Victims

Virginia Tech mourns victims, killer

(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-04-23 06:55

A heart-rending note pays tribute to Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-hui at the campus memorial.    Reuters

Mourners gathered on Saturday for the funerals of many of the 32 victims killed at Virginia Tech, and students extended a note of forgiveness to the gunman responsible for the massacre.

A few tributes to Cho Seung-hui, who shot his victims then himself last Monday, have been added to a growing memorial of stones in the center of the sprawling university in southwest Virginia, where knots of weeping students continue to gather.

"I just wanted you to know that I am not mad at you. I don't hate you," read a note among flowers at a stone marker labeled for Cho. "I am so sorry that you could find no help or comfort."

The note, one of three expressing sorrow and sympathy for the gunman, a deeply disturbed English major, was signed: "With all my love, Laura." A purple candle burned and a small American flag stood in the ground nearby.

Other memorial stones were decorated with flags from Canada, Peru and Israel for victims who came from those countries. There were also teddy bears, photos and scribbled notes of grief from friends and family.

Nearly a dozen funerals and services for victims, who included 27 students and five teachers, were held in Blacksburg and across the United States, following the worst shooting spree in modern US history.

In Narrows, a tiny factory town about 50 km from the university, some 800 mourners filled the high school auditorium to overflowing for the funeral of Jarrett Lane, 22, an engineering student who would have graduated in May.

"He had the world by the tail," state Senator John Edwards told the packed auditorium, where students in Virginia Tech's orange and maroon mixed with townspeople in black.

After the service, mourners walked together across the school's track, where Lane once raced, to a green cemetery in the crook of Virginia's mountains, and stood quietly beneath a cloudless sky as he was buried.

In Evans, Georgia, some 100 members of the Virginia Tech marching band saluted Ryan Clark, 22, a member of the Marching Virginians and one of Cho's first victims.

Clark, a resident assistant in the dormitory charged with helping other students, was killed when he ran to the room where the initial shooting took place. He had been due to graduate in May and wanted to pursue a doctorate in neuroscience.

At Virginia Tech, graduate student Chris Chabalko, 29, said adding a stone memorial for Cho was fair. "He was a student. Thirty-three people died," said Chabalko. "There's nothing anyone can do about it now. We've got to remember them equally."

Cho's family issued a heartbroken apology on Friday for the actions of the 23-year-old, who moved to Virginia with his family from South Korea when he was a child.

"He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare," the family said in a statement.

Agencies

(China Daily 04/23/2007 page6)