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Still Strong

April 17, 2007

By Rebecca Blanton, Media General News Service

DANVILLE — Tory Boivin, a freshman engineering student at Virginia Tech, was in her dorm when Monday’s shootings happened.

She lost Maxine Turner — a friend, mentor and sorority sister — in the massacre, but says the most important thing people need to know is that the students and the school aren’t victims. They’re Hokies.

So while the nation mourns and the media continues to emphasize the tragedy, fear and suffer-ing, some Virginia Tech students have another message — the message of enduring youth. That things are going to be OK.

“One thing I think is really important for the media to know right now is that we’re still strong. This happens.

This thing is so tragic and it’s so horrible. We’re going to rise above it,” Boivin said after a prayer service Tuesday at Westover Baptist Church. “Hokies are strong. We’re going to get through it. I don’t want (people) to remember Virginia Tech as ‘oh my gosh, 33 people were killed.’ I want them to remember that Hokies stick together.

“This isn’t about people dying. This is about people coming together. That’s so important to me.”

Lights in the church sanctuary are dimmed. The shadows from the edges of the room reach out to where Boivin, her mother, her friends and fellow students Virginia Williams and Erin Burdick have gathered with the Rev. Doug Barber and two associate pastors to pray.

There is no screaming here. Soft carpet muffles even the footfalls of those entering and leaving. There are no gunshots here, but there were Monday.

‘I Heard the Gunshots’

“I heard the gunshots,” Burdick said. “It was like (the shooter) had to go right by our dorm.”

Burdick and Boivin pick up a pen and paper and start sketching where they were as the shoot-ings unfolded.

“I was standing right here in front of McBride, which is next to Norris, when I saw like the SWAT team all around the building and the sirens going off,” Burdick said. “I was just getting out of class and the SWAT team was all around screaming, ‘Clear the area! Clear the area!’ There was screaming and screaming all around. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ I was just in class.

“I didn’t have any idea anything had even happened on campus. There were lots of kids stand-ing around questioning what was going on — just like they were frozen.”

Burdick said she started running after hearing the gunshots and seeing SWAT team members break in doors.

“I called my boyfriend to see where he was and he was stuck in class. Then I heard a couple of shots,” Burdick said.
“I was standing in the middle of the drill field and I could see the front of the building and I could see the main doors and I could see them break open the front of the building. I saw them break in doors and people running out with their hands in the air screaming. That’s when I started running.”

“People were jumping out of windows to get away,” Boivin added.
Ammo tucked in vest pockets with a gun or guns in his hands, the girls can only imagine the shooter passing by.
“This is the first shooting,” Burdick said, pointing to a circle scrawled on the paper she used to sketch the scene. “This is the second.”

Back to Normal?

The students’ voices are calm today. The extent of the tragedy hasn’t sunk in.

They are doing “normal” things today, Fern Boivin, Tory’s mother said.

Virginia Williams is getting her hair cut. The girls are studying for tests, talking about the things college students talk about, laughing with each other, lapsing into smiles and talking about school pride.

The photos are there in every media outlet in America — teary faces, students and parents and families crying and grieving, but there are other images that remain as well, if only in the memo-ries of those who were there. These are images of scared, but determined students who blocked a door, keeping the shooter out of a classroom even as the assailant fired into the door.

There were students who stopped friends headed to classrooms and turned them back; students who staunched the flow of blood from wounds with their own clothing or bare hands. Strength. That’s the image Boivin wants the world to have of Virginia Tech students even as they move through the grief process.

Her mother nods. The optimism of youth, of survivors, blazes in these young women.

“We’re going shopping today. We’re going to lunch. It hasn’t hit them yet,” Fern Boivin ac-knowledges. “It will stay with them. It will shape who they are.”

For Tory, that shape will be a positive one.

“It’s a tragedy,” she said. “But this is a freak thing. This has nothing to do with our school. If anything our school is one that’s going to be able to get over it. Other schools are so big, but we’re small and so close. I love my school and I would never ever think about leaving. Even after some-thing like this happened. Never. I would never leave. You know? I love it and I want to go back there as soon as possible and be with them.”

Rebecca Blanton is a staff writer for the Danville Register & Bee in Danville, Va.