A mother’s dilemma

Holly Adams was thinking there was no point in cooking dinner—her husband, Tony Sherman, had called to say he was running late—when the phone rang again in her Springfield, Va., kitchen. Holly picked it up, assuming it was Tony or their 19-year-old daughter, Lisa. It was a Sunday afternoon this past August, and Tony and Lisa were in Blacksburg, Va., getting Lisa moved into a new apartment before the start of classes at Virginia Tech.

But the person on the line was a man Holly did not know, a Tech administrator calling to give her some disconcerting news.

“I’m very sorry to tell you this, but there’s been another incident,” Holly remembers him saying. “It may involve your daughter, Lisa. We didn’t want you to hear it on the news.”

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I’m very sorry to tell you this, but there’s been another incident. The call was shocking, yet it felt, to Holly, sickeningly inevitable. Holly had been beset by dread ever since Lisa enrolled at Virginia Tech, where, almost exactly four months earlier, on April 16, 2007, Holly and Tony’s older daughter, Leslie, 20, had been shot and killed along with 31 other students and faculty members in the deadliest college campus massacre in the nation’s history. Before the shooting, Leslie had persuaded her younger sister to transfer to Tech so they could attend college together. Afterward, Holly urged Lisa to reconsider, but Lisa felt she owed it to her sister to honor their plan.

Now, Holly thought her worst fears had been realized and that she had lost her remaining child. “I hate Virginia Tech! You can’t take my other daughter from me!” she remembers screaming at the caller, who urged her to calm down, explaining that there had been a carbon monoxide leak in Lisa’s apartment complex. Some students had been hospitalized, but they did not know which ones.

Holly hung up and frantically dialed Tony, who told her the leak had been discovered before they’d even arrived at Lisa’s apartment, and everything was fine. They hadn’t told Holly because they hadn’t wanted to cause her more anxiety than she was already feeling.

Holly wasn’t sure she believed him. She called Lisa for the reassurance of hearing her voice. When Lisa didn’t answer, she panicked. “It was just like when I was trying to call Leslie,” recalls Holly, who with terrible force was transported back to the morning of April 16. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she remembers thinking as she redialed Lisa’s number. And then Lisa answered and apologized for worrying her mother, and they both, Holly says, started to cry.

“Tony and I decided, after that, that if anything happens again, there would be no secrets,” says Holly.

A slender woman of 53, Holly is recounting the episode as she sits in the back seat of the family minivan, with coffee and a suitcase of acrylic paints to keep her busy. It is early, a Saturday in September, just after 5 a.m. Tony, 48, is in the driver’s seat, wearing jeans and a maroon T-shirt. They are en route to a Tech football game, a fact that astonishes Holly. For her, the Blacksburg campus has become a heart of darkness. It is the last place on Earth she wants to visit.

“This is setting me back,” she says, memories overwhelming her as they head south on Interstate 81 and begin to see the ridges and slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And yet she also murmurs, “Leslie loved this view so much.”

Over the past several months, as the families of the Virginia Tech victims have attended innumerable ceremonies, testified before a state panel investigating the shooting, or appeared on Capitol Hill to lobby for stricter gun laws, they have come to be seen by some on the outside as a monolithic unit: an angry group of grief-stricken, not entirely rational people.

In truth, though, the Tech families are not united, either in their anger or their loss. Some have made public statements of support for Tech, saying no one could have predicted or prevented the attack. Others are exploring a lawsuit against the university—and, by extension, the state—for failing to issue an early warning after the first two students were killed that morning.

Holly Adams and her family belong to a third category: They’re torn. Holly, a retired Navy officer who works as an inspector general with the Office of Naval Research, is attracted by the idea of a lawsuit and the accountability it might bring. “When Leslie died, I made a promise that I wouldn’t rest until I discovered the truth” about who made the mistakes that led to her daughter’s death, she says. But that puts her at odds with her surviving daughter and her husband, both of whom have made peace with the place where Leslie lived, studied, and died.

How angry can a mother afford to be?

The morning after the massacre, Holly, Tony, and Lisa woke up early, not knowing what to do with themselves. Lisa had caught a ride home from the University of North Carolina–Wilmington late the night before, soon after Fairfax County police officially notified Holly and Tony that Leslie had been among the victims. Lisa, a UNC–Wilmington freshman, crawled into her parents’ bed in the very early morning. None of them had slept.

No one from the university had yet called the house. They heard on the news, however, that other families were gathering in Blacksburg for a memorial service, and so they went.

