An April 22 Style article incorrectly reported that a Virginia Tech student killed 32 classmates. He killed 27 Twenty-seven students and five faculty members. were killed in the attack.
In Tragedy's Shadow
Fog shrouds the campus of Virginia Tech Friday morning. "People understand that the students, and the university, in a way, were victims," says Thomas C. Tillar Jr., an alumni relations official.
(By Mary Altaffer -- Associated Press)
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Sunday, April 22, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Big cities, big places, they don't worry like this. Shooting sprees, mass death -- they don't become linked in the national consciousness to their moment of suffering. Small towns, little-known places, they often do. It's not fair, but it's still the way it is.
Columbine, Waco, Oklahoma City, even Pearl Harbor. Tragedy tends to stick.
John Rowan, proprietor, Rendezvous Tattoos, Main Street, Blacksburg, America: "This is the last place in the world where you'd expect something like this to happen, and here we set a record for it, the worst shooting in the country."
You want to know surreal?
The University of Miami baseball team came to play a series against Virginia Tech on campus this weekend. It was the first regular campus event since 32 students were shot to death by a fellow classmate. The Hurricanes were planning to bring an extra cop to Blacksburg so they'd feel safe.
Read the above sentence again.
This is a joke, right?
A town of 40,000, more than half of them college students, a rural pocket of off-the-interstate America, a town with zero murders in the previous year, a place where the crime report for the year reads 22 burglaries, seven sex offenses, six weapons violations, 194 liquor law violations -- and Miami thinks this place is rough?
This is what Blacksburg is beginning to confront. Reality vs. the momentary national image.
USA Today headline: "Prospective Students, Their Parents, Might Reconsider Their School Choice." The Akron Beacon Journal: "Virginia Tech went from a well-regarded public school to a name uttered in horror." Endless television and Internet pictures of Seung Hui Cho with a gun pointing dead at the camera, the American fascination with death and guns and murder, another grisly icon, Charlie Manson's gaze, John Wayne Gacy's clown costume, Ted Bundy's smile.
Word association: I say, the University of Florida, in Gainesville, the Gators. You say . . .
Ta dum, ta dum.
