Pain and Fear at Virginia Tech Hits Home

Around noon Thursday, Katja Engle drove her car onto the Virginia Tech campus and parked it outside McComas Hall.

Engle, a senior human nutrition, foods and exercise major, headed into the university gym and recreation center for an end of the semester celebration with members of a project she had worked on; it was a reading day, and most students were preparing for Friday's exams. 

There was no indication of the havoc about to shake up the campus for the rest of the afternoon.

Engle, a 2008 graduate, said two female students then entered the hall and started talking about a shooting. Engle and others rushed to the hall's towering windows to see what was happening outside when she got a text message on her phone: there was a gunman on campus.

As she looked out a window, ambulances, police cars and other law enforcement officials stormed the same parking lot she had left her car in about a half hour earlier. When they stayed there, she realized a crime scene was unfolding around her car.

When Engle left the building hours later, two people were dead. Much is still unclear but late Thursday night, authorities released some details.

Deriek W. Crouse, 39, an officer with the Virginia Tech campus police for the last four years, and a father of five, was making a routine traffic stop at the Cassell Coliseum parking lot on Spring Road. A gunman (not inside the car) shot and killed him, then ran away. Authorities found a second person dead in another parking lot not far away. They later indicated the person was the shooter. 

But for about four hours, students were on high alert, holed up in dorm rooms and other areas as the school sent message after message on the emergency text system. Engle said while she got the alerts quickly, not much information was given; for much of that time, it wasn't clear that the gunman was dead.

Thursday was a nerve-wracking day for Hokie students and families, many of whom come from Fairfax County.

Parents, including Engle's mother Petra, immediately began to call their children on the Virginia Tech campus to make sure they were safe, while frightened students called their parents to talk about what was going on. Engle had sporadic cell phone service at best, she said.

For many, the events also brought back memories from the day, four and a half years ago, a gunman swept through the campus in one of the country's most devastating massacres in modern history.

 2011 graduate Isabella Lacsamana stayed in her dorm room as word came in of the shootings. Memories surfaced of watching news of the shooting on TV on April 16th, 2007—when Seung Hui-Cho killed dozens of people, including

"I flashed back to when I saw the news of the shooting the first time," Lacsamana said. "The first time I heard it was happening, I was just hoping it wasn't happening again."

Engle said classmates locked with her inside the university's gym felt it wasn't appropriate to associate the two shootings, particularly the university's role in them. They were two, isolated incidents, and in Thursday's shooting, "it wasn't in the officer's control to stop the person who shot him," she said.

 on Thursday afternoon, flags flew at half-staff on the  campus. The graduate campus in the Northern Virginia Center was bare with only a few faculty members walking around. A number of Fairfax County Public Schools, including in Vienna, wrote parents to say they would be offering counseling for children the next day. George Mason University also wrote it would offer counseling for students. 

Engle left campus around 4:30 p.m., yellow caution tape right by her car. It was quiet, she said later that night, as exams that should have begun on Friday were rescheduled for Saturday.

A candlelight vigil is planned for 6:30 p.m. Friday night on campus. As of Thursday night, nearly 4,000 students, faculty, staff and community members had said they were attending on the vigil's Facebook page.

Engle, like many others Thursday night, were still grappling with the incident and resulting deaths. She said students were upset by the insinuation from media outlets and Facebook and Twitter users that the university was somehow cursed, or an otherwise bad place.

"I don’t understand why it happened," she said. "[But] the school shouldn’t be judged on two completely different things ... This could’ve happened everywhere."