At a campus conference center that had been set aside for relatives of the victims, some families were already asking Tech administrators why no campus-wide warning had been issued as soon as the first two slain students were discovered. They demanded to see Tech’s president, Charles Steger, who had chaired a committee that decided after those first shootings not to issue a warning. But Steger, inundated by calls from the media and government officials, did not visit families that day.

Holly, for her part, felt it was too early for a memorial service, that the campus was being rushed into “closure” before families had time to grasp what was happening. When she asked someone at the conference center whether there was a space cordoned off for family members to attend the service, she was told, incorrectly, that they would have to stand in line with thousands of others. Furious, Holly found a television, and she and Tony watched the event from afar.

It was during that ceremony that the poet Nikki Giovanni, a Tech professor, issued her now-famous rallying cry: “We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.” Holly couldn’t believe it. Somehow, the ceremony was turning into a pep rally, an expression of support for the school rather than of grief for those who died.

“For crying out loud, who put her on?” she asked Tony, who tried to calm her. Holly still feels this way: “My daughter’s dead, and you are goddamned Hokies!”

Gov. Timothy Kaine’s decision to appoint a review panel did little to soothe those families who were, like Holly, worried about accountability. At the panel’s first public meeting, the head of the group voiced unmitigated support for the officers who responded to the shootings.

So parents began organizing themselves. By summer, they had created a comprehensive e-mail list and were using it both to offer one another consolation and to air their complaints.

A lawsuit always loomed as a possibility. Toward the end of the summer, family members were invited to meet with lawyers from a Washington, D.C.-based firm that had won a wrongful-death settlement after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. Tony wanted no part of such a meeting. But Holly said she needed the “fix” of seeing other parents.

Arriving early, she and some others agreed that all they wanted was to hold people accountable for the massacre. But then one of the lawyers arrived, saying he had flown in from out of town. “I bet your arms are tired,” Holly joked, and he didn’t laugh. She sat there looking at his shoes and thinking they looked frayed, and that the whole thing reeked of money.

For a while, she pinned her hope for answers on the review panel’s report. When it was released on Aug. 30, it did offer some satisfactions. Its hard-hitting language singled out the university administration and the campus and local police forces for lapses. The killer, 23-year-old Tech student Seung-Hui Cho, was an extremely troubled student who gave what the report called “clear warnings of mental instability.” Yet despite many, many red flags, the “university did not intervene effectively.”

Still, the report stopped short of calling for resignations. Nor did the governor demand that anyone step down.

Holly was incredulous. “I would hang [Steger] in the town square,” she says.

Tony is horrified by the idea of filing a lawsuit seeking a monetary amount to compensate for his daughter’s life. “To me, it’s almost insulting to talk about a dollar amount,” he says. “You could name the national debt. It doesn’t equate to a person’s life.”

“Settlements don’t have to be money,” Holly tells him. They are about half an hour from the Tech campus now. “It could be an apology,” she says. “It could be putting together an institute in her name. It could be a bunch of things, none of them lining our pockets.” Holly, who spends her weekdays investigating government waste and fraud, sees a lawsuit as a way to continue probing for details. A way to fully understanding who was responsible for the crucial mistakes that allowed Cho to take so many lives.

“A variety of mistakes were made,” says Tony. “Why was he there [attending the school]? Why did he have guns? The more facts you get, the more they point to mistakes by many, many people and organizations.

“The truth won’t change the loss that occurred,” says Tony. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with the information once you get it.”

About 30 minutes later, Holly and Tony park the minivan at the main lot at the Tech campus. They pull out Holly’s suitcase of paints and carry them to a lot near a small lake known as the duck pond. At game time, Tony walks to the stadium and meets Lisa, while Holly remains behind to work on some small still-lifes.

Holly never did want to see her surviving daughter go through with the planned transfer to Tech. But Lisa prevailed in that argument early on. “She would say, ‘I know, Mom, but I can’t let this person destroy my life,’” Holly says. Lisa also figured that at Tech, everybody would understand what she was going through.

Holly worries, as she paints a group of tomatoes, about her own capacity to move on. Her marriage, she says, will likely survive whatever choice she makes. But she fears disappointing her husband.

“If I participate in a lawsuit, I will lose his respect for me, and that’s the same as losing him,” she says. “I don’t want Lisa to lose respect for me either.”

From a story by Liza Mundy that appeared in The Washington Post Magazine. ©2007 by The Washington Post Co.