Virginia Tech marks decade since attack that killed 32

BLACKSBURG, VA.— Ten years after a mentally ill student fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech, survivors and families of those killed returned Sunday to the campus to honour the lives that were lost that day.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, widely known as Virginia Tech, held a series of events to mark the anniversary of the deadly campus shooting on April 16, 2007. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine were among the 10,000 to 20,000 people on the Blacksburg campus for the solemn occasion.

Kaine, who was governor at the time of the shooting, said he still vividly remembers the horrors of that day, and has also grown close to many of the survivors and the victims’ families. “We’re going with a lot of different emotions, but we wouldn’t be anywhere else,” said Kaine, who attended the service with his wife, Anne Holton.

The shooting at Virginia Tech was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history. A massacre that claimed 49 lives at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., surpassed it last year. The Virginia shootings forced schools across the country to rethink campus security and reignited the debate over gun control that rages to this day.

On Sunday morning, McAuliffe and his daughter participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at 9:43 a.m., the time when Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage in Norris Hall began. The Roanoke Times reports that the pair, along with former Virginia Tech president Charles Steger and current president Timothy Sands and his wife, walked around the memorial, stopping at every one of the 32 stones arranged in a semi-circle, each engraved with the name of a victim.

Cho, who had been treated for mental health problems, killed himself on the day of the attack.