March/April 2008

Reflection and Recovery

Exploring emotions and calls for action one year after the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

By Ben Swenson

Cassandra Carver remembers waiting.

“When I first read the e-mail at work that there had been a shooting, I tried to call Jamal on his cell phone and he didn’t pick up,” says Carver, a Virginia Beach resident. “I found out later that the shooting had been at the engineering building, and my heart dropped to the floor.”

She soon found out that her worst fears were true. Her son, 22-year-old Jamal Carver, an engineering science and mechanics major at Virginia Tech, had been shot twice by Seung-Hui Cho, whose murderous rampage left 32 Tech students and professors dead and 17 others seriously wounded on April 16, 2007.

The memories from that eventful day and the outpouring of grief that followed remain vivid. Most remember exactly where they were when word first came that something was terribly wrong. People began calling around, checking on friends, family and neighbors, particularly those in the Virginia Tech community, as if this was a rerun of 9-11, but even closer to home.

The potency of these recollections, as if the tragedy occurred just last week, is a testament to time’s swift passage. This April, one year will have elapsed since the shootings. All these months have offered hindsight and the opportunity for investigation into how to prevent tragedies like this in the future.

INVESTIGATIVE ACTIONS

The public most immediately demanded answers in the aftermath of the shootings. Virginia Tech’s administrators and state policymakers decided that the best way to find out how Cho was able to carry out such a brazen attack was to convene official panels with investigatory powers sufficient to make sense of the tragedy.

For the rest of this article, see the March/April issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.