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Making sense of the senseless

BY MARTIN C. EVANS | martin.evans@newsday.com

11:10 PM EDT, April 17, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The heart of Virginia Tech is a wide green quad, around which the institution's oldest academic and residence buildings are arrayed.

On most days, students stream across the grass, on their way to and from physics, poultry sciences, German or any of dozens of other courses taught at this 135-year-old university.

But Tuesday, red-eyed students lingered to share tearful hugs, or to drop flowers on a makeshift memorial to the 32 students and faculty who were killed in buildings that flanked the quad, in what was the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

Mandy Wiloth came with her friend, Kristin Fields, to drop a supermarket bouquet at the base of the memorial, a 6-foot maroon "VT" crafted from art supplies, upon which students scribbled sorrowful notes.

The freshmen, both 18 -- Wiloth from a small Maryland town, Fields from Newport, Va. -- had begun taking Wednesday-night belly-dancing lessons shortly after they had enrolled in the fall. A fellow freshman who is Lebanese -- Reema Samaha, of Centreville, Va. -- had organized the dancing class, and both Mandy and Kirstin were enthusiastic learners.

"She was so sweet," Kristin said.

"She loved what she did," Mandy added.

"She was good at it, too," Kristin said.

They spoke in the past tense. Samaha had been among those who had been shot dead.

"We were supposed to have a performance this Saturday," Mandy said, her voice now glum. "That won't work out now."

The campus, which was bathed in sunshine Tuesday, remained a solemn place a day after the shootings. Word spread among students Tuesday that a senior Virginia Tech English major, Cho Seung-Hui, 23, had been identified by police as the killer.

Fellow students walked past as Fields and Wiloth spoke, heading up the hill in groups of twos, threes and fours toward a 2 p.m. memorial convocation in the university's Cassel Coliseum basketball arena.

Mo Yang, 20, an accounting student from Xian, China, was in the crowd that pressed toward the gym. Yang was among several students of Asian heritage who had worried that early descriptions of the shooter as "Asian" would fan xenophobic hostilities against them.

"When I first heard about this, someone said it was a Chinese student here on a visa," said Yang, who immigrated to midtown Manhattan three years ago. "That concerned me. I was afraid there would be a backlash.

"I'm feeling a little ashamed of him," Yang said. "This is a big disgrace. But living in an on-campus dormitory, I really feel part of the community. It is a very diverse campus and with very caring people."

A short while later inside the Cassel Coliseum, President George W. Bush tried to comfort the students, who sat in a mostly hushed silence that was broken by an occasional sob.

Bush said the Virginia Tech community, which also endured a campus shooting on its first day of fall classes, would one day get beyond its pain. "And when it does, you will always remember the friends and teachers who were lost yesterday, and the time you shared with them, and the lives they hoped to lead."

Poet Nikki Giovanni, a professor at the university, ignited the somber audience with closing remarks, saying "Through our blood and tears, through all this sadness ... we are Virginia Tech."

Members of the crowd, many with faces still wet from tears, rose to their feet, shouting "Let's go, Hokies! Let's go, Hokies!"