I’ve been following the case of missing Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington since she disappeared in mid-October of last year. Her family and Virginia State Police had been searching tirelessly for her for the past three months since she disappeared in Charlottesville after attending a Metallica concert at the University of Virginia. Today, Virginia State Police have confirmed that the human remains found on a farm southwest of Charlottesville have been conclusively identified as Morgan Harrington’s.
Here is the report from a local televisions news network in Southwest Virginia. (Coincidentally, the anchor is Jay Warren, who was my senior year Broadcast Writing teacher.)
Although I didn’t know Morgan, I have a few friends back at Tech who knew her, and the fact that a student from my alma mater had mysteriously gone missing alarmed me. Not to mention, the story has been all over the media since the weekend of her disappearance.
It’s interesting to me that despite the fact that over 2,500 missing persons reports are filed daily within this country and few of them receive any attention from the media, the disappearance of Morgan Harrington shot straight from local news to national news within 48 hours. Was her connection to Virginia Tech, the place that many Americans still associate with the largest mass school shooting in US history, a factor in the story exploding onto national news? I definitely think it was one of the largest factors that came into play. As much as it hurts myself and many other members of the Virginia Tech community to be reminded of it, the university has been indelibly branded as a site of a major school shooting and national tragedy. As we have seen in the past two and a half years, the slightest bit of negative news that sparks in relation to Virginia Tech or Blacksburg will somehow make it to national headlines.
Robert Thompson, one of the country’s most-respected media experts told The Roanoke Times, “Part of this is when you think ‘Virginia Tech,’ it carries certain sacred overtones to the country. Not only do you have a young college student in danger, but when you attach the words ‘Virginia Tech’ … Virginia Tech is one of those sets of words like ‘9/11’ and ‘Oklahoma City.’ It means more than just the college name. The whole country has strong sympathy and empathy for the university. It’s still recent in their minds, the last big national story to happen there.
Whatever the reason that Morgan’s story received national coverage, it doesn’t change the fact that those who knew her have suffered an unimaginable loss. My heart goes out to them; I can’t even fathom the pain that her family and friends are going through at this time. It’s been an emotionally taxing search for the last few months, with the Virginia State Police receiving over 600 leads. It’s a heartbreaking reality that oftentimes our wishes and prayers for a happy ending do not get rewarded, but at least Morgan can finally be laid to rest and the community can reach some semblance of closure, however sad it may be. There are still many unanswered questions, however, and the possibility of this case being a homicide is strong (as the State Police are investigating it as one). We can only hope that there will be answers soon, and that justice will be served.
As a proud Hokie and Virginia Tech alumna, I like to keep up with news about and within my university and I have a Google Alert set for whenever it makes headlines on online news stories. Since April 16th of 2007, however, the majority of these news stories relate back to the tragic shooting of that day rather than the achievements of our engineering departments or coverage of our exciting football games.
Our school suffers from the same stigma of other schools (such as Columbine High and Northern Illinois University) that have been terribly rocked by a shooting — it is for that single negative event that we become most famous for. We used to be just another great engineering school that boasted a strong football team, but now we are better known as the site of the deadliest peacetime shooting massacre by a single gunman. The label is heartbreaking, and the new news stories that pop up every few months, whether it be due to another shooting elsewhere or due to updates about the still-ongoing investigation of April 16th, serve as a constant inescapable reminder that the public perception of the university that I’d come to love so much has become marred by this single atrocious event.
And so another series of news stories came up in my Google Alerts yesterday, reporting that a revised report released by the Virgina governor showed that Virginia Tech officials had started to lock down administrative buildings and that a number of staff had even notified their families 90 minutes before an email alert was sent out to notify the rest of the campus that a gunman was on the loose. (see CNN story) Governor Kaine called the findings “inexcusable,” and Senator Chap Petersen of the 34th wrote that “the University’s decision to wait over two hours to alert the students of a campus shooting is inexcusable.” He continues:
What struck me – in reviewing Massengill’s report — was that Blacksburg public schools were “locked down” that morning of April 16, 2007 due to the shooting, yet the Tech administration blithely continued forward with classes.
This situation is not going to resolve until someone at Tech accepts responsibility. No one has been held accountable.
