What Comes After

Meanwhile, Lisa heard from a friend who attended Tech, saying Leslie had been seen that morning walking to Norris Hall. This news contributed to their mounting panic. Where was Leslie? What had happened to her? Then, at around 9 p.m., they heard on the news that families of deceased victims would be informed in person by local police. So they called a Fairfax County police station and asked if they knew anything about Leslie. "They didn't say yes or no, and that's when we knew," recalls Holly. Almost immediately, there was a knock on the door. "And I remember Tony screaming with anguish."

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Holly remembers little more of that evening. She was weeping, and Tony was weeping; they wept separately, wept together. At some point, Tony called Lisa and told her that her sister was dead. She, too, screamed. Close friends called and asked to come over. Holly said no, but they came anyway, and she remembers sobbing with her head in a friend's lap. Lisa caught a ride to Roanoke, and Holly's nephew drove down and brought her home. In the very early morning, Lisa crawled into her parents' bed. The three of them got up early, no one having slept, and wondered what to do. No one from the university had called.

They'd heard on the news, however, that families were gathering in Blacksburg for a memorial service, so Holly's nephew drove them there. On campus, they managed to find a parking spot near the Inn at Virginia Tech, a conference center designated as a meeting place for victims' families. It was directly across from the place where hundreds of reporters and camera crews were congregating. This was an act of very bad planning, as a review panel appointed by Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine would later note. "Families had to travel a labyrinth of cameras and microphones to reach the front desk at the inn," said the review panel's report, which criticized both the university and the state medical examiner's office for the "disjointed, unorganized" way family members were treated. Neither Tech nor the state assigned a trained public information officer to stay on site and keep the relatives informed. Moreover, the report said, the "communications nightmare . . . remained unabated throughout the week following the shooting," which "compounded the pain and trauma."

Holly's family walked straight into the chaos. She, Tony and Lisa were led to a volunteer, who asked them to fill out a form giving Leslie's name and identifying features. Then, "we just sat and waited" for positive identification of Leslie's body or any scrap of information, says Holly. In the chairs around them were other sobbing people who, they assumed, were family members of the victims. From time to time, a police officer or unidentified administrator came into the room to make an announcement. By now, it was known that the gunman, a 23-year-old Tech student named Seung Hui Cho, had shot two students in West Ambler Johnston dormitory at about 7:15 a.m. Police had suspected the female victim's boyfriend and were pursuing him when, about 2 1/2 hours later, the real killer initiated the full-blown massacre in Norris Hall. Some family members were already asking police and Tech administrators why no campus-wide warning had been issued as soon as the first two slain students were discovered, but they didn't get an answer. Holly and Tony sat, numbed and stunned, while some parents asked whether they might identify their children's bodies. The medical examiner told them dryly that there was no point.

"She was real matter-of-fact," recalls Holly. The impression given was that "their faces had all been shot off."

Some family members demanded to see Tech's president, Charles Steger, who had chaired the committee that decided not to issue an immediate warning after the first shootings. But President Bush and Gov. Kaine were en route for a convocation ceremony, and Steger did not visit families at the conference center that day, though he had been there on Monday and would return again on Wednesday.

"This was the worst mass killing ever in the history of America on a university campus," Steger says now, explaining the confusion and saying there was no way to prepare. "We're not an emergency management agency or whatever." He points out that he was inundated by calls from government officials and media and that he gave interviews to five television networks on Tuesday morning. The university itself was so traumatized, he says, that it was "victims helping the victims." And, he says, he was concerned for the well-being of the entire campus and believed the convocation was necessary to "help with the grieving and healing process."

For her part, Holly felt it was too early for a memorial service, that the campus was being rushed into "closure" before families had time to grasp what was happening. When she asked someone at the conference center whether there was a space cordoned off for family members to attend the convocation, she was told, incorrectly, that they would have to stand in line with thousands of others. Furious, Holly found a television, and she and Tony watched from afar the event honoring their daughter and 31 others.

It was during that ceremony that the poet Nikki Giovanni, a Tech professor, issued her now-famous rallying cry: "We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech." Holly couldn't believe it. Somehow, the ceremony was turning into a pep rally, an expression of support for the school rather than of grief for those who died. "For crying out loud, who put her on?" she asked Tony, who tried to calm her. Holly still feels this way: "My daughter's dead, and you are goddamned Hokies!"

At the end of the day, she and Tony went back to Springfield and tried to absorb the idea of life without Leslie.

THEY RECEIVED LITTLE HELP IN RETRIEVING LESLIE'S BODY. Holly remembers trying to call a phone number they had been given by the university, but getting no answer. A group of Tech employees were appointed to serve as liaisons to families and did their best. But they were dealing with confusing logistics in addition to their regular jobs, and Steger acknowledges that the task was too much. "That's an area that did not work well," Steger says. "The messages we thought were getting to families did not get through."

Once Leslie's body was transported to Northern Virginia, Holly asked the funeral director if the damage from bullet wounds could be sufficiently repaired so that they might have an open casket. He assured her it could. They had to order flowers, choose a program, decide on a grave site. To Holly, the logistics were so surreal that she had the wild thought, "Can't we just hire a party planner?"