Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine on Wednesday mourned the “lost promise” of 32 lives cut short one year ago at Virginia Tech, speaking before a sea of maroon and orange on the first anniversary of the worst mass shooting on a campus in history.
“The world was cheated on April 16 a year ago, cheated out of the accomplishments that were sure to come from these extraordinary lives,” Kaine told the crowd at a ceremony on the school’s Drillfield. “Their lives were just too short for all the promise and for all the good that was within them.”
University officials estimated a crowd of 14,000 to 15,000, who heard brief biographies of each of the students and faculty who died April 16. They heard, among the students and faculty slain that day, of Julia Kathleen Pryde, an engineering student and avid environmentalist who had fought wildfires in Arizona, and foreign-language instructor Christopher James Bishop, who was “convinced studying foreign languages was fundamental to understanding humanity.”
Little mention was made of the massacre itself, in which mentally ill student Seung-Hui Cho opened fire in the West Ambler Johnston Hall and then in Norris Hall before taking his own life as police closed in. Instead, the focus remained on a universitycommunity coming together to understand the massive, unprecedented loss.
While the school has been helped in many ways by the passage of time, Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said that “neither the heat of summer nor the winds of winter has relieved our pain.”
“It has been a difficult road, it’s been a hard journey indeed,” Steger said. “It began with shock and trauma and a flood of emotions, and in the ensuing days and weeks and months, we’ve searched for answers, we’ve searched for meaning in what is incomprehensible, and we have searched for rest in those sleepless hours in the night when the silence is shattered by the barrage of our own thoughts.”
About 50 people laid down in protest of Virginia’s gun laws. The protesters stretched out on the grass for three minutes, to symbolize the amount of time they say it takes to buy a gun in Virginia.
Similar “lie-ins” were held at campuses around the country as well as at the U.S. Supreme Court.
For many who lost relatives and friends a year ago, the day served as a bittersweet reminder. Omar Samaha, whose sister Reema, a freshman from Centreville who graduated from Westfield High School, was killed in the attack, told reporters that Wednesday was “a great day to remember” the victims, “but it brings back a lot of memories.”
