Thursday, April 26, 2007
Student takes on heavy burden: appropriateness of Cho's stone
"You don't get to pick who's in your family," Katelynn Johnson said of Seung-Hui Cho.
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Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times
Norris Hall on Virginia Tech's campus.
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Part of the mystery is solved.
Katelynn Johnson added the stone representing Seung-Hui Cho to the memorial in front of Burruss Hall.
When she heard someone had taken that stone from the semicircle that has drawn thousands of mourners to the Drillfield, she fired off an e-mail to The Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's student newspaper. Cho was a Hokie, too, Johnson declared, a troubled member of the Hokie Nation, but a member nonetheless.
"You don't get to pick who's in your family," she declared.
Johnson also declared her intention to replace the stone. And if someone took that one, she'd replace it, too. She'd keep on bringing stones "for as long as the memorial remains there," she wrote. And she meant it.
Early Wednesday morning, she walked onto the Drillfield with a replacement stone in her backpack. But Cho's stone was there. Johnson recognized it. It sat a little out of line with the others. She counted. There were 33 stones.
"If it was removed," she said, "it's back."
She still has a spare, just in case. And she knows where to get more.
Johnson explained herself Wednesday evening. Again. She'd done seven or eight interviews in the past four hours, she said, including one with her hometown paper.
Johnson said she grew up in northern Minnesota. There were 900 people in her town, 34 students in her high school graduating class.
"I have a different sense of community," she said. "That's what brought me to Virginia Tech in the first place."
And her sense of community embraces the whole community, even when someone has done something horrible.
"I don't know how to not be that way," Johnson said.
She first noticed the memorial stones Wednesday afternoon. Someone commented there were a lot of them. They counted 32.
"It was heartbreaking for me," Johnson said.
Angry and sad, Johnson broke down in public for the first time, When her crying slowed, her boyfriend looked into her eyes and said, "You want to go get a 33rd stone, don't you."
"I said, 'Yes,' " Johnson recounted.
So she did.
About 4 a.m. April 18, Johnson placed the 33rd stone on the Drillfield.
She didn't do it under cover of darkness because of shame or fear, Johnson said. That's simply when she prefers to visit the memorials, when the crushing crowds and media hordes have evaporated. And she didn't want to draw attention to the stone. But she wanted it to be there.
After outing herself in The Collegiate Times, Johnson feared a backlash from people who think Cho doesn't deserve a place in that row of Hokie Stone.
She didn't answer her phone or check her e-mail Wednesday morning.
More than 100 e-mails flooded in while she was in class.
All but one, Johnson said, supported her. Some of them, she said, came from relatives of Cho's victims.
She doesn't hold Cho blameless, Johnson wrote in her e-mail. But she does believe every life has value and its loss is worth mourning -- even when that life is as troubled and ends as violently as Cho's.
Johnson graduates May 11, but she won't be leaving Tech. She plans to earn a master's degree in sociology there.
She wasn't sure about that before April 16, Johnson said.
She's certain now.
