VA TECH MASSACRE: Queens basketball standout safe

Former Francis Lewis High School basketball star Vionca Murray boarded a flight at 9:05 a.m. from LaGuardia airport after a weekend at home in Rosedale, to return to Virginia Tech University, where she is less than one month away from completing her first year at the school.
However, at the time, she did not know that a last minute, weekend-trip home for her sister’s Sweet Sixteen party, spared her from being on the Blacksburg, VA campus for the deadliest shooting massacre in United States history.
At 9:45 a.m. on Monday, April 16, a gunman opened fire inside Norris Hall, a classroom building on campus, spraying students and professors with bullets that left 30 people dead before apparently turning the gun on himself.
Authorities identified Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean permanent resident and senior English Major at the college as the gunman, and they are currently investigating whether he was also responsible for killing two additonal people inside a university resident hall less than three hours before the rampage.
In total, 33 people died, and 15 were injured during the bloodbath, causing the school to cancel classes for the entire week.
After awaking from a nap during her Delta Airlines flight back to school, Murray, who is a freshman forward on the Virginia Tech women’s basketball team, turned on the television monitor from her airline seat and saw the news regarding the shooting at her school.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” Murray told The Queens Courier on Tuesday, April 17, from a Virginia airport while waiting for a flight back to Queens. “I kept on watching the news [the rest of the flight.]”
Murray decided on Friday morning, April 13 that she was going to fly home for the weekend to celebrate her sister’s 16th birthday instead of coming home the following weekend when the celebration was originally planned for.
Her father, Kelvin Murray, said the family decided to change the celebration date so that Vionca would not miss a basketball awards banquet scheduled for Sunday, April 22.
“God works in mysterious ways,” said Kelvin, who was grateful that his daughter was not on campus for the shooting.
Vionca, who plans to study business management at Virginia Tech, said that she usually has class at 9:05 and 10:10 on Monday mornings, and the path that she walks to get from one class to the other would have put her right next to Norris Hall.
In addition, the building where she lives in an on-campus dorm room is located directly next to the dorm where the two people were murdered earlier in the day.
“I was just so grateful that I wasn’t there,” she said.
When she arrived in Virginia at 5:30 p.m. (after a layover in Atlanta) on the day of the shooting, Sheree Jones, a junior at Virginia Tech whom Vionca met at church while at school, picked her up at the airport.
“We were talking about it [the shooting incident] the whole way,” said Vionca. The two drove back to Jones’ off-campus apartment where Vionca stayed for the night.
Meanwhile, friends, former teammates and opposing coaches began calling her former coach Mike Eisenreich to see if Vionca was safe.
“A lot of people were concerned. I got about eight or 10 phone calls from coaches and former teammates asking if I heard from her,” said Eisenreich, who had found out from her parents earlier in the day that she was OK.
The Murrays visited the Blacksburg campus before Vionca committed to the school, and both Kelvin and Vionca described the 2,600-acre campus as quiet and safe.
Vionca, who has developed close friendships with her coaches and teammates, said that school was very different from New York.
“It’s so different from the city; I wanted to try something different,” she said. “In New York, you have to watch your back; it was different here.”
Since Virginia Tech canceled classes for the remainder of the week, Vionca booked a flight back to Queens, and her parents picked her up from LaGuardia Tuesday evening.
Her father, who termed the incident as very upsetting, said he believed things would be different when his daughter returned to school.
“When something drops everyone will be looking around. When there’s a loud bang, people will be jumping,” he said. “There has to be a little time for healing.”