Buffalo Students Shocked by Plane Crash

ABC News On Campus reporters Sabina Kuriakose, Meghan Lisson and Torie Wells blog:

Fifteen miles west of Clarence, N.Y., where Flight 3407 crashed late Thursday night, students at SUNY Buffalo were shocked at the tragedy unfolding in their backyard.

"I got a call from my mom about 10:30, right when it happened. She was kind of freaking out a little bit," said SUNY Buffalo junior Anthony Gugino, who is from Clarence. While he lives on campus, he said he commutes back home a lot.

"It was pretty much in our backyard," he said. "If the plane would have been up in the air for another two seconds or so, it would have been right on our house."

But it wasn’t just students from the Buffalo area who said they were affected by the news.

"Just shock, disbelief, I just felt terrible for the victims’ families," said SUNY Buffalo graduate student Derek Mitchell. "I was totally in shock, what a terrible tragedy."

Buffalo freshman Sarah Bonk, also from Clarence, said many on campus were shaken by the incident.

"I don’t know if the feeling on campus changed, but in the individual dorms people have taken it a little bit heavy because there are a lot of people who dorm here who still live in the area," she said. "It’s scary to know that we live right under the flight path and that just happened, so it’s a heavy feeling."

Sophomore Ben Coleman said the news sunk in over the course of the day. " I didn’t really notice the closeness of it at first, because Buffalo is such a big place, and I’ve never been to where this happened, but then I noticed over the course of the day that everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a big deal,’ so that had an impact on me," he said.

Former Buffalo State University student and women’s ice hockey player Madeline "Maddy" Loftus and 1975 graduate Beverly Eckert were among the victims.  Loftus, 24, was heading back to Buffalo for a weekend hockey team reunion.

Eckert was the widow of Sean Rooney, who died in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Students said the legacies of both victims were present on campus.

"I was working at the campus house, where the professors and alumni go to hang out, and some of the professors were talking about how there were a lot of good people on that plane, like the hockey player," said Coleman.

Students said campus chatter ran to feelings of disbelief and sadness for the victims and their families.

"There’s a lot of community bonding right now, I’ve gotten a lot of text messages and there are Facebook groups saying pray for the families, pray for everyone," said Bonk.

But she said there are feelings of fear too.

"I’m supposed to fly out to Florida for spring break, and my boyfriend from down there was considering not having me come down there because of it. And because there have been frequent plane crashes, like the recent Hudson River one," Bonk said, referring to the water landing of US Airways flight 1547 last month.

Others were not as concerned.

"I am taking a plane and still am. I figure that the chances of a plane crashing are one in a lot," said Coleman.

Either way, students said that proximity had made them more aware of the impact of the crash.