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Condolences Overwhelm Virginia Tech

June 10, 2007

By Rex Bowman

BLACKSBURG, Va. — From the life preserver sent to Virginia Tech by the U.S. Coast Guard in Puerto Rico to the 150-pound engraved rock sent by a community college in Mississippi, things have really piled up at the school's Squires Student Center.

A race-car hood arrived from Langley Speedway. High school students from Rappahannock brought in a mural. An elementary school sent an 83-foot-long laminated banner. Embroidered pillows and watercolor paintings have come from all points of the compass.

"The volume that has come in was never meant for a university to handle," said Steven J. Estrada, the administrative assistant in charge of Squires. Estrada is leading the massive and nearly finished effort to catalog and archive the myriad items that began pouring in to Tech after the April 16 shootings, in which a student killed 32 students and teachers, then himself.

At last, Estrada is nearing the end of his labors. Working with about 80 volunteers, he has drawn up a list of everything sent in — cards, letters, posters, poems and photos — and moved the bulk of it from Squires to storage rooms at Tech's Corporate Research Center. The archive will be available for researchers and historians.

Sometime this week, the volunteers expect to have Squires cleared out.

The task has been a challenge: Estrada said a single-column list of items Tech has received from sympathetic supporters would fill 1,000 pages.

Volunteer Renee Jacobsen, who has been organizing material at Squires for nearly two months, said notable items include a solar-powered light display and a paper chain so long "it came in a box the size of a refrigerator."

For weeks, FedEx and UPS trucks laden with well-wishers' offerings pulled up outside Squires. At first, school officials struggled to keep up with the inflow of goods. Then they wrestled with how best to display the stuff. And now they are in the last throes of packing it all away.

In an upstairs room of Squires, volunteers have sorted much of what they have received according to where it came from: elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, cities. There are separate sections for flags, posters and paintings to be sorted through, for letters and cards to be stacked up and boxed.

"We don't exactly know how many quilts we have," Estrada said. "We have oodles. You have to look at the effort that went into this. These quilts — that's something that usually takes two years to make, and they did it in one month."

Then you have the faux Tiffany lamp, the dogwood tree, the Hawaiian lei, the U.S. flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol, the flag that flew next to the Statue of Liberty, the flag that flew over an Army engineering battalion's base in Tikrit, Iraq. And there's the condolence letter signed by President Bush.

"Nothing's unusual anymore," Estrada said.

Not everything is being archived, though. For instance, the school has passed along the 32 handwritten letters to the victims' families from the mother of Chandra Levy, the Federal Bureau of Prisons intern who was slain in 2001.

The dogwood tree will have to be planted somewhere, Estrada said. And eventually, even the 150-pound rock dredged from the bottom of the Mississippi River will be moved from Estrada's office.

Contact staff writer Carlos Santos at csantos@timesdispatch.com or 434) 295-9542.