Gene Cole silenced the alarm Monday at 3 a.m., stumbled down the narrow hallway of his trailer in Belspring’s Eagleview Mobile Home Park and fixed his coffee.

He likes it with a little cream.

In a couple of hours, he would start his work week.

Now 52, Cole joined Virginia Tech’s housekeeping department 21 years ago. Before that, he pumped gas at a filling station.

On the thin walls of his tidy mobile home are framed certificates marking 10, 15, 20 years with the university. He has one noting his certification in portable fire extinguisher training. He has pictures of Jesus retrieved from his mother’s home after she died. He has pictures of his mother.

Cole lives alone. He grew up with six brothers and a sister in McCoy, a rural community on the outskirts of Blacksburg.

“I didn’t go very far in school,” he says, noting that he attended Prices Fork Elementary School. “I couldn’t learn that good.”

But he enjoys being around some of the world’s most brilliant minds in his daily grind, one that starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 1:30 p.m.

By 4:15 a.m. Monday, he was in his ’89 Mazda pickup, driving in pre-dawn twilight to his custodial job at Tech’s Norris Hall.

A blustery day. The wind tried to push him back.

Outside Harper Hall, a Tech dormitory built in 1999, the same year 13 people were killed in Colorado’s Columbine school shootings, it was the first day in three that rain hadn’t poured. Cold, gusty winds were ushering in snow flurries. It was a cold that Seung-Hui Cho had seemingly carried in his heart for a long time.

It was nearly 5 a.m.

Cho, a 23-year-old senior English major, was awake about half an hour earlier on this morning than most in the past year. Usually, he’d go to bed early, around 9 p.m., save for the nights he watched wrestling. Sometimes late at night, he’d ride his bike around campus, always alone. He’d usually wake up about 5:30.

But lately he’d been lifting weights at the gym, sometimes twice a week. He’d tossed aside his thick, gold-rimmed glasses from the past, adopted a close-cropped haircut and even started dotting acne medication on his blemishes.

During down time, he’d type on his computer. W hen his roommates vanished from the shared suite at the end of the corridor, he’d record videos.

On this morning, Cho climbed from his twin bed for the last time, surrounded by the blank walls that had encased him since August.

Clad in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, he walked into the bathroom the young men shared in Room 2121. (See the search warrant and inventory from Seung-Hui Cho's room in Harper Hall.)

Karan Grewal, his roommate, was there. Cho went around him, saying nothing. No emotion.

That was the way it was with Cho, a man who liked to call himself “Question Mark.”

Today, those secrets would surface.

April 16 was his day, time for the planned “revolution” to begin.

Before midday, his rage would stain the stately Hokie stone in what would be described as the deadliest shooting spree in modern U.S. history.

Five professors. Nine graduate students. Four seniors. Two juniors. Three sophomores. Nine freshman. Plus, 17 other people wounded.

The world would watch.

Three years ago, Rowan Webster was walking down the hallway of an unfamiliar school when a pretty girl with deep blue eyes came out of a nearby cooking class, saw him and handed him a cupcake.

“What’s your name?” Emily Hilscher asked.

That was Webster’s first contact with Hilscher, a fellow Rappahannock County resident who eventually became a close friend. The moment stuck with him.

Hilscher was part of a close-knit group of friends from the tiny county, which has a population of 7,000 and not a single stoplight. Together they would climb Old Rag Mountain or trek to hidden swimming holes on warm summer nights. Among that group was her boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, a slender, dark-haired 19-year-old Radford University student.

“The only love interest I knew in her life was Karl,” Webster says. “She gave me advice on my own relationship, which was a long-distance relationship, and I told her: 'Karl will make the drive for you. He loves you and you love him.’

“As far as I know, they never had any troubles. Some minor quarrels, but they were completely in love with each other.”

At Tech, Hilscher shared Room 4040 with Heather Haugh in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a seven-story coed dorm known as West AJ that houses 895 students. Their room was vacant last Sunday evening, as it often was on Sundays, when Hilscher and Haugh typically visited their boyfriends off campus. They had agreed to meet at their fourth-floor room Monday to walk together to their 9 a.m. chemistry class.

Hilscher, an animal and poultry sciences major, aspired to be a veterinarian. She had a particular love of horseback riding — a popular pastime in Rappahannock County — and was a member of the Virginia Tech “B” equestrian team.

She was next scheduled to ride at 3:30 Monday afternoon.

Before daybreak, Gene Cole was in Norris Hall, ready to start his cleaning. First, the dean’s office. Then he headed for classrooms to tidy up before students began arriving for class.

One of the older campus buildings, made from the school’s trademark Hokie stone, Norris houses the university’s engineering science and mechanics offices, as well as the dean’s office for the College of Engineering. There are laboratories in Norris, as well as classrooms for engineering, mechanics and foreign language studies.

A thin, wiry man with a face that becomes animated when he’s excited, Cole likes his job here. He likes the people.

Virginia Tech’s professors, he says, are “real friendly. They talk to me all the time.”

And the students?

“I get along with them real good. A lot of them is real nice.”

That’s why he tolerates their deficiencies. They’re messy, he says, especially the engineering students who “cut paper and everything else up on the floor.”

On Monday, Cole was expecting the usual mess.

But he was in good humor.

“I just went to work. I didn’t know nothin’ was going to happen.” (Continued...)

Pages 1 2 3 4