Zack Schoenholtz talks about the enormity of the tragedy at Virginia Tech

Zack Schoenholtz woke up in his Virginia Tech dorm room Monday morning to the sound of his phone ringing. It took him a few blurry moments to process what his friend on the other line was saying. Just three floors above him, someone had been shot.

"My friend had actually called me at 8:45 when he was about to go to his 9 o'clock class because there were police at both ends of our hall saying we weren't allowed to leave the building," Zack said. "He said, 'We're on lockdown, there was a shooting in our building.'"

Zack, a Crescent Valley High School graduate, is a freshman in business at Virginia Tech. His father, Stephen Schoenholtz, is a former professor of forestry at OSU, and now teaches at Virginia Tech, as well as being director of the Virginia Water Resources Research Center. Stephen's office is close by West Ambler Johnston Hall, where Zack lives.

Managing to wake himself up a few minutes after the confusing phone call, Zack went to the door and stuck his head out into the hallway, to confirm what his friend had told him.

"Right when I opened my door, a cop just went full sprint down my hallway. That's just something you don't always see."

Zack went to his window and looked out across campus, toward where the academic buildings are located.

"I saw two cops running with guns drawn and kids just scattering."

It was difficult to figure out what was happening. At first, Zack and others thought police had found the shooter who'd been in their building, and were exchanging gunfire with him. As students returned from class, they began reporting on what they were seeing and hearing.

"Kids were coming in saying 'We heard gun shots, we heard police saying 'Officer down,'" Zack said. "We were kind of confused about what was going on."

They turned on the news, watching events unfold on television just like the rest of the world.

"There was no real way to tell what was happening because nobody knew anything, it was so chaotic."

The campus did send an e-mail to dorm residents regarding the shooting at West Ambler. While some students and parents have been critical about the university's decision not to lock down campus after the first shooting, Zack disagreed.

He said that it was clear from the initial e-mail that the university believed the first shooting was a private disagreement that ended violently.

"I'm pretty sure they weren't thinking this was a random shooting spree," he said. He doesn't blame the university for not closing campus.

"There's no way anybody could have known (the shooting spree) was going to happen," he said.

Zack was never worried for his own safety, and his father wasn't in a building affected by the shooting. Even now, he said, he doesn't worry about being safe on campus.

"There's nothing you can do to prevent something like that if someone really wanted to," he said.

But he and his dormmates contacted their family and friends via cell phone, until the flood of calls shut down most service.

"This is the first thing that's happened to me that I could wake up tomorrow, and if everybody acted like it didn't happen, I could say 'What a dream.'"

The names of many of the victims hadn't been released when Zack spoke to the Gazette-Times, so he wasn't able to confirm whether or not he knew many of the dead. However, he did know the first shooting victim, resident adviser Ryan Clark.

The Virginia Tech campus is larger than Oregon State University, with a student population of around 25,000, but Zack said that the repercussions of so many dead and injured will touch everyone.

"If you don't know personally one of the 33 (who died), your best friend does," Zack said. "There's so many people, and everybody has such a big network on a campus this big. It really isn't just affecting the 70 people that got shot, it's affecting their friends and their friends."

The memorial service Tuesday afternoon was packed with attendees. President Bush and Gov. Timothy Kaine both spoke, and poet Nikki Giovanni, professor of English at Virginia Tech, gave a rousing speech that Zack said was very powerful and received a long standing ovation.

"Everybody was really choking up at that point because everyone was coming together," he said.

While classes have been canceled and many students chose to return home for the remainder of the week, Zack said he is staying in the dorms.

"I want to stay here because when I was at home, you kind of forget what a big deal it was. When I'm here, it's like, it's a lot more real," he said. "I don't really want to go home and ignore it. I want to stay here for the rest of the week and just be here."

Photos: To view more Associated Press photos from the past two days at Virginia Tech, go to http://democratherald.com/shared-content/story_tools/slideshow/?type=slideshow&id=5

Forum: Has the tragedy at Virginia Tech altered your view as to whether students and faculty/staff should be allowed to carry guns on college campuses? Weigh in at http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2007/04/18/news/opinion/6edi03_forumguns.txt

Blog:Online editor Graham Kislingbury writes about the reaction from a University of Oregon resident adviser, his daughter. Go to http://www.democratherald.com/blogs.

Virginia Tech Web Site: http://www.vt.edu

Podcast: To hear Theresa Hogue's interview with Zack Schoenholtz, click below: