The grass died long ago, trampled under the feet of thousands of people who have traveled from all corners of the country to see the makeshift memorial put together by Hokies United on the Drillfield.
The university announced this past week that there are plans for a permanent memorial, as well as an “intermediate” memorial that will be in place before students return to campus this fall.
The intermediate memorial will consist of 32 Hokie Stones for the 32 victims of the shootings in Norris Hall and West Ambler-Johnston on April 16. Each victim’s name will be etched on a stone, and there will be lighting for the crushed-gravel walkway. The memorial will be placed in the same location as the makeshift memorial — in a semicircle on the Drillfield near Burruss Hall. Each Hokie Stone weighs 300 pounds.
The stones currently on the Drillfield have been there for almost two months. The week following April 16 brought many additions to the makeshift memorial, as people left mementos at each of the stones. Hokies United has since moved many of these items to Shultz, where they will remain until the end of July. Sumeet Bagai, a Hokies United leader, said that the group is currently looking for places to hold these items for the return of students in the fall.
President Charles Steger appointed a committee, led by Tom Tillar, vice president of alumni relations to determine recommendations for a permanent memorial, as well as decide what should be done before students return in the fall. The 10-person committee included faculty members, alumni association members, members of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors, graduate students and undergraduate students.
“I had a very well-represented group,” Tillar said.
The committee did not consider Norris Hall as a memorial, but did look at different locations for an intermediate and permanent memorial.
“The charge of this committee was to come up with an appropriate intermediate memorial for our campus and to get the process started for how a permanent memorial process would look,” Bagai, a member of the 10-person committee, said.
That group helped make many difficult decisions, Tillar said, but one decision was not a hard one — choosing 32 stones instead of 33, which would have included the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho.
“Thirty-two stones was really what we agreed early on, was the purpose of the memorial,” he said. “The memorial is to be for the victims of a crime.”
Tillar said that one member of the committee, John Lee, the president of the Korean-American alliance at Tech, was most helpful in this decision.
“Having John (Lee) there was helpful to us to understand how his culture views this,” Tillar said. “He was very, very opinionated that we only have 32 memorial stones and that there should be no attention given to Cho at all.”
The Hokies United memorial originally contained 32 stones, but Katelynn Johnson, a sociology major, added the 33rd stone to remember the Cho family.
The committee first came up with its idea for the location of a permanent memorial, Tillar said. The committee began thinking about the intermediate memorial after deciding that the permanent memorial should be placed somewhere between Price and Davidson Halls, across from War Memorial
“It’s a site begging for some kind of structure, or memorial or magnificent sculpture,”
Tillar said. “It’s going to take several years to plan and build something at that site.”
The committee has sent only a recommendation of the permanent memorial to the administration. The administration will appoint another committee, which will look more closely at what and where a permanent memorial will be.
Construction on the intermediate memorial will begin in a couple of weeks, said Mark Owczarski, director of news and information with University Relations.
All of the materials for the memorial have been donated to the university, Tillar said.
