Pain and Fear at Virginia Tech Hits Home

Update 9:30 a.m.:

Ballistics evidence testing has officially shown that the two shootings are linked.Virginia State Police announced Friday that both victims were shot by the same weapon. State police are still awaiting confirmation of the second victim's identity. 

State police also said that upon reviewing Crouse's in-car video, there is a male subject seen with a handgun at the officer's car at the time of the shooting. Blacksburg Police also found a discarded backpack near the Greenhouses on campus. Inside was similar clothing worn by the male subject in Crouse's video.  

In a press conference Friday, public relations director for Virginia State Police, Corinne Gellar said that said that the second shooting victim appears to have suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The second victim was not a Virginia Tech student. 

Original Post:

Thursday seemed like a normal day for Natalie Leake. The Virginia Tech sophomore started off the day with a swim team practice, then headed over to a campus cafeteria with two friends to grab a bite to eat. It was a reading day, and most students were preparing for Friday's exams.  

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

Leake and her friends walked out of the cafeteria and into the parking lot. "That's when everything started happening," said Leake, 2010  graduate.

As they drove around the parking lot, she and her friends saw about 15 police cars. There were all kinds of cones and yellow tape. 

"We thought it was a car crash…the last thing we thought was that it was a shooting," Leake said. "We saw the body and then later a sheet being put on top."

Thursday was a nerve-wracking day for Hokie students and families, many of whom come from Prince William County and Northern Virginia. Parents 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. For many, the events also brought back memories from the day, four and a half years ago, that a gunman swept through the campus and committed mass murder.

Much is still unclear about what happened over the course of the day, but authorities have begun to release some details. Deriek W. Crouse, 39, an officer with the Virginia Tech campus police for the last four years, and the father of five children, 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 that the person was the shooter. 

But for almost 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. For much of that time, it wasn't clear that the gunman was dead. 

 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 16, 2007—when Seung Hui-Cho killed dozens of people, including Hylton graduate and Woodbridge resident Daniel Cruz. 

"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."

Though out of danger in Northern Virginia, many people were frightened for their children, friends and siblings. 

"I was scared and concerned when I couldn't reach my brother after I realized he was in the student center and there were reports of lots of police activity there," said Manassas resident Sam Klemz (a Ballston Patch contributor) whose brother is a sophomore at VT. "He eventually got through on a friend's phone to let me know he was fine."

 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. George Mason University wrote that it would offer counseling for students. 

Back in Blacksburg, Leake had found out that it was a gunman through the emergency alert system.

"We were like hysterical in the car," Leake said. "It was just really frightening—the fact that we had been in the same parking lot. If we had left just a few minutes sooner, we might have been in there right as it happened."

She hurried back to her off-campus residence, locked the doors, pulled down the window shades and started watching the news. 

"I think in the beginning we were all just in a state of shock: why Tech? Why us again?" Leake said. 

"It’s frightening, just being a student, knowing that you could be walking around campus any time, any day, and you don’t know what the person next to you might do."