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It’s Been Ten Years Since the Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Steve Helber
/
AP

 

No one at Virginia Tech was prepared for what happened there on April 16, 2007, when a shooter rampaged through campus, killing 32 people and himself.  Nearly ten years have passed since the tragedy. And while it remains a day that will live in infamy, it also marks a moment of solidarity that lives on in Blacksburg and beyond. Robbie Harris reports.

   

 

“We are Virginia Tech.  We are sad today and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on,” declared Nikki Giovanni. 

The day after the shootings, more than 10,000 people packed Cassell Coliseum on the Virginia Tech campus to mourn its victims. Renowned poet and English Professor Nikki Giovanni delivered closing remarks.

“We are alive to the imagination and the possibility. We will continue to invent the future.  Through our blood and tears, through all this sadness, we are the Hokies," she said. "We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail! We are Virginia Tech!"

 

Credit Steve Helber / AP
/
AP
Virginia Tech English Professor, Nikki Giovanni, speaks closing remarks at a convocation to honor the victims of a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Tuesday, April 17, 2007.

“By the time we got to the end I had tears streaming down my face like everyone else,” says Melissa Repepi, then a recent Tech grad. “And it gave it real perspective it wasn’t just the connection, 'We are Virginia Tech' but also in the many injustices across the world; it connected. Tragedies occur every day.”

And though each tragedy is unique, in some ways, they are remarkably similar.

James Haudon teaches sociology at Virginia Tech.

“It’s one of those things, as frequently happens, no none can imagine it happening here," Haudon says. "So it violates our sense of togetherness our sense of security, our sense of community.”

In 2006, he surveyed Tech students to see how they felt about their school community. After the tragedy, he repeated the study.

“What we found was that solidarity did provide a level of well being,” he says. 

Haudon is now Director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. It was created in 2008, to memorialize the victims of the April 16th shooting and to "transform a space of suffering" into a research center and degree program.

 

We are more than just the actions of a mentally ill young man on a cold April day. We are much more than that.

One of its findings is that being with people and feeling part of a group is a real antidote to suffering after cataclysmic events. So, while communities often decide to cancel routine events out of respect for victims, Haudon says, that’s actually not the best thing to do.

“The Rotary Club doesn’t necessarily have to do what the Rotary Club always does, it might just get together and collectively cry, have some coffee and just express that, ‘you mean something to me,’” sys Haudon.

If isolation isn’t good for communities after tragedies, it’s also not good for troubled people in those communities who don’t feel a part of them.

After the shootings, Psychology Professor, Scott Geller began developing a series of books called, “Actively Caring for People.”  They’re aimed at training various groups to look out for the welfare of troubled or isolated people in their midst. His latest is focused on college campuses.

“It was written to train school personnel on these basic lessons for creating a culture of compassion,” says Geller.

Geller was as horrified as everyone else at the senseless act of violence at Virginia Tech by the gunman, Cho Sung Hee, a Korean American majoring in English. But he says, that’s why it’s important to consider what the title of his series suggests.

"Because there are other people out there who are perhaps hurting as much as Cho was hurting," says Geller. "He didn’t have the therapy he needed and he didn’t have the culture that could have prevented that dirty deed.”

Could it have?  We will never know. But what we do know is that solidarity in times of tragedy is a powerful force for good. 

“We are more than just the actions of a mentally ill young man on a cold April day.  We are much more than that," says James Haudon.

On Sunday April 16th, which marks 10 years after the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, The Virginia Tech Day of Remembrance begins at 12 midnight with a candle lighting ceremony.