Austin Cloyd dreamed of working for the United Nations and believed she would help heal conflicts, such as the one now ranging in Ukraine. One can only imagine, had she been able to follow that path, the difference she might have made.
Matthew La Porte was a talented musician — a cello player and percussionist — and a natural leader, ascending to and succeeding in positions of responsibility. It’s easy to think he would have been an asset to the armed forces if he pursued a career in the military.
And Julia Pryde studied biological systems engineering, exploring ways to reduce food waste and working on sustainable practices to better protect the environment. Her contributions might have proved to be invaluable in the climate crisis.
We’ll never know what Cloyd, La Porte and Pryde might have done with their lives. On April 16, 2007, a gunman at Virginia Tech killed all three, 24 of their classmates and five faculty members. Twenty-three others were injured, including 17 who were shot. The gunman then killed himself.
At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in American history, a searing and shocking affront to American sensibilities. Shootings at an Orlando nightclub in 2016 and at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 were deadlier; the 2012 shooting at Newtown Elementary School in Connecticut was arguably more monstrous.
Yet, in each of these, what challenges us is the ages of the victims. These were overwhelmingly young people, lives of limitless opportunity stretched out before them.
In Blacksburg, most of those killed were promising students in the dorm rooms or attending classes at Norris Hall. Others were accomplished academics who dedicated their lives to research and instruction. These included Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who bravely blocked his classroom door to the gunman before his death.
Indeed, there was plenty of courage on display that day: students and professors whose quick thinking and selfless acts saved lives. In the face of such horror, they moved to help others — sacrifices that should never be forgotten.
Cloyd, 18 at the time of the shooting, would be 33 today. La Porte would be 35 and Pryde would be 38. What they could have accomplished for their communities, for Virginia, for the nation and the world had the shooter received the mental health treatment he so desperately needed or been prohibited from buying the guns he used in the rampage.
A state report into the shooting identified those issues and others in its review, recommending improved and expanded behavioral health services, streamlined emergency response plans, and more effective restrictions on firearm purchases by those considered a threat to themselves and others.
The General Assembly moved to adopt many of those recommendations in the years after the shootings, but Virginia has not done enough to provide adequate mental health services across the commonwealth. And while a push for tighter gun control did follow the shooting, memories are short and some lawmakers seem to have forgotten their responsibility to keep deadly weapons away from those hell-bent on violence.
It is infuriating to know, as the state report made clear, the many moments when different choices might have prevented this carnage and could have provided the troubled student gunman the help he so desperately needed.
But it is inexcusable that Virginia still doesn’t not treat these issues with the urgency and gravity they deserve. We know the consequences of inaction and inattention. They were clear 15 years ago, as they are today.
On Saturday, the Virginia Tech community will join with fellow Virginians and people around the world to remember those lost in the 2007 tragedy. We should celebrate their memories and lend support to their families and loved ones.
It is a sorrowful reminder of the terrible toll violence inflicts on our communities — the lives of service and boundless promise it steals from us — and why we must do everything in our power to stop it.
