April 25, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Senior Bridget Devlin started her day April 16 by reading away messages written on AOL Instant Messenger."Locked in the dorms. Somebody got shot," her friend's message read.
For the rest of the day, Devlin stayed in her off-campus apartment and relied on social networking Web sites, text messaging, e-mail and phone calls to unravel the events.
She told one roommate not to go to campus and called the other to tell her to come home. Devlin received an e-mail from University Relations that said there was a shooting on campus and to stay away from the windows. The e-mail had bad punctuation, incorrectly spelled words and wasn't signed.
"That just scared me to death," she said.
Devlin watched the news and waited for the names of victims to be released. When people signed on to their Instant Messenger or Facebook accounts, she said it was a relief to see they were alive.
"You forget who you know and wonder, 'Who am I forgetting? Who's not online?'" she said. "And then it's, 'they're OK, and they're OK.'"
Phone calls came in all day from people she hadn't talked to in years. Students from Virginia Tech's rival school, University of Virginia, changed their Facebook pictures to the Hokie mascot and the "VT" symbol.
Students' e-mail inboxes are full from e-mails from the university, but "nobody is ready to delete them," Devlin said.
"We feel like deleting it is saying that we're over it, and no one is ready to do that," she said.
Virginia Tech professor and renowned poet Nikki Giovanni said she doesn't do e-mail.
"I have a Web mistress," she said, referring to her secretary that checks her e-mail and calls if there is a pressing message.
Giovanni has a computer, but no Internet access. She has a cell phone, but only uses it to talk to her aunt. But while Giovanni is not technologically savvy, she found out about shootings from a text message on someone else's cell phone.
Devlin said that technology is how she found out about everything that day. So many people relied on their cell phones for calls and text messages that circuits were busy for several hours.
Freshman Jill Evans was walking across the Drillfield at 9:15 a.m. April 16 on the way to an eye doctor appointment. She ended up staying at the eye doctor for hours while tragic events unfolded on campus.
There were no TVs in the doctor's office and Evans couldn't reach anybody by cell phone because the circuits were busy. She was the only person on the floor of her residence hall that was not accounted for.
When Evans returned to her room that afternoon, she opened her phone and found 32 voicemail messages and about 40 text messages from her parents and every friend she could think of, she said.
The tragedy hit Evans the most when she learned that her friend, Reema Samaha, had been killed. Evans was in a dance group with Samaha and had videotaped her dancing three days before she was killed.
That night, David Grant had the job of confirming each person killed in the shootings so their names could be listed in the school newspaper, the Collegiate Times.
Grant said he spent seven hours in front of the computer the night of the shooting and early the next morning. He was able to confirm several of the dead students using Facebook.
"I ran that thing to the ground," he said.
Facebook was crucial that night and the most important tool he used, Grant said. He was constantly checking who had recently updated their pages and looking at the newly posted messages.
The Collegiate Times published more names Tuesday than any other media outlet, Grant said.
"What we did would not have been possible without Facebook."
Karen McIntyre can be reached at kmcintyre@theorion.com
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Read more of The Orion's on-location coverage of Virginia Tech:
- Virginia Tech tragedy
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