Virginia Tech Inundated With Gifts

A supportive message engraved on a 150-pound Mississippi River rock, a gift from Itawamba Coummunity College is displaedy at the University Unions and Student Activities Center on the Virginia Tech campus, Thursday June 19, 2007 in Blacksburg, Va. After a student gunman killed 32 people on campus, Virginia Tech was showered with gifts of comfort including the rock hauled in the trunk of a car from Tupelo, Miss. The Library of Congress sent staff to advise Tech on what to save and how to save it, university spokesman Larry Hincker said. (AP Photo/Don Petersen) (Don Petersen - AP)

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- One supportive message came engraved on a 150-pound rock from the Mississippi River. Another was a lime-green hood from a race car bearing Virginia Tech's logo. A large painting of a tree arrived on a semitrailer from a New York university.

Gifts of comfort showered upon Virginia Tech after a student killed 32 people and himself have gotten larger, heavier and more exotic since the April 16 shooting rampage.

"It started with e-mails," said Steven Estrada, who had worked at the university doing the student center's budget for only a month when he was given the job of finding a place for everything.

The volume was huge from the start. It took hours to print and paste condolences on boards. Flowers arrived. Then the mail arrived: first letters, cards and drawings, then boxes in a range of sizes.

One person wanted to donate a motorcycle, university spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Estrada couldn't handle the gifts alone and his colleagues were stretched thin as the campus struggled in the aftermath of the massacre, so he scoured the community and found more than 80 volunteers.

They showed up faithfully, filling all available display space in the student center with deliveries of quilts and banners signed by thousands.

One volunteer from Massachusetts, whom Estrada would identify only as Jeff, interrupted a trip after he heard news reports of the shootings. Jeff has prostate cancer and had been given less than a year to live, but he wanted to help, Estrada said.

People often feel a need to give as an act of comfort after a death, but also as a way to help restore order, said Brian Britt, a Virginia Tech professor of religious studies.

"There was something particularly upsetting about these shootings in this bucolic environment that made people feel particularly unsettled," he said. "One way to ward off evil is to give gifts."

Flags came from the White House, the Statue of Liberty and numerous colleges. One was from the Iraqi town of Tikrit.

As the days passed, the banners got longer. The longest Estrada saw was 116 feet, 10 inches, sent from Eastern Michigan University.