By Brigid Schulte and Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 25, 2008; B04

Christine McNabb, 20, of Manassas had just parked her car in the Cage, the fenced-in parking lot on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg on Saturday evening. At 6:23 p.m., she stepped into the crosswalk on Duckpond Drive with four other people. In seconds, a car plowed into four of the five pedestrians.

Three and a half hours later, McNabb's heart stopped beating, and she was pronounced dead.

David Budzenski, 19, of California, Md., who was walking beside McNabb, was also flown to a hospital with serious injuries, Virginia Tech police said. Both were sophomores in the school's nationally ranked college of engineering.

Family members said McNabb, who dreamed of being an aeronautical engineer and working for NASA, was a top student and a keen debater on philosophy, religion, current events and the meaning of life.

Virginia Tech police are investigating the incident but said alcohol was not a factor. They have charged Joshua Sales, 20, of Blacksburg with driving with an expired registration and not having insurance. The two other pedestrians who were hit suffered minor injuries and were treated at the scene.

McNabb's stepfather, Gary Secen, said a student at the scene used her cellphone to call her father. That parent called McNabb's mother, Barbara McNabb Secen, in Manassas. The Secens immediately jumped into their car. McNabb's older sister Laura and their father, Jim, were in a car not far behind for the tense drive to Blacksburg.

"The hospital told us she was not responding, that she had a head injury and a lung injury," Secen said. "That was all we knew. They told us they were trying to stabilize her, but we didn't know what that meant."

As the family sped south, the hospital called to say McNabb had been stabilized and was being flown to Roanoke Memorial Hospital. She wasn't breathing on her own, they said. They wanted to perform a CT scan. When the family was just 10 miles away, the hospital called again. They had a bad feeling, Secen said.

"When we got there, they didn't take us to Christine; they took us to a room. The doctor said she had bad news: that Christine didn't make it," Secen said, his voice breaking. "They took us up to see her. The doctor explained that she suffered massive head trauma at the scene. It was her opinion that Christine had died on the spot."

But her heart continued to beat, Secen explained. "A 20-year-old has a very strong heart," he said he was told. It was only when her heart stopped and doctors could not get it started again that they pronounced her dead, at 9:53 p.m.

Secen said students at the scene said that a car ran a stoplight and that Sales, in a 1993 Mercury sedan, swerved to avoid that car and crashed into McNabb and the others. McNabb, Secen said, was the first one he hit. Sales stopped at the scene.