Mason Gross senior Nina Kania was a first-year student when the shootings took place
Nina Kania knows you have questions.
Kania is resigned to the fact that when strangers learn she was a Virginia Tech student on April 16, 2007 – the day another student opened fire on campus and killed 33 people – each stranger, regardless of gender, age or race, will pose the same three questions: Were you there? What was it like? Did you know anyone who got shot?
The answers, in that order: yes, horrible, no.
“I don’t know what to say,” says Kania, 22, a Mason Gross School of the Arts senior in photography and graphic design. “[It was] horrible. You can’t answer that one quickly. . . . It comes up all the time. And if they don’t ask you, you know they want to.”
The massacre, which drew colossal media attention to the relatively sleepy town of Blacksburg, Virginia, is considered the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history.
Kania was a first-year student at Virginia Tech when the shootings took place, but she had already decided to transfer to the Mason Gross School to pursue a BFA in Visual Arts. On the morning of the shootings, Kania gathered with friends in her dormitory hallway at Tech, watching the news on TV.
“He [the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, who ultimately killed himself] was walking as half my roommates were walking to class,” Kania says. The shootings took place in a classroom building and a freshman residence hall. “We were freaked out because we thought, ‘Where is everybody?’ The numbers [of shooting victims] kept growing, and we’d say, ‘Where’s Sarah?’ ’’
Kania says she left campus almost immediately after the shootings – “I didn’t say goodbye to anybody; everyone just wanted to be home” – and returned a few weeks later to pack up her things, spend time with friends and participate in on-campus memorials. She brushes away media criticism of how school officials handled the crisis.
“There were no bad thoughts. Everyone came together so well,” she says. “Nobody asked each other questions.”
Moving away from the scene of the crime was one thing; moving on from the experience was another.
“It’s kind of strange because [my friends at Virginia Tech] went back to school and moved past it,” Kania says. “But I ended up here . . . When we [got] home, we didn’t talk about it. There was nothing to say. We were shocked – that we were students and that could have happened to us. . . .Nobody gets it when you go home.”
Kania says she began to struggle with “bad nightmares” and other anxieties.
“I hate big lecture halls. For some reason, I don’t know why, it just bothers me,” she says. “I hate ends. I sit in the middle.”
Kania is not overtly emotional; the last thing she seems to court, besides idle curiosity, is pity. She graduates next month and hopes to land a job in commercial photography. She knows that the Virginia Tech questions will fade with time.
But her own thoughts about the event, which surface on occasion, can be more difficult to dodge.
“It’s always, it could have been you,” she says, “and that’s scary because it was so close to being you.”