Virginia Tech Students Leave Messages to Victims and Killer
The campus community recovers and remembers.
April 28, 2007 — -- Roughly two weeks after a mass shooting devastated the campus community, Virginia Tech is a mix of remembrance and recovery.
A grassy patch not far from Norris Hall, the classroom building where 30 of the 32 victims were killed, has become a makeshift memorial site. There, 33 Hokie stones -- one for each victim, and one for the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho -- were strewn with flowers and messages of grief.
"It seems like you were the least deserving out of all of us," an unnamed student said in a note to Maxine Turner. "You already had a job lined up. … Max this shouldn't have happened in our class, especially not to you."
Turner would have graduated with honors May 11.
Student Brittany Martin left a message to her friend Reema Samaha: "I know you're in heaven, dancing with the stars. You will forever be missed."
Birthday balloons bounced in the wind above Austin Cloyd's memorial stone. Cloyd's 19th birthday was Tuesday, a week and a day after the shooting.
The messages at Cho's memorial stone show students struggling between confused grief and a willingness to forgive. Among the flowers and notes, someone left a copy of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's "Resurrection: A Key to Understanding."
"Cho, I wish you had known those whose lives you ended. You would have loved them. Maybe it would have been different. I am trying to forgive," said one message signed Nancy.
Erica, another student, left a poem simply addressed "To Cho."
"Even though you took innocent lives … even though my eyes are tired of crying. … Even though my campus, my home, will never be the same … I forgive you. And I love you."
Elsewhere on campus, students were less forgiving. Shortly after the shooting, one student went through the hallway outside Cho's dorm room in Harper Hall, punching and scratching up the door signs in anger. Cho's stone at the memorial site disappeared earlier this week but had been returned by Wednesday.
At the center of the Drillfield, a tent housed rows of canvas murals and Sharpie markers, inviting students and visitors to write their messages of memory and loss.
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