NMH Magazine : Winter 2008

That I May Serve

The campus of Virginia Tech (VT) in Blacksburg, Virginia, was shaken to its core last April when a mentally disturbed student killed 32 people, then turned his gun on himself. Ellen Plummer ’78, a Virginia Tech administrator, was on campus at the time and became a key player in the recovery effort. Now deputy director of VT’s Office of Recovery and Support, she writes about her experiences.

On April 16, 2007, I went to my job as director at the Women’s Center at Virginia Tech. It was a cold, windy Monday, with snow flurries—unusually chilly for that time of year. At about 8:30 am, the associate director of the center walked into my office, looking the color of newspaper. “Christine, what’s wrong?” I asked.

There are two students dead in West AJ,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.” She explained that her husband, a sergeant in the Blacksburg police department, had just called to tell her. Immediately after that, Virginia Tech’s dean of students had phoned and canceled a meeting with us, saying, “There’s been a shooting.”

Christine and I were overwhelmed, stunned, tearful. We simply couldn’t believe it. Hugging each other, we kept repeating, “Oh, my god! Two students shot? What the hell?” Next we called our colleagues in student affairs to offer counseling to other students in the residence hall.

i had a meeting at ten o’clock across campus in Burruss Hall, Virginia Tech’s administrative building. True to form, I was running late. As I drove down Washington Street, where West AJ is located, I saw masses of police vehicles and police officers running. Not wanting to be a gawker, I drove to the other side of campus and parked behind Burruss. It was class change time, so students were getting out of their cars and starting to walk up into the quad, a clutch of buildings that includes Norris Hall. Two officers met me at the top of the stairs with their rifles drawn, screaming, “Get back! Get back! Shots fired!” When they realized I was an administrator, one said, “Ma’am, can you help us get the students to not come up the stairs?”

I joined forces with a grad student who was also walking up the steps. We turned around and widened our arms as students began to pour in from the parking lot. “Go back to your vehicles! Leave campus! Go back, go back!” I returned to my car too, sweeping people in my wake. By then, ambulances and police cars were converging on this side of campus, all going a million miles an hour. It was sheer pandemonium.

While I was driving back to my office, a student from the Women’s Center called my cell phone. “Ellen, we’ve gotten a message from the university. We’re to remain in the building with the windows shut and the blinds drawn because there have been shootings in Norris Hall.”

Back at the center, we pulled up CNN on a computer and got the story in the same way the rest of the world did. At a noon news conference, my dear friend Wendell Flinchum, chief of police at Virginia Tech, announced, “We think there are at least twenty dead.”

I experienced total disconnect: a textbook example of cognitive dissonance. I thought, “He misspoke.” There was no way he was right. No way.

the university gave the all-clear at about 1:30 pm. My staff all decided to go home, but I knew I couldn’t leave. I drove to the dean of students office and asked, “Where do you need help? What do you want me to do?”

They sent me to the Inn (the local name for the Skelton Conference Center and Inn at Virginia Tech), which became the staging center for families of the deceased and injured. Two colleagues from the provost’s office were already there, along with a lot of emergency responders. Students, faculty, and staff seeking news of loved ones kept streaming into the Inn, and we created a list so we could contact them as soon as we had information.

The police were showing up in droves, and they needed a command center. By stripping my office at the Women’s Center of its computer, printer, paper, and office supplies, I set up headquarters for the medical examiner’s office, the FBI, and the state police. At one point I ran into Wendell, the VT police chief, after his second or third press conference. I knew he’d gone into Norris Hall while shots were still being fired, putting his life on the line for all of us.

I said, joking a little, “Even though you’re in uniform, can I give you a hug?”

“Absolutely,” he answered.

I threw my arms around him and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

For the next five days, I did whatever I could to help, heading home for a few hours now and then to get some sleep. My role emerged with time; nobody could say, “Okay, Ellen your job is—” because no one was telling anyone what her or his job was. I did my best to get food to those pulling the long hauls. Along with many others, I talked with families of the deceased while they waited, and then I escorted them to their official notification. I was very involved in sorting out the regulations associated with shipping bodies to other states and countries—we had remains transported as far as Egypt and Israel and as close as Blacksburg.

Reporters swarmed in every nook and cranny of the Inn and pounded on the windows of arriving vehicles. One member of the media put on a collar and tried to masquerade as a minister so he could sneak upstairs to the second floor to be with the families of the deceased. I was oddly encouraged by the crude signs students threw together and posted all over campus, saying, “Media go home, leave us alone.”

