Collegiate Times

The second floor of Norris Hall doesn't hint at what its old walls had witnessed.

"When you come in downstairs and you look at that old hallway, that is the image I have in my head," said Colin Goddard, a student who was injured in Norris Hall. "But when I came here, it was a different place completely."

Survivors entered through the doors that have been closed for the past two years and will soon house the Center for Peace Studies as well as facilities for the engineering science and mechanics department.

"I really like what they have done with Norris," Goddard said. "It is very open and very bright, you feel kind of good about being there."

Roger O'Dell, father of injured student Derek O'Dell, said it was the first time he had been inside Norris Hall, and he was glad to see that the building looks different than before the shootings occurred.

"Norris will not be the same place anymore," O'Dell said. "It is almost like something of the past, like a bad memory that will not be here any more."

 "I think it is good to have the feeling erased, because it is like a haunted house in some neighborhood, and if you can imagine a horror movie where the haunted house finally gets torn down and the movie ends happily, to me, it is sort of the same idea," O'Dell continued. "Part of Norris Hall is sort of a haunted house on the campus of Virginia Tech, and to have the rooms totally renovated, and to have it look so different does it really have the feeling of being erased."

O'Dell compared the renovation to Derek's belongings the police retrieved from Norris Hall after the shooting.

"I went to pick up Derek's calculator and backpack, but because of where he was in the German classroom, there was a lot of blood on the backpack," O'Dell said. Derek's therapist told his father "not to take it out of his control, but to just take it home and tell Derek that it is in the house, and when he wants it destroyed, you can destroy it, and when he wants to see it, he can see it, but don't take that out of his control."

O'Dell said that maybe Derek's backpack "will be destroyed some time, then that will be end of it, just like the second floor of Norris Hall has been destroyed, and that is the end of that as well."

After the destruction came the restoration.

Jerzy Nowak, the Director of Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention and widower of Jocelyn Couture-Nowak, a French instructor who was killed in Norris Hall, said the center is a student operation that hopes to provide opportunities to work with the curriculum.

"I am working forward to setting up the minor," Nowak said, referring to the peace studies minor that will be added to the Tech programs. "We are going to build learning teams that the faculty and students can be a part of. We hope to focus more on the creative process and developing the same applications in interdisciplinary studies."

Nowak added that he is going to create a capstone course that will provide some internship opportunities for students in the future.

"I hope to start to minor in the fall semester of 2010," Nowak said. "The peace center for this period of time has been playing an important role for the healing and recovery process and it is perceived as a symbolic place, and a place that will help them."

Goddard added that he does not think Tech could have turned Norris around from such a negative location to a more positive event without the Center for Peace.

"This place will be about bringing people with similar experiences together and talking about those experiences," Goddard said.  "I am all about it and all for the peace center. You would not want students to walk by it and just see an empty space all of the time, but now this is something constructive and something positive that has been done with Norris and I think that it will entice people to come back and get involved."