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BLACKSBURG -- From the moment he saw the first student crawl away from Norris Hall, Bill Knocke knew he wasn't just witnessing a tragedy.

From his office window in neighboring Patton Hall, he could hear what was going on inside Norris, thanks to a tech-savvy grad student who managed, somehow, to stream the police scanner through his computer.

As the head of Virginia Tech's civil and environmental engineering department, Knocke was already too close to the carnage.

The scanner blared: "31 black."

A colleague translated the code: "31 dead."

Many of them, he feared, were people he knew: students, colleagues, friends.

He had already ordered everyone in Patton into secured conference rooms and labs -- the only rooms in the building that locked.

Then he braced himself for the news. Before the day was out, 33 lives would be lost. Nine of the dead were from his department: seven graduate students, one undergrad and the engineering college's most beloved professor, G.V. Loganathan. Eight of his students were wounded.

Something kicked in. Knocke, 53, doesn't know what -- maybe adrenaline, maybe grace.

In the coming weeks, his civil engineering department would be tested like never before. Knocke and others would figure out how to finish out the semester, from tallying grades to consoling guilt-stricken survivors to giving eulogies and appearing on "Larry King Live."

Their own grief would have to wait.

Command center

Doctoral student Chris Strock volunteered to organize the first of several memorial services, the one held in honor of Loganathan's class. It evolved informally, as everything did that week.

There was no road map, after all, for something like this.

Strock, 32, had been one of the first to help Knocke guide staff and students into lockdown mode. He had stood in the stairwell with one of the students who had jumped out of the window of Liviu Librescu's class.

Snow flurries blew angrily, and Strock was not surprised at all when he heard one of the police officers say, "It feels like the devil has been released here today."

By midday, Strock's wife, Anna, had talked to another grad-student friend -- a woman who had withdrawn from Loganathan's class the week before. She was in shock at the news and couldn't drive, so Anna Strock brought her to their Blacksburg home, along with a key piece of information: the roster of students from Loganathan's class.

That afternoon, the Strocks' dining room table became the unofficial command center for Room 206.

The roster turned into a list. The list morphed into a chart that tracked who was dead and wounded, and who walked out physically unscathed. Some friends went to the Inn at Virginia Tech to cross-check information and collect pictures that would help identify bodies. Others drove to area hospitals to check on names.

Was Loganathan admitted? No.

Brian Bluhm? No.

Gil Colman? Yes.

There were too many "nos" on the list.

A friend reported that Jeremy Herbstritt had been shot but was en route to a hospital. Someone else heard he'd had a nervous breakdown and was walking around Blacksburg. A professor relayed it all to Herbstritt's relieved family on the phone.

But hours passed, and Strock and his friends could not confirm Herbstritt's status. By midnight, they knew why. A police chaplain gave them the news.

Strock slept little that night, but the next morning he was already planning a memorial service for the following day. "I realized we needed to do something to say, 'What the hell just happened?' and to honor the hope of the survivors and the remembrance of the people killed."

He listened, too, as the stories of survivors began to emerge:

The grad student who had made the first 911 call after Seung-Hui Cho shot him twice. He survived Cho's second visit by pretending to be dead.

The grad student who ran panic-stricken from the building and ended up on Prices Fork Road, where his wife picked him up in their car. Thinking the campus was under terrorist attack, they drove to Roanoke.

At the service, Strock displayed white candles for the people killed and green candles for those in the class who were injured and those who left without physical wounds. He included two candles for the students who weren't in Room 206 at all: the woman who had withdrawn the week before and the man who had skipped Loganathan's class to write a paper.

"Their guilt was horrific," he said. "It was not OK just to ignore them."

Victims' families spoke, including Herbstritt's dad. His son had wanted to go to Tech to get away from the family farm in State College, Pa.

His dad recalled helping Jeremy find his first apartment in Blacksburg -- within view of some grazing Angus cows. They both thought Tech was the safest place in the world.

To honor G.V.

That Saturday, doctoral student Craig Moore attended two funerals in the same afternoon: for Loganathan, who had been his longtime adviser, and for senior Jarrett Lane, who interned in the campus office where Moore worked.

