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31 Black

Tuesday, 15 April 2008 21:03 by Dave

Today is the day it all comes back. All the images, all the sounds, all the memories of one of the worst days many have ever experienced.
April 16, 2007. The day “massacre” and Virginia Tech became synonymous. The day the world learned about Blacksburg, Va. The day we all became Hokies.
The airwaves today will be full of replays from that day. Newspapers have been running stories since Sunday, with The Roanoke Times running a 10-page special section entitled “One Year Later.” The Washington Post has had several excellent stories, including stories on the parents of the shooter, and survivor Derek O’Dell.
Each will bring back memories and stir emotions. The memory I won't ever be able to get out of my head involves a phrase I’d never heard before. I was at WAGE that morning when the phone calls started coming in from parents of Tech students asking for information on the shootings. I immediately turned on CNN, then went online in search of any details. One site, Techsideline.com, was filled with posts from students and people in the area, and several were suggesting the situation was far worse than what was being reported.
One post had a link to the police band radio in Blacksburg, so I connected with it and turned the sound up as loud as it would go. I then grabbed another computer and was able to pick up streaming video from a Roanoke television station.
While monitoring all three sources of information, I selectively listened to each for a few moments at a time. Just as I was turning my attention to the police scanner, I heard the end of a transmission with a voice saying “31 black.” At the time, police were only reporting one fatality. I walked down the hall and asked anyone if they knew what it meant. No one was sure.
As the day went on, and the casualty numbers kept increasing, it became apparent what the transmission meant. Several weeks later, Randy Breton, who runs EMS services locally, told me it was terminology for triage in an emergency medical situation. “Red means critical injury,” he said. “Green means they’re not critical. Black means they’re dead.”
In Norris Hall that morning, 30 students lost their lives, plus the shooter. 31 black.
While much will be made today of the senseless loss a year ago, I hope a few other things from a year ago won’t be overlooked. While devastated by the tragedy – any Hokie who tells you he watched that first week of news coverage and didn’t shed a tear is lying – most Hokies were equally flabbergasted by the outpouring of support from every corner of the world. As each show of support became known, the waterworks among Hokie Nation kept going. If you were one of them, thank you. The world will never know how much that support meant to so many.
Then there’s the person who really started the healing, but will probably never be identified. He or she is probably a student, and just followed an instinct during the convocation ceremony the next day. After Nikki Giovanni hit a home run with her “We Will Prevail. We Are Virginia Tech” speech, and the applause died down (click on the screen below to see), one person started clapping as if at a basketball game. “Let’s go Hokies” started off quietly, then immediately rose to a level that filled Cassell Coliseum. The crowd roared.
In my mind, that’s the moment the healing began. It’s as if the students were saying to the world, in their own way, we’ve taken a huge blow. But we’re going to be OK.
One year later, a lot of healing has taken place. There's still a long way to go. But we're going to be OK.
Nikki said it best: We are the Hokies...we will prevail, we will prevail, we will prevail.
We are... Virginia Tech.

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