“I work in a building that is right next door to the one where the majority of the shootings took place,” he said Friday.

“I walk by it every day.

It’s the weirdest feeling now looking at it.

”If he had not gotten the call that interrupted his routine, Washington said that he probably would have been walking by Norris Hall when the shooting there started.

“I tried to go on in to work, but officers stopped us and told us and turned us back,” Washington said.

“At this point we really didn’t know what was going on.

You know how it is; we thought the police were going a little overboard.

I didn’t realize it was more than one shooting.”

So, Washington said he tried a different entrance to campus.

“That’s when I saw this train of ambulances,” he said.

“There must have been six in the first group with more coming up behind them.

That’s when I realized something was definitely not right.”

Throughout the day he watched the news coverage as the event unfolded.

His family in Jefferson County called off and on all day to check on him.

“The numbers started to unfold,” he said.

“First it was 20, then 21, eventually there were 32 people killed.

“It was tough. We sort of assumed it was a student, but we didn’t know who the shooter was.

There are 26,000 of us here. He could easily have blended in with everyone.”

The next day Washington realized that he did indeed know some of the victims. Three names stood out to him: Matthew LaPorte, Reema Samaha and Nicole White. “There were all in a class I taught for a colleague of mine earlier this year,” he said. “I remember Matt and Nicole asking a lot of questions. I saw their names on the news and thought, ‘I know them.’” Washington said he had just walked across the drill field and commented on how strange it feels to walk across campus after the shootings. “I had been on campus, but this was the first time I’d walked through the heart of it since all this happened,” he said. “I took my camera and got some pictures of the buildings and saw some of the memorials. There are still reporters around asking questions.”

He admits that he and his friends have mixed feelings about the coverage the event received on the national news stations. “On one hand we understand the coverage is necessary. This is an unprecedented event,” he said. “But people here are really taking offense to the constant effort by the media to find fault. Right away they started asking what could have been done to prevent this.”

According to Washington, many of the reporters on the scene seemed to be looking to point fingers.

“They were looking for somebody to say that somebody had done something wrong and that’s why this happened,” he said. “This is a college campus; it is an open environment. Students hold the doors open for each other. You just can’t make the leap that that is a bad thing.”

Washington said the media were back in “full throttle” Monday when classes resumed. He watched some of the stations setting up around 7:15 a.m. on his way to the 8 a.m. class where he had met the three students he knew who were killed.

“It’s an early class and usually, if you can get students to attend at all, a lot of them will be late,” he said. “Almost everyone arrived by 7:30 or 7:40 a.m.

“It was quiet as a mouse at first. There were some students who were visibly crying. There were two counselors there and the department head stopped by. There’s no script for this sort of thing and it was tough at first. The teacher thanked everyone for being there and then there was a long pause. Then she asked if anyone had anything they wanted to say. Everything was quiet for a long time. Then a hand went up.”

The students started commenting on the events, on what happened that day and what had happened since then, how they felt and about the last time they had seen some of those who died April 16.

“It was quite therapeutic,” Washington said. “Once it started rolling people were less somber. Most were very stoic about what they felt.”

He said that the school’s administration is discussing closing Norris Hall where the shooter chained the doors closed and most of the shootings took place, for the rest of the year.

“Though the university community is stunned and deeply saddened by the tragedy, forgiveness has already begun for Cho (the shooter),” Washington said. “Surprisingly, the memorials around campus include one for him.”

Washington is in his third year at Virginia Tech where he is working on his doctoral degree in public administration and policy with a concentration in governmental accounting and financial management. He has just begun writing his dissertation.

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