The internet is already swarming with scathing remarks about the “incompetence” of the administration and how they had enabled the events of the shootings to play out as they did. As a Virginia Tech student who witnessed her campus being ripped apart by the shooting less than a month before her graduation, I am deeply saddened by these comments. I think I speak for the majority of the Virginia Tech campus community and students when I say that I support the overall actions of our university administration. They had so little information at the time and the first incident of the two students being murdered at West Ambler Johnston dormitory seemed to them (understandably) to be an isolated domestic incident. They were hesitant to throw the campus into a climate of fear and confusion when they themselves knew so little about the circumstances. Looking back on the events, yes, I agree that there definitely could have been improvements and better ways that the administration could have handled the situation and that they should have alerted students earlier than they did. And it was irresponsible for the staff members to be calling or emailing family members rather than immersing themselves in disaster response. But hindsight is 20/20, and who would have even imagined that a violent massacre of such catastrophic proportions would ensue?
Despite what the public may think due to the events of April 16th and the other smaller, yet violent incidents that have seemed to plague our campus like a curse since, I can attest that Blacksburg was a truly safe, peaceful little college town for most of the five years that I was lucky enough to be a student at Virginia Tech. It’s one of those towns that are in a rural community that comes alive when school is in session, but grows as quiet as a ghost town during the summer months when the majority of their students are out of school. There were rarely any alarming incidents, and I personally felt that Blacksburg would be the least likely place for a violent crime to happen, that it was a place that I would never question my security — I felt safe there. If you ever lived in Blacksburg and were a part of the campus community, a school shooting on campus would have been beyond your imagination. Sure, we were unprepared, but who can ever be prepared enough for a horrific tragedy like that to unfold itself on your campus?
If you look at the larger picture with 9-11 and the anthrax scare, the nation’s own disaster planning was very limited itself. Airports had security measures, but the top concerns were about inclement weather rather than possible terrorist attacks. It was only after the attacks that security measures were considerably tightened to the strict checks we see in airports today. As terrible as these events were, they became useful for us to analyze them and figure out what are the best emergency practices to use in future emergencies, so as to hopefully prevent any similar tragedies from happening thereon.
Simply put, the Virginia Tech administration was not equipped with the experience nor training, expectations nor clear plan for responding to a disaster like this. As long as the administration has been as honest and forthright as possible (which I believe they have been), I stand by them and university president Charles Steger as I did from day one. Looking back to find a scapegoat other than Seung-Hui Cho is not going to help anything. He was the mentally unsound, deranged gunman that took every single one of those 32 innocent lives away. He is the one who singlehandedly brought so much heartbreak to their families and to our campus community; ultimately, there is no one to blame but Cho.
It’s difficult for me to look back on the days following the shooting without tears, because it was during that time that I experienced the most incredible pain and witnessed more sadness than I’d ever seen in my entire lifetime. Losing a friend in such a horrific way was unthinkable and traumatizing in itself. Watching the events unfold on television while we were unable to leave our apartment, I felt as though I was watching a horror movie — the buildings and streets of our campus suddenly looked so unfamiliar as I witnessed SWAT teams and scores of police cars gridlocking them. Our AASU board was completely broken at our meetings in the days that followed, grieving our lost friends and professors but also having to deal with the exhaustion and stress of being hounded by the media all because the killer had been Korean. My cell phone didn’t stop ringing with calls from not only domestic media reporters but Japanese and other international reporters as well, and our email boxes were inundated by requests for comment. Some even had the audacity to come to my apartment. The school that we all love had been branded the site of a historic massacre, and we couldn’t even kick the media out because we are a public university… they ended up camping out and harassing the campus community for over a week, and returned when it came time for commencement. Through it all, president Steger showed tremendous leadership, strength, and poise, while at the same time exhibiting compassion for his students. The events of April 16th must have taken as heavy a toll as it has for the victims’ families, and he must have felt as though he himself had lost 32 beloved children. I have never felt anything but respect for our university president and our administration.