One striking memory from that week is the candlelight vigil on Tuesday night, when thousands of people gathered on Virginia Tech’s drill field. What struck me most was the quiet. Typically when masses of people come together on the Virginia Tech campus, it’s for a football game—and, of course, there’s a lot of noise. But here was a huge field full of people, and everyone was utterly silent.

I was also amazed by the volume of mail, gifts, and mementos, which created a separate crisis. Where to put everything? The amount of stuff was boggling: countless teddy bears, angels, crosses, candles, full-sized portraits of the deceased, topiaries, posters, banners, and origami cranes. One Canadian man called and offered to give a VT tattoo to all the university’s employees and students. Grief, I learned, is an emotion of action.

The only time I cried that week was when I called my mother. There’s something primal about hearing your mother’s voice in the midst of a crisis. I kept saying to her, “It’s awful, Mom, it’s awful. It’s awful. It’s just awful.” And yet I kept functioning. I suppose my need to work kept me from falling apart.

By Thursday morning, the deceased and injured were all accounted for, and the families had come and gone from the Inn, which seemed strangely subdued after the frenzy of the past three days. On Saturday I broke down the command post, then went home, where I took a long walk. It was a beautiful April day, warm and soft, light years away from the raw, unforgiving cold of 4/16. I was still in shock.

i never really returned to the Women’s Center, at least not as full-time director. I reported to the provost’s office on April 23 and literally staffed telephones. I helped with whatever was needed in the weeks and months that followed. Three months after the shooting, I became deputy director for the Virginia Tech Office of Recovery and Support, which was created to serve families of the injured and deceased, the injured students, and affected departments.

I’d offered to serve in any way, knowing that my social work degree, grant-writing skills, and background in victim services might be useful. I started the job in late July; we had no job descriptions, no budget, no office. The first two weeks, we answered phones while sitting on the floor.

What we’re doing is a true improvisation. There’s no template for this, though we get advice from experts who’ve dealt with the tragedies at Columbine, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and Texas A&M. At first I thought our office would exist for about 12 months, but these folks say that’s naïve, especially with lawsuits being filed. We’ll probably be around for five to ten years.

We have four full-time and four part-time people in the office. Our function ranges from serving people directly (we have therapists on staff) to helping administrators who determine policy. The most difficult decisions are those associated with the actual 4/16 tragedy. For instance, what do you do with Norris Hall? We’ve got faculty members saying, “This is my research area. It can’t be a museum.” Others say, “No, this is sacred. This is where I lost my child.”

People are still sending us gifts, which take up three climate-controlled storage units costing hundreds of dollars a month. We give what we can to charity, but many of the gifts are personalized. What do you do with it all? We’ve gotten advice from people at the Smithsonian, the Vietnam War Memorial, the 9/11 memorial; we’re still mulling the possibilities.

The need for our services is so great, it’s insatiable. You give it your best and work from your heart, and you still get criticized. Sometimes it’s scathing because folks are grieving and enraged. But truly the hardest thing is remembering daily that this event occurred. I go past the memorial every day, and all I can think is, “Did this really happen here?” Then I feel guilty because I know it did. On the other hand, I tell myself, “It’s okay to feel detached sometimes.” Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get through the day.

I had nightmares for a while, always about a shooter killing my friends who are police officers. I have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: memory lapses, mood swings, a propensity to depression. I’ve been to counseling, and I try hard to practice self care. I’m co-teaching a graduate course in higher education, and being in a classroom with students is wonderfully therapeutic.

After 4/16, I heard from NMH classmates that I hadn’t been in touch with since 1978. They sent notes saying, “You and your institution are in our thoughts and prayers,” as did colleagues from across the country, family friends, and relatives. Their sympathy and empathy were palpable, and every word went straight to my heart.

Also deep in my heart is a Virginia Tech graduate student who lost her husband in the shooting. I’ve been working with her and her husband’s family since last April, and throughout all the grim tasks we’ve endured together, they’ve offered me lesson after lesson in hope, humility, and faith.

During this extraordinary journey, I’ve thought often of NMH and how it helped prepare me for what I’m doing. As a student I learned about being part of a close-knit community, tackling whatever work needs to be done (scrubbing graffiti off desks in Beveridge and carrying mail through snowdrifts provided a good start), and helping others in need. From NMH’s mission of educating the head, heart, and hand, to Virginia Tech’s motto, ut prosim (“that I may serve”), my marching orders are clear.

What I take away from all this is the power of love in the midst of tragedy and sorrow. I will never underestimate that power again, and it helps me every day in the singular, all-consuming work that I do—a job that, in a perfect world, should never need to exist.

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