Leah Palmer will always remember the moment she was handed her slain sister's ashes.
The box was still warm to the touch, just eight hours after her body had been cremated.
Joseph Aust still wonders what would have happened if he hadn't made the decision to go to class that Monday morning, instead of being in his room when his roommate, Seung-Hui Cho, returned from his first round of shootings.
The splintering of the wood door Lisa Kaiser laid against in room 205 of Norris Hall will echo in her mind for eternity, along with the feeling of Cho pushing against her weight, trying to get inside the room to kill her.
Col. Rock Roszak of the Corps of Cadets remembers standing by the kitchen table, embracing his wife, and weeping into her shoulder. It had finally hit him. A cadet, full of potential, was forever lost.
A sister mourns the loss of her younger sibling ...
Palmer's sister was Julia Pryde, who was in the advanced hydrology classroom where Cho shot and killed her and nine of her classmates. April 16 seemed like just another day in Palmer's office in Chantilly, where she works as a project manager for Advanced Project Management.
She had already received some calls from concerned close friends, who knew her sister went to Tech, where earlier in the morning the news had announced an ugly shooting took place. Palmer called her sister, but she didn't pick up.
She left a message, but felt assured Julia was probably fine; there had been no reason to worry. It wasn't until about 5 p.m. that evening, right when she was about to head home from work, that she called her mom. Her mom told her to quickly pack her bags, and to drive down to Tech as soon as possible, something was wrong.
Palmer was the first to arrive in Blacksburg. Her parents were driving down from New Jersey. Once she got to Tech, Palmer started demanding answers: "Why am I here? Where is my little sister?"
Finally she got answer from a chaplain with the Virginia State Police: her baby sister was dead.
Pryde had an incredible future ahead of her, Palmer said. And one could determine that by looking at all the accomplishments she'd garnered in just the 23 years of her life.
"Julia was very involved with composting at Tech, she did lots of case studies and presentations to the administration to get it started," Palmer said. "She did work in South America studying the effects of water run off on mountains. She was going to be famous. She was going to change the world."
Suffering the intense loss of her sister, Palmer will never forgive the Tech administration for what she described as a lack of compassion. Palmer remembers feeling bewildered when she first arrived on campus. After she'd been in Blacksburg for two days, consoling her parents and siblings, they still hadn't seen President Charles Steger, Palmer said. After strenuously campaigning to meet him, an appearance was scheduled.
They met in the Skelton Conference Center auditorium. The victims' families sat in the seats, and he stood at a distant podium. His first words to them, as Palmer remembers, were, "Well I suppose you've seen my interview on CNN..."
"We demanded he come talk to us," Palmer said. "How dare he not be there on day one, on Tuesday at 7 a.m. saying 'I'm so sorry for your loss, what can we do to help you?' He never ever apologized. For him to come in and say that (about the CNN interview) was just a slap in the face."
She also recalls feeling slightly nauseous when she learned her parents' Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund payout had a $200.00 deduction subtracted from their total payment. The deduction was for the hotel room at the Inn at Virginia Tech they stayed in during May to receive their daughter's posthumous diploma. Later, in August, Palmer received an invitation to sit in President Steger's personal luxury skybox during Tech's football home opener against East Carolina University.
But more than free tickets to a football game, more than a hand shake from Steger, more than a free hotel room, Palmer wanted something she knew she'll never get again: one more hug, one more smile, one more 'love ya,' from her sister, "Jules."
"Even the invitation to the football game, I mean, that's not reaching out to the families," Palmer said. "I don't want to go to a football game. I want Jules back. I want my little sister back."
A roommate wonders what could have been ...
All Joseph Aust wanted to do was get back to sleep. Aust, a junior electrical engineering major, heard his roommate get out of bed around 5:30 a.m. He recalls the sound of Cho munching on some cereal. He remembers lying there, unable to go back to sleep for a few hours, debating whether he would go to his only class of the day, a 10:10 a.m. elements of materials engineering class in the first floor of Randolph Hall.
Cho's routine seemed ordinary to Aust. He was usually a loud mover, knocking things around the room in the morning and keeping Aust awake. At 6:30 a.m., when Cho left, he finally got back to sleep for a couple more hours.
Aust woke up and saw the clock read 9 a.m., so he got up, and went to have some breakfast and decided to go to class.
In the middle of that class he learned something was going on. His class was instructed to stay in the room until 2 p.m., when it was deemed safe to return to his residence hall. He stayed in his room for a few hours, wondering why Cho had not come back yet after everyone had been told to go to their rooms.
There was a knock at the door to their suite in 2121 Harper Hall at 7:45 p.m. that night. The FBI, ATF and Virginia Tech Police had a warrant to search his and Cho's room. Four hours later the authorities finished their search, and Aust went to sleep. The most bizarre day of Aust's life had just passed, but he still wondered: Could his roommate's actions have been prevented?
"It is a possibility that Tech could have done something to prevent the tragedy," Aust wrote in an e-mail. "It is also a possibility that if they did prevent it, something else might have happened. It is horrible that 32 people lost their lives, but I think Tech did their best and prevented something that could have been much worse."
Moreover, Aust might always wonder if he had skipped class, would he have encountered Cho when he returned to their room after the shootings in West Ambler Johnston, before leaving again for Norris? Would he had have lived through the encounter? Or would there be 33 stones on the Drillfield today, instead of 32?
He tries not to think about that though. Rather, he prefers to honor the people his roommate killed, than wonder if he could have been one of them.
