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April 22, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Bobby Bowman assumed his position as managing editor for Virginia Tech's campus newspaper the Collegiate Times, April 16, the day 32 innocent lives were taken in a campus massacre.He worked 61 hours and slept for 10 in the four days that followed.
Around 7:15 a.m. English major Seung-Hui Cho, 23, shot two people in a campus residence hall. Two hours later, he opened fire in a building across campus, killing 30 more before turning the gun on himself.
Bowman received a text message from a friend alerting him of a possible shooting at 8:45 a.m., near the end of his morning class. By 10 a.m., most of the campus was on lockdown, he said.
"We had a job to do," Bowman said.
Over the next few hours Bowman called several people, but his mother first. He called his friends and told them not to go to class.
One of Bowman's friends was in a French class that was attacked. To avoid being shot, she laid on the ground and pretended to be dead. Bowman knew students who were shot, but none who were killed.
While Bowman was in an interview with Fox News, he saw the Collegiate Times' photo editor, Shaozhuo Cui, on the newsroom TV. He was lying face down on the ground with guns pointed at him.
Cui was detained before police learned that the killer had shot himself and before police knew there was only one suspect, Bowman said. Cui matched the description of the suspect as an Asian man wearing a black jacket and glasses.
Bowman said he and the staff spent the next few days running on adrenaline. About a third of the staff left to go home for some of the paper's most challenging issues.
The newspaper increased its circulation from 14,000 to 15,000 and at the same time Bowman wrote his first story as managing editor for the Collegiate Times. The newspaper, regularly a Tuesday-through-Friday publication, published its first Monday edition on the one-week anniversary of the attacks.
Ex-multimedia editor David Grant had the hardest job this week, Bowman said. Grant said he spent seven hours calling friends and family of alleged victims to confirm their fatalities. He broke down in tears for the first time Tuesday morning while reflecting on his task.
"The mornings are the worst," Grant said. "When you wake up and think about what you did the day before."
By Tuesday, he had confirmed 28 of the innocent 32 victims, beating the competition.
"We scooped everybody," Bowman said. "We got the story first."
But Bowman said he wished the paper's success didn't come under such circumstances.
"I'd give anything to not have had to do this," he said.
Had the massacre not occurred, the Collegiate Times' top stories would followed the usual topics - a horse that contracted herpes, a proposed Wal-Mart downtown, and a Girls Gone Wild trip to their city, Bowman said.
"Nothing happens in Blacksburg, Virginia, and we wish it would have stayed that way."
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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