When classes resumed the following Monday, Moore voluntarily filled in for Loganathan, who co-taught a large sophomore-level measurements course with professor Jeff Connor. Connor had not only lost his co-teacher in the shootings, he also lost four of his five teaching assistants.

Department chairman Knocke came to the first class, too, along with other administrators and mental health counselors. Knocke had already fielded calls from the University of Massachusetts and Purdue University -- professors volunteering to teach for Loganathan free of charge. "That's how much people thought of him," Moore said.

"I keep thinking about him that day. His class was the first one the shooter went into, and I'm sure Dr. Loganathan probably heard him coming into his class and turned around to say, 'How can I help you?' "

With the semester's end just two weeks away, Connor and Moore debated how to best calculate grades. Connor's first thought was to forgo gathering materials from the murdered teaching assistants, not wanting to disturb their families.

"But then it hit us: It would mean something to the students to show their work wasn't forgotten," Connor said. It's what Loganathan and the teaching assistants would have wanted, too.

Graduate students ultimately did retrieve the materials from some teaching assistants' homes. In some cases, family members brought victims' papers to Knocke in a box.

Spreadsheets were created, and staffers put in overtime helping students figure out whether to continue a course, withdraw from it, take the pass/fail option or end with the grades they had on April 16.

Connor himself has pulled several all-nighters, which is OK with him because he's having a hard time sleeping anyway. Everyone is.

During semesters past, measurement course grades were tallied as a team: They would project a student's grades onto an overhead screen, and Connor, Loganathan and the teaching assistants would calculate each person's final score.

"The TAs were always advocates for their students when it came to assigning the grades, especially if someone was borderline," Connor said Wednesday night in his Roanoke home. Loganathan was easily swayed to give the student a higher grade, while Connor was usually the hard-sell of the two.

Connor's 9-year-old son, Alec, was doing his homework in the next room -- and listening to his dad recount all that was lost.

"Dad, do you think the students liked G.V. better or you better?" Alec asked.

"Oh, Alec, there's no question about it -- they loved G.V. the most," he said.

'Small Man, Big Heart'

The first week, Knocke spoke at five memorial services. Many were written and delivered on two or three hours' sleep.

He's made sure that at least one faculty member was present at each service. And with all but the international students, he has seen to it that families were given personal, faculty-guided tours of the projects their children or spouses were in the midst of researching.

In order for his staff to attend the funerals, Knocke's daughter and son-in-law drove in from Chesapeake to answer office phones. For the first week, his secretary, Shelia Collins, left an inspirational Bible verse on his desk every day.

"I was worried about him emotionally," she said. "We just want him to have the strength to get through all these days."

Collins herself has counseled wounded survivors in the office, including one who recounted praying to Jesus as he lay on the floor playing dead at Cho's feet.

Knocke has a national reputation in his field for his work on drinking water and wastewater. He had been interviewed for professional journals before, but talking to Larry King was definitely something new. So was keeping pushy journalists out of Loganathan's office and away from the student-made memorial in the lobby of Patton Hall.

A framed photo of each civil-engineering victim is displayed on an oblong table, along with votive candles and pins that say "Love an Engineer." Visitors have written notes, including one for Loganathan signed by Girishwar Nagevcoil of India:

Small Man from a Tiny Village

Came to the Large Campus with a Big Heart

G.V., You will always be remembered

May your Soul Rest in Peace.

"Don't write a story that makes me sound like some kind of hero," Knocke advised earlier this week. "When you're department head, you're the person on the point. But I am standing here with the arms of hundreds of people supporting me right now."

After graduation, Knocke plans to meet with teaching assistant Waleed Mohamed Shaalan's family members; the university is flying them in from Egypt. To hear that his son had died, Shaalan's father traveled miles from his remote village to get to a community phone.

"Waleed had a wife and a 15-month-old in Egypt who were going to join him here this summer," Knocke said. "He was the pride and hope of his family."

Hearing the victims' stories has moved him the most. "I wish I had known these people as well in life as I have come to know them in death," he said.

He thinks about Liviu Librescu, the 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who died trying to bar Cho from entering his class: Sure, they had said hello in the hallway. Though they taught in different engineering departments, they knew of each other's work.

"I wish I would have stopped him just one time and said, 'Tell me about your life.' "