Although it has been over two and a half years since April 16th, we are still healing. The process will probably take years, even a lifetime for many of us. There are still days when the tears just unexpectedly come and won’t stop for a few hours. In some ways, it was easier when I was with fellow Hokies who understood and we could act as mutual support for each other. Finding areas to place more blame is not going to change the past and is not instrumental in the healing process at all. What matters more now is to educate people and help establish more precautions to prevent more school shootings from happening. An employer of mine once made a comment on April 20th that she thought the celebration of 4/20 in reference to cannabis was much more appealing, newsworthy, and “less depressing” than remembering the anniversary of the Columbine shootings. I was personally shocked by the comment — although she may have meant it as a joke and she may not have realized that I came from a school that suffered a very similar fate to Columbine, the joke was not tasteful and was very disrespectful to families and friends of not only Columbine victims but to everyone who has had to deal with the repercussions of such a tragic event. Her flippant comment both hurt and angered me, and made me realize that there are still so many ignorant people out there who can just brush off the news of a school shooting without a second thought. I really feel that our focus should be targeted to educate people like this and make them aware of the severity of such an incident so that something like this should never happen again, rather than to expend so much time and effort trying to find someone accountable other than the perpetrators themselves.
Dan and I just booked our plane tickets home to Northern Virginia for the Christmas holidays, and I am already super excited. We’ll be back December 24th to January 3rd, so we would love to see friends and family who will be in the area around the same time.
Northern Virginia, especially my hometown of Vienna, holds a really special place in my heart and I think it may be the only place I may ever really consider “home” after growing up there and living there for twenty years. Unfortunately, my hometown pride has been bruised countless times since moving over here to California two years ago. Many Californians — several of which don’t seem to have stepped one foot out of their beloved state — regard the rest of the 49 states that comprise the country as only an afterthought. When I first tell people where I’m from, whether they be neighbors or coworkers or new friends, the most common response is that of pity or disbelief. At first they are aghast at the fact that I’m from such an unfamiliar, “remote” place, and then what usually follows is a reassuring “Oh honey, well… aren’t you glad you’re in a much better place now” type of comment. Apparently when the majority of Californians hear “Virginia,” the images that immediately spring to their mind are those of farms, cows, plantations, fried chicken, rednecks… basically what characterizes “the boonies” and “Dirty South.” After a while, I just started to tell people I was from DC (as Northern Virginia’s in the Washington, DC metropolitan area), simply because I was sick of the ignorant negative reactions I kept having to deal with. When I mention that I really miss my hometown, the response is usually along the lines of “But why would you want to go back there?” I’m all for state pride and being loyal to your roots, but also think it’s unfair and rude to trash-talk on other regions and locations when you’ve never even visited them to know what they are really like.
So I wanted to take an opportunity here to provide a geography lesson and introduce those who are unfamiliar with Northern Virginia to the area, complete with supporting facts and statistics. (I’d like to thank Wikipedia in advance.) Hopefully this will help enlighten some of the more ignorant minds out there.
Northern Virginia (often referred to as “NOVA” by the local community) consists of the several counties and independent cities in Virginia, a large area that stretches southerly and westward from the nation’s capitol. It is the most populated region of both the state of Virginia and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Affluence:
Northern Virginia is the most diverse (in terms of both the number of ethnic groups and nationalities represented) and highest-income region of Virginia, having six of the twenty highest-income counties in the nation, including the two highest as of 2007. The region is known in Virginia and the Washington, D.C. area for its relative affluence. Of the large cities or counties in the nation that have a median household income in excess of $100,000, the top two are in Northern Virginia, and these counties have over half of the region’s population.
The Tysons Corner Center located in my hometown of Vienna is the Washington area’s most popular upscale shopping destination and in 2002 National Geographic described it as “the Rodeo Drive of the East Coast”. People travel miles to shop there and it is a popular tourist attraction it itself. The area surrounding Tysons Corner’s shopping center sprawls with several prominent companies that appear in the Fortune 1000 list, including Freddie Mac, Booz Allen Hamilton and BearingPoint, among others.
Crime Rate:
Crime? What crime? Fairfax County has the lowest crime rate in the Washington metropolitan area, and the lowest crime rate amongst the 50 largest jurisdictions of the United States. A 2009 report by the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force suggests that anti-gang measures and crackdowns on illegal immigrants by local jurisdictions are driving gang members out of Northern Virginia and into more immigrant-friendly locales in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and the rest of Virginia. The violent crime rate in Northern Virginia fell 17% from 2003 to 2008. Sorry, you won’t find any homicide maps here. (WTF. I’d never even heard of homicide maps until moving out near Oakland.)
