Thousands of people, many wearing maroon Hokies United t-shirts, gathered on Virginia Tech's Drillfield today for the dedication of the university's April 16 Memorial. In a dedication speech, Tech President Charles Steger said the crowd gathered on the eve of a new academic year "still shaken, still deeply saddened by the collective nightmare of April 16."

The heart of the April 16 Memorial is a semi-circle of 300-pound Hokie stones, each with the name of a student or professor killed when Tech student Seung-Hui Cho went on what Steger called "a rampage of violence" on a cold, snow-spitting day last April. The memorial is an enhanced replica of the one that grew in front of Burruss Hall in the hours after the shootings. Hokies United placed one stone for each person that day. That simple memorial became a center of mourning and remembrance.

When the university formed a committee to determine the form a memorial to the victims should take, the committee decided it could do no better than to emulate that spontaneous memorial.

The original stones were given to the families of the victims at the conclusion of the dedication ceremony.