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.
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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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You say, national champions, right -- football, basketball?
Did anybody say Danny Harold Rolling?
He was a serial killer who, in August 1990, broke into three apartments in Gainesville and killed five college students. Rolling killed all of his victims with a hunting knife, sexually assaulted most of them, decapitated one student and left her head on a shelf. It was huge news at the time.
The slayings were "by far the most horrific thing that had happened in Gainesville and in the University of Florida community," local prosecutor Bill Cervone told wire services when Rolling was executed last year.
Gainesville, like Blacksburg, is small-town America. Like Ann Arbor, Tuscaloosa, Columbus, College Station, it is inherently entwined with the local university. Gainesville didn't become inseparably linked with a killer who once tormented the people there.
That Hokie pride thing you've heard about?
It's real, it matters, and maybe it's what will move Virginia Tech from being momentarily synonymous with mass murder to just a small town where something very bad once happened.
* * *
As a public service, we hereby pause to explain the meaning of the word "Hokie."
It doesn't mean anything. It's an old Appalachian exclamation, like "rah," or "hurray."
The school began life in 1872 as Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, and the state later added Polytechnic Institute to that title, which became so long that everyone just called it "VPI."
In 1896, a competition was held for a new school cheer. The winning entry:
