Virginia Tech goes back to class

2007-04-23 10:19

Paul Handley

Blacksburg, Virginia - Crying, hugging, many still clearly shaken, thousands of Virginia Tech students were heading back to classes on Monday, one week after a disturbed classmate killed 32 in the country's worst-ever mass shooting.

Virtually empty since classes were cancelled after Cho Seung-Hui blasted his way through a dormitory and a classroom building on April 16, the campus in this rural southern Virginia town filled up late on Sunday as students, many with their parents, returned to the university.

First-year student Adriana Gonzalez said she was unnerved by the prospect of resuming class on Monday, after having been locked down in her classroom building one week earlier as Cho blasted his way through Norris Hall just next door before killing himself.

"Tomorrow I have to take the same route as last Monday" to class, Gonzalez said shortly after driving back from her home in Alexandria, Virginia near Washington.

David Anderson, a graduate student from Massachusetts, said he welcomed the occasion to get back to work and get the tragedy out of his mind.

"It's been real hard getting motivated this week," he said.

Moment of silence

At 09:45 (13:45 GMT) on Monday morning, the university will stop for a moment of silence, then the tolling of 32 bells and the release of 32 white balloons, one for each of Cho's victims, and then a thousand more in the university's omnipresent maroon and orange colours.

After a week of some of the most intense media attention ever seen in the United States, the university banned reporters and television cameras from classrooms on Monday, aiming to let the students and professors begin to deal with the massacre away from scrutiny.

On Sunday under warm, sunny skies at the drillfield at the centre of campus, hundreds of students, parents and alumni lined up to pay their respects to the dead, represented by a semicircle of 33 stones - including one for Cho - piled high with flowers, candles, American flags and mementos from softballs brought by a visiting team to stuffed animals.

Many said they were determined to get back to their studies and complete the school year in just over two weeks on a positive note.

"It was a break that we needed," said Matt Manousoff, a first-year student from Frederick, Maryland.

"But I'm looking forward to finishing out the year."

- AFP