Education:
Fairfax County’s most notable commitment is to education, with an allocation of 52.2% of its fiscal budget to the public school system. Including state and federal government contributions, along with citizen and corporate contributions, this brings the 2009 fiscal budget for the school system to $2.2 billion. The school system has estimated that, based on the 2006 fiscal budget, the county invested $13,340 in each student in 2009. With over 170,000 students enrolled, Fairfax County Public Schools is the largest public school system in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and in Virginia. The school division is the 12th largest school system in the nation and maintains the largest school bus fleet of any school system in the United States. It’s hard to imagine myself sending my future children to school anywhere else after coming from such a successful, safe and prestigious public school system. It’s been among the top public school systems in the nation for decades now, one of the reasons why my parents (along with so many others) were dying to enroll their children in FCPS.
As for higher education, the population of Northern Virginia is highly educated, with 55.5% of its population 25 years or older holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. This is comparable to Seattle, the most educated large city in the U.S., with 53.4% of residents having at least a bachelor’s degree. The number of graduate/professional degree holders in Arlington is relatively high at 34.3%, nearly quadruple the rate of the U.S. population as a whole.
Speaking of Arlington, here is a rap about the town that went viral this summer on YouTube, which showcases the feel of the area.
But I digress.
The federal government is a major employer in Northern Virginia, which is home to numerous government agencies, including the CIA headquarters (right over in the neighboring town of McLean) and the Pentagon. Government contracting is an important part of the region’s economy. Arlington alone is home to over 600 federal contractors, and has the highest weekly wages of any major jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area.
Due to high income families and the excellence of the public school system, real estate in Northern Virginia is some of the most expensive you’ll find in the entire country. Real estate is comparable to (if not pricier than) the more affluent parts of the Bay Area and Southern California.
Vienna, Virginia
Some tidbits about my own hometown of Vienna, nestled in the heart of Northern Virginia: In July 2005, CNN/Money and Money magazine ranked Vienna fourth on its list of the 100 best places to live in the United States. In addition to excellent public schools, its assets include a downtown with many small businesses, a Washington Metrorail station with large parking garages just south of the town, and a portion of the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park hiker/biker trail cutting through the center of the town. It is home to the aforementioned Tysons Corner and the famous Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.
I feel like this post has ended up sounding pretty pretentious, but please keep in mind that it’s been difficult for me to put up with the offensive stereotypes that people have been slapping onto my old stomping grounds the past couple years since I’ve relocated out here. My university, Virginia Tech, was indeed in the middle of nowhere in southwest Virginia, but it was four hours away from my more metropolitan home. (And it still had many endearing qualities of its own… but I’ll save that for another day.) Yes, a good portion of the rest of the state is rural and less metropolitan, but the differences in the political and economic climate between Northern Virginia and the rest of the commonwealth are so stark that some secessionist sentiments have emerged, with hopes for a separate state of “North Virginia.” I personally think that that is a little ridiculous, but it is a good illustration of how urban and distinct NOVA is from the rest of the state.
So next time you’re about to pass judgment on a city, region or state that you’re unfamiliar with, please do your research first. Or better yet, step out of your comfort zone and pay it a visit before you open your mouth to throw in your two cents.
I love going out to eat and exploring new delicious dishes and then seeing if I can make them myself at home. It’s usually pretty hit or miss — a long time ago, when I was obsessed with P.F. Changs chicken lettuce wraps, I tried to recreate the appetizer at my college apartment and failed miserably — all we could taste were the crunchy water chestnuts. (I’m hoping to redeem myself by trying again someday.)
One of my absolute favorite dishes is linguine frutti di mare, which is essentially mixed seafood pasta. Linguine tossed with “fruits of the ocean” and loose red sauce — just thinking about it makes my mouth water. I have a hobby of trying the seafood pasta every time Dan and I go to a new Italian restaurant for the first time, and going around comparing. So far, some of my personal favorites have been Luciano’s in Oakton, The Cellar in Blacksburg, Buca di Beppo (various locations in California), and The Milanese Caffe in Berkeley. There were many other good ones, but we try to support unique, non-chain restaurants, so we don’t often dine at the likes of places like Olive Garden (although theirs is not bad, either).
