Back to Blacksburg
Va. Tech students returned to campus life, but college will never be the same.
April 23, 2007 — -- For Virginia Tech sophomore Trey Perkins, coming back to school was a kind of catharsis.
After five days at home, Perkins and his friends drove back to his apartment just off campus, relieved in a way to return to the rituals of college life.
"Just to be back on campus and to get back to classes," he said, "to not let this completely change everything, change my world, to just get back to this community, this campus."
A week ago, Perkins was on the second floor of Norris Hall, room 207, for his elementary German class. He was fortunate to survive, but four of his classmates and his professor, Chris Bishop, did not. Today, in another building, Perkins and some of the other survivors held that German class for the first time since that awful morning.
Watch Chris Bury's full report tonight on "Nightline" at 11:35.
For Danica Van Horn, a Virginia Tech freshman from a small town in Vermont, coming back to campus meant returning to her dorm, West Ambler Johnston, the building where Seung-Hui Cho began his rampage and killed freshman Emily Hilscher and popular resident adviser Ryan Clark.
"It is hard to come back this week," Van Horn said, "but at the same time, I think the best way to face something like this is to come back and face it and not run away."
So today they returned, Van Horn, Perkins and thousands of their classmates. They came back seeking relief in the routine of campus life and comfort in a community that shares their state of mind and understands their grief.
"It's good to get back to school and in a routine," Perkins said. "We'll never forget this."
Like most Virginia Tech students, Perkins took much of last week off and went home to see his family. But it was not until he was at his home in Yorktown, Va., in the familiar surroundings of family and friends, that the enormity of what he had witnessed, a mass murder, finally got to him.
"It hadn't hit me yet, the magnitude of what happened," he said. "Really on an emotional level, it hadn't hit me. When I got home on Wednesday and speaking with some friends and family, it really started to sink in. I was really upset for a while."
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