Colin Goddard, who was shot and wounded at Virginia Tech, became a prominent gun-safety proponent and strategist in the decade after the tragedy. Here, he attends a rally at Richmond’s Capitol Square in 2008. (Photo by Steve Helber/Associated Press courtesy University of Virginia Press)
His thoughts whirling, Thomas P. Kapsidelis tried to focus as he raced toward Blacksburg on that chilly Monday morning.
It was April 16, 2007. Kapsidelis had been a journalist for 30 years, but everything he knew, everything he had experienced, would be eclipsed by what lay ahead. He would be directing coverage for the Richmond Times-Dispatch of what was then the biggest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history.
The killing rampage at Virginia Tech left 33 dead, including the gunman — a Virginia Tech senior who shot himself as police closed in.
“I had two college-age children at the time. It affected me deeply,” Kapsidelis recalled in a recent interview to discuss his book, “After Virginia Tech.” The book is set for release by the University of Virginia Press on April 16, which marks 12 years since the horrific events took place.
It’s not a blood-soaked, minute-by minute account of what many have called a massacre. Instead, Kapsidelis tells the story of the Virginia Tech shootings and their aftermath through the eyes and voices of the survivors.
Readers meet Kristina Anderson, who was shot three times, lost two-thirds of her kidney and parts of her large and small intestines, but lived to become founder of the nonprofit Koshka Foundation and an international advocate for violence prevention in schools, workplaces and public spaces.
She was in a French class where the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 12 of her classmates. Altogether, 30 people died and 17 were wounded in Norris Hall, which housed the French class and other disciplines. Two other students were shot and killed by Cho earlier in the day.
As she lay on the classroom floor among the dead, dying and wounded, Anderson heard her classmates’ cell phones ringing, ringing, ringing.
“The reporters told me that as fast as they were driving south on Interstate 81, they were passed by ambulances and state police as if standing still.” —from the prologue of “After Virginia Tech”
Kapsidelis also introduces good Samaritans such as Gary Ford, a FedEx driver. He unhesitatingly parked his truck and took the wheel of a traumatized couple’s station wagon for the frenzied drive from Rappahannock County to a hospital in Roanoke. The couple, who were frequent FedEx customers, were in shocked mourning over the loss of their daughter, Emily Hilscher, one of the first students Cho shot and killed.
In some ways, everyone who was on the Virginia Tech campus when the shootings occurred had their lives altered, as did others far from the university. While some survivors became champions for change, others moved forward with meaningful lives out of the spotlight, forever bound to both the living and the dead.
“The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent and unafraid,” poet and English professor Nikki Giovanni said in a convocation address the day after the shootings.
Kapsidelis had already worked the weekend shift as an editor, and he was supposed to have had that Monday off.
He had driven his wife, Karin, then a reporter for the Times-Dispatch, to work and had heard early reports of two students being shot on the Virginia Tech campus. He pulled off on a side street and called his brother, whose son had gone to Tech. By then, word was out that the death toll might be climbing.
Kapsidelis headed back to the newspaper, arriving just as senior editors were coming out of a meeting. He was immediately asked to go to Blacksburg and lead the team reporting the story. Outlying reporters, in what was then the state bureau system of the Times-Dispatch, were already on their way.
“After Virginia Tech” comes out in April, 12 years after the mass shooting. (Image courtesy University of Virginia Press)
It was three years later when he decided he would write a book, telling the stories of the survivors and their accomplishments since one of the saddest days in Virginia history, a sadness that galvanized a country behind Hokie Nation. Kapsidelis, 62, first earned a master’s degree from Goucher College in fine arts, focused on nonfiction writing.
“I felt like perhaps I wanted to write for people who might be swept up in how news changes quickly and how we lurch from one intensely reported event to another,” Kapsidelis says.
“I hope that people who follow and are saddened by mass violence and violence in their own communities will want to know what can be done about it and what is a way … to effect change. I hope people like that will read it.” He also hopes that young people will read the book and be inspired by the courage of survivors, including those who bore no physical injuries but who were deeply scarred mentally and emotionally by their experiences.
Kapsidelis left the Times-Dispatch in 2016 to accept a fellowship at Virginia Humanities to research and write the story of the mass shootings at Virginia Tech.
For the most part, he lets the survivors speak for themselves and their work over a wide range of causes: gun safety, campus security, trauma recovery and mental health reform. But in the book’s last paragraph, he leaves the reader with a disturbing image, and a call to action:
“The gun smoke hung heavy in Norris Hall when police entered with weapons drawn. A murderer was dead by his own hand in a college classroom building that had become the scene of unimaginable horror. The cell phones of the dead and injured rang unanswered. Through the haunting period that has followed, answering the call is the only chance to fashion hope from horror.”
