VT Student from Fairfax Writes E-Mail to Washington Post

Phillip Murillas, of Fairfax, Virginia, now a freshman at Virginia Tech, majoring in communication, sent an e-mail to Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post. Achenbach posted the letter to his online blog. The e-mail has received an outpouring of community support.

The letter can be found here.

Broadside Online contacted Murillas to expand on the story detailed in his letter.

He received the first email at 9:29 a.m. "Even then I didn't think it was going to be an off day," Murillas said. "Everything was at an arm's length."

Then the cops started showing up and "everything got a lot more immediate."

Despite the fact that his dorm, Main Campbell Hall, stood about seven minutes from West Ambler Johnston and only about five to ten minutes from Norris Hall, Murillas still felt safe, but "profundly disturbed." He could see the ambulances but did not hear the gunshots.

On his way to class Murillas's friend alerted him of the second email. Murillas ran to the lounge common area to look out over the campus, and then back upstairs to check on his dorm-mates. He posted reassuring messages to his family and friends on Facebook and then checked his friends' IM statuses to make sure they were all accounted for. Those he could not reach through the Internet, he called.

One of the two missing dorm-mates he mentioned in his letter have since been accounted for. The two girls attended their Norris Hall french class that morning. While one girl suffered gunshots to her knee, the other is currently unaccounted for.

edited by Whitney Rhodes: Mon. 16, 9:23pm.