JOAN BARRON Star-Tribune capital bureau with correspondent reports | Posted: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 12:00 am
CHEYENNE - Tim Robinson, an instructor in the University of Wyoming statistical department, was on the phone Monday at about 8 a.m. with a staff member at Virginia Tech who had been on the committee that approved his advanced degree at the southwestern Virginia college.
"He commented that there were sirens going" and said there had been a shooting in one of the dormitories, Robinson said. He got off the phone and turned on the news.
Robinson said he has kept in touch with several people in Blacksburg, Va., where the campus for 26,000 students is located.
"It really hits close to home. I got married on the Virginia Tech campus. It's a place that's very near and dear to my heart," Robinson said in a telephone interview from Laramie.
"It's a close knit community," Robinson said. He and his wife, who has family in Blacksburg, know some of the school's engineering students but don't know about their situation.
Anne Moore, women's soccer coach at UW, spent four years on the Virginia Tech campus before getting her master's degree in 1996. Moore also coached soccer at the school, and her husband was an officer with the Blacksburg Police Department.
She said she had the television on all day Monday.
"It's very surreal, because it's such a wonderful place to live. It's very safe. It's very similar to Laramie," Moore said.
The town is surrounded by national forest and national park land, she added.
"It's just amazing that something like this could happen in such a beautiful place," Moore said. "It's shocking to me."
She said she knows the soccer coach at Virginia Tech but hadn't called her yet because she has a lot to deal with right now checking on the student-athletes.
Moore said many of her high school classmates in Fairfax, Va., went to Virginia Tech, one of the two largest school in the state. The other is the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
Meanwhile, a former Virginia Tech professor and his wife who have retired in Buffalo expressed shock at the news of the shooting spree that killed more than 30 people.
"It's awful, such a tragedy," Jane Bollinger said. "It's just hard to believe that such a murder of such proportions could happen on that lovely college campus. Virginia Tech was home to us for so long."
Bollinger and her husband, Gil, spent 25 years in Blacksburg, where Gil served as head of the Geology Department in the Arts and Science College. It was in the little college town of 30,000 to 40,000 where the couple reared their three sons.
"Nothing like that ever happened there in the quarter century we lived in the college community, and it's definitely a shock," Gil said.
"We've not contacted any of our friends in the area - not even our son who lives some 35 miles from the university," Gil said at midday Monday. "We feel like everything there is in such confusion and the authorities have not had time to identify the victims."
Asked about security on the campus, Bollinger says the campus layout is much like many other universities.
"Virginia Tech is like the University of Wyoming - it's a land-grant school," he said. "…It's a very open campus, and anybody can wander around without arousing suspicion."