2 years later, Va. Tech families still struggling

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Jerzy Nowak acknowledges he’s not yet comfortable in the peace center he helped to create at the site of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

His wife, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, was teaching French in Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall when she was gunned down April 16, 2007. Troubled graduate student Seung-Hui Cho killed two people in a dorm and 30 others in the second-floor classroom wing where Couture-Nowak died before fatally shooting himself.

Two years later, victims’ families and survivors are still trying to make sense of what happened. Classes will be canceled on the anniversary Thursday, and events will include an open house at the peace center, a candlelight vigil and a memorial ceremony.

For some, a trip to campus is part of working through their grief. For others, it’s still too painful.

“I went for a visit yesterday,” Nowak, the center’s director, who will move into the building later this month, said recently. “Honestly, my heart sank.”

But the former horticulture department chairman said he pushed to create the peace center because it will help families heal. The center is already working on violence prevention for at-risk youth.

Nowak’s resolve was strengthened by an e-mail from a woman who had never planned to visit the building where her daughter died.

Others, like Michael Pohle of Flemington, N.J., and his wife, still find it too painful to come to campus for the anniversary events. Instead he says they plan to visit the cemetery near their home where their son, Michael Pohle Jr., is buried.

Some families have made their own peace with what happened that day, but the Pohles are among those who have lingering animosity toward administrators and feel they’ve never received an adequate explanation of officials’ actions the morning of the shootings.