The morning before the fall semester began at Virginia Tech — where 33 people, including gunman Seung-Hui Cho, died in a shooting rampage in April — a carbon monoxide leak in an off-campus apartment complex sickened 23 people, most of them students.
At press time, two of the students were in critical condition, three were stable and 18 others were treated and released in the aftermath of the leak, which was discovered late Sunday morning after a neighbor complained of fumes, according to The Associated Press. Authorities believe the leak was caused by a faulty valve on a water heater in an apartment shared by five women at the Collegiate Suites complex, which is described as a short distance from campus.
Witnesses told The Washington Post that the victims who remained hospitalized Sunday night, Kirsten Julia and Kirsten W. Halik, looked to be unconscious or semiconscious when they were pulled from the apartment building on Sunday morning.
"It's a community that has gone through a tremendous amount of tragedy in recent months, and we certainly don't need to experience any more of it," an unnamed university spokesperson told the paper. Britnye Kurty, a student who spent the night at the Collegiate Suites on Saturday, told the Post that she awoke feeling lightheaded and nauseous on Sunday. Kurty said the other eight people in the apartment also woke up with headaches.
News of the leak broke just as 10,000 campus faculty, students and members of the Blacksburg community were gathering to dedicate a memorial to the 27 students and five faculty members who were killed on April 16 when student Seung-Hui Cho opened fire in a dormitory and school building before killing himself (see "33 Dead In Shootings At Virginia Tech"). The memorial consists of 32 300-pound stones engraved with the names of the victims and fashioned out of the same locally mined gray limestone that is used in many of the university's buildings.
Virginia Tech's fall semester begins Monday (August 20), and, the AP reported, VTech enrolled a record freshman class of 5,200 for the fall, though school officials won't know for several weeks how many of the 26,000 students enrolled returned for the fall.
In addition to the memorial, another change on campus is that Norris Hall, where all but two of the murders took place, will no longer host classes and has been transformed into engineering laboratories and offices. Other changes include new rules that keep dorms locked at all times and a new campus emergency-alert system that uses text and e-mail messages.
