By John Hawkins
Photo By Suzy Allman
November 23, 2007
Seven months later, people can still hear the sirens. It is a sound never to be forgotten, a high-speed symphony of emergency vehicles as they piled up by the dozens on the Drillfield's northwest rim. Every ambulance in Montgomery County, or so it seemed, every cop car in the Roanoke Valley.
"There had to be 50 of them," says Brian Sharp, the assistant golf coach at Virginia Tech. "We were maybe 500 yards from Norris Hall--they kept coming and coming."
As college campuses go, few are prettier or more practically designed than the 2,600-acre sprawl in Blacksburg. At the center of it all is the Drillfield, a huge grass oval with no military relevance, although it has hosted numerous Frisbee battles and neatly divides this educational metropolis into two sections: academic buildings on one side, residential halls on the other.
All structures are built from "Hokie Stone," a sandy-colored rock exclusive to the university, which owns the quarry. Anyone with an ounce of architectural sense would take a liking to the place. With the Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop, the grounds are classy and compact, which makes it easy to get around but brings a lot of kids into play when a student-turned-gunman kills 32 people and himself on the third Monday in April.
Then sophomore Drew Weaver and freshman Matt Boyd had just gotten out of an accounting class in McBryde Hall, putting them a lob wedge away from the deadliest single-killer murder spree in U.S. history. A day earlier the two members of the school's golf team had returned to Blacksburg from Holly Springs, N.C., where the Hokies finished 11th among 15 teams at the Courtyard by Marriott Intercollegiate.
One minute, you're thinking about the 7-iron you missed into the 15th green at Devil's Ridge GC. The next, some panic-stricken guy with a weapon is telling you to run like hell. "We come out of McBryde and see all the cops at Norris," Weaver says. "The door is barricaded, so we figure it's a bomb threat. All of a sudden, this cop comes running toward us, and he's freaking out. He tells us to get out of here, to sprint in the other direction, but he doesn't tell us what's going on."
For an introspective 20-year-old from High Point, N.C., whose cozy existence kept him a safe distance from firearms, the morning of April 16 jarred Weaver's universe with the force of a giant meteor. Many Virginia Tech students are East Coast suburbanites--close enough to big cities to glean a bit of cultural sophistication, far enough to avoid urban blight. They come to Blacksburg because it is as collegiate as a college town gets, an otherwise sleepy hamlet invigorated by a vibrant academic institution.
They come because it's in the middle of nowhere, idyllic and isolated, if not fully insulated from the scourge of the real world. "It's not like anybody comes from the immediate area," says Jurrian van der Vaart, a senior this fall who was born and raised in The Netherlands. "Everybody had to make a big decision to come here, and once they do, they find something they like. Europeans don't bond the way people do here. It's something very special."
And so the last place you would expect to find a mass homicide became the tragedy capital of America, chained to one kid's hate and the vile side of fate. As gusts of 40 miles per hour blew snow flurries aimlessly across the Drillfield, Weaver and Boyd readied themselves for the dash toward Newman Library. Less scared than bewildered, their eagerness to flee the madness didn't prevent them from pondering a scene they would surely never witness again.
"That's when we heard the shots," Weaver says. "Five or six really loud bangs, like bombs going off, and the second we heard them, my heart just jumped. It haunted me for two or three months. I remember going to bed every night that week, and as soon as I'd close my eyes, my mind would flash back to the moment we heard the shots. Such an intense sound, such a vivid memory."
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