend called. Screaming into the phone, she said, "I hear gunshots; there's SWAT teams on the Drill Field; what's going on?"

Woods rushed to the Drill Field - just in front of Norris Hall, where the majority of shooting occurred - and grabbed his girlfriend before returning to his dorm.

"Right now, everybody's still in shock," Woods said. "It doesn't even seem like anybody's accepted that this happened."

Despite having 26,000 students, Virginia Tech maintains a tight-knit community, and students say hardly anyone did not know somebody who was directly affected by the tragedy.

"You're going to know someone, either by them being in one of your classes or through a friend or something," said junior Hope Hudock, standing on Drill Field in front of a memorial signing board in the shape of a Virginia Tech logo. "It's going to hit everyone once all the names [of the dead] come out."

With that list of names trickling in, students remained on edge waiting for news of friends, classmates and professors. Cell phone lines were down for most of Monday and parts of yesterday, making communication difficult.

As of midday yesterday, freshman Andrew Stephens still was unsure if all his friends were alright.

He said he was still trying to get in contact with five, and he made sure to be one of the first in line for the convocation ceremony, believing that a roll call of the dead would be read out at the service and that he would finally be able to find out which of his friends had died.

During the service, though, no such list was read, and Stevens was left to keep trying to find more information.

"You're not quite sure if you're OK or not," he said, describing the general mood on campus as "somber" and "depressing."

Well behind Stevens in the line to enter the convocation ceremony - which stretched for blocks and was thousands of people long - sophomore Matt Giangi waited with his friend Chris Tucker.

"Everyone's pretty much been huddled around TV, news," Giangi said. "Everyone's pretty much been on the phone constantly. . We're all hurting and in mourning right now."

Tucker was visibly distressed by the news of the death of his engineering professor, G.V. Loganathan.

"Students were crazy about him," he said.

Amid the melancholy and shock, some students also expressed a level of frustration and anger.

Sophomore Alex Fagan lives in the dorm in which the first shooting occurred. The shooting occurred at 7:15 a.m., but Fagan said that, when he headed for class at 7:45 a.m., he had no inkling that anything had actually happened.

"I didn't see any cops," he said. "They didn't do anything from what I saw."

"They put all at risk. Everyone in the dorm, and then everyone else," Fagan said.

Woods also questioned the campus police, saying, "Speeding tickets, alcohol and noise violations - that's all they know how to do. It just seems like they didn't know how to handle this situation."

Still, most students say that, instead of pointing fingers, the community should focus on moving forward and healing - emotionally and physically.

Hudock, for instance, said one of her friends had been shot four times and is scheduled today to undergo surgery on his leg.

She expects he will make a full recovery but said the situation on campus remains difficult.

"As much as you want to ignore it, it's really hard to," she said.

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