BLACKSBURG Va.
One supportive message came engraved on a 150-pound rock from the Mississippi River. Another was a lime-green hood from a race car bearing Virginia Tech’s logo. A large painting of a tree arrived on a semitrailer from a New York university.
Gifts of comfort showered upon Virginia Tech after a student killed 32 people and himself have gotten larger, heavier and more exotic since the April 16 shooting rampage.
“It started with e-mails,” said Steven Estrada, who had worked at the university doing the student center’s budget for only a month when he was given the job of finding a place for everything.
The volume was huge from the start. It took hours to print and paste condolences on boards. Flowers arrived. Then the mail arrived: first letters, cards and drawings, then boxes in a range of sizes.
One person wanted to donate a motorcycle, university spokesman Larry Hincker said.
Estrada couldn’t handle the gifts alone and his colleagues were stretched thin as the campus struggled in the aftermath of the massacre, so he scoured the community and found more than 80 volunteers.