"I think it is important to stay strong and not let April 16 affect us in a negative way," Aust said in an e-mail. "I am a bit glad that I decided to go to breakfast and then to class though, since there is the rumor that Seung went back to our room sometime before the Norris shootings. If had skipped that class, I would have been in my room (then)."
A student survives a horrific ordeal ...
For what will always be a "what if" for Aust, for Lisa Kaiser, it was a reality.
She couldn't believe it was snowing that morning. "It's April, this is crazy," Kaiser had thought, as she boarded the Toms Creek A bus. She had a short walk through the blistery flurries to her computational errors analysis class on the second floor of Norris, room 205.
Her class went on as usual, except there was a substitute teacher that day, Haiyan Cheng. At 9:40 a.m. when class was over halfway through, Kaiser heard what she thought was a series of explosions. The sounds didn't alarm her though. She at first figured it was a controlled experiment. Norris, Kaiser said, was full of labs, and they are always doing projects that can occasionally be noisy.
"I thought it sounded like an exploding project, but on purpose," Kaiser said. "But I had this gut feeling that something wasn't right. I was trying to think that's not what is going on. But it really was."
Cheng peaked her head out the door, and looked Cho right in the eye. He fired at her, and Kaiser helped to move a desk to block the door. She and five of her classmates collapsed in front of its legs to keep it still. Unable to force his way through the human blockade, Cho fired a bullet into the hollow wooden door.
The bullets whizzed right over Kaiser's head, and smacked into the wall behind her. Cho gave up on getting into their room, and moved on down the hall. Kaiser remembers the screams of the others in between the blasts of Cho's guns. It only occurred to her later that people were screaming not out of fear, but because they had been hit. Kaiser heard some of the victim's last yells for life.
"I remember hearing screams inside and outside the building," Kaiser said. "I heard popping sounds too. But what I remember most were the shots and the sirens."
A year later, Kaiser is enjoying a bright sunny afternoon in Blacksburg. She's hanging outside Squires, on her way downtown for some lunch. She's not sure where though, it depends on where her five or so friends want to go -- they're also survivors of 205 Norris Hall. They e-mail each other once a month to decide on a convenient day to meet for lunch. This mid-April, it's a Thursday.
"We go to lunch and just hang out. We try not to focus on (the shootings) but it will come up," Kaiser said. "It's better not to think about it, but I try to do better things now. There's things I don't take for granted anymore. We all try to take 30 minutes out of our day for them."
A colonel salutes a fallen cadet ...
In his crisp sky-blue shirt, and sharply ironed blue pants, Col. Roszak appears the epitome of military strength and leadership. His clean jaw and tightly muscled forearms hint at years of discipline. But deep in his iron eyes, camouflaged beyond his Spartan demeanor is just a human being, with human emotions.
Roszak was sitting in his office in Brodie Hall when he saw a rush of people outside his window near Torgersen Hall. He was alerted of an emergency on campus, and helped the cadets safely escort stranded civilian students from McBryde to Brodie, the corps' main administrative building.
The corps immediately initiated a lockdown and a role call of the entire regiment, mainly to ensure every cadet was accounted for, and had returned safely back to their dorms. The count went up by the hour, but at 11:30 a.m. still tallied only 709; one short of their total. Within minutes, they had confirmed Cadet Matthew Joseph La Porte, of Dumont, N.J., and a drummer in the Highty Tighties, had a 9:05 a.m. intermediate French class in Norris Hall room 211.
"It was then that we realized the potentially grave situation we had on our hands," Roszak said. But the worst news came the very same day, almost twelve hours later.
"I can still remember it was at three minutes to midnight that Cadet Archut, the Corps Regimental Commander, called to tell me that Mrs. La Porte had just been notified by the New Jersey State Police that her son had passed away."
Later, on Thursday night, when Roszak had time to settle down, he remembers finally feeling the young man's loss. He had never personally engaged with La Porte, but even so, just to sense the disappearance of one of his corps' bright and enthusiastic cadets was ultimately more than his emotions could take.
"I just finally had a minute to where I had some time to myself," Roszak said. "I was at home, and I just held my wife, bawling. It wasn't a long cry, but it was enough."
La Porte's funeral mass was held on April 25 at St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Blacksburg. Hundreds packed into the church to honor La Porte, including the women's basketball team to show their appreciation to the Highty Tighties as their team's pep band, the entire sophomore class of the Highty Tighties and all the corps administration.
When the mass was finished, La Porte's flag-draped casket was carried by cadets out of church doors and into a bright spring sunshine that seemed like decades away from the snow flurry morning of the 16. As Roszak stepped into the sunlight, he was struck by a scene so intensely, that it became engraved into his memory. Lining the hill atop the cemetery where La Porte would be laid to rest, was the entire Corps of Cadets Regiment, decked in their very finest dress blues, giving the coffin of their fallen friend their final salute.
"We did what we had to do for one of our own, and I was very proud of that," Roszak said. "That in midst of all the turmoil, all the tragedy, I was proud that our cadets still stood tall, and they were there for their brother in probably the solemnest ceremony I've ever been a part of."
A year later, the four plan for the anniversary ...
This year, on April 16, Leah Palmer will come down to Tech to pay tribute to her sister with her parents. She and her family will go to a luncheon and hike hosted by Julia's major field, the biological systems engineering department.
Joseph Aust will participate in every event in appreciation for the lives of those lost on that tragic Monday.
Lisa Kaiser will be there too, with her very special group of friends from 205 Norris, who all lived through that terrible experience.
To honor La Porte, the entire Corps of Cadets will run in regimental formation to his gravesite in Blacksburg at 0600 hours. There, they will have a moment of silence.