Serendipity35

It has been a year and there will be more than enough coverage on the tragic anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech. The university community will have its own ways of remembering those who were lost. I hope the media will allow the campus to mark the day privately. When I posted something last year about that day, my thoughts were of a personal nature since my son was an engineering senior there.

As time has passed, I have felt less comfortable with the university's response to the events that day. If my son hadn't, for whatever reason, decided to wait before going to a project session before his morning engineering class, he would have been right there in Norris Hall. When he heard there had been a shooting but classes were still being held, he waited. He watched it unfold on television while he was on the phone with us in New Jersey.

I will wear my Virginia Tech shirt and ribbon today to my own campus because I think we all need to remember. But my own way of remembering today is to celebrate the life of one who was lost.

I never met Professor Kevin Granata. He was my son's senior project adviser and his professor senior year. He had also been helping fill what my son felt were some weaknesses in his software skills by working with him outside class.

He was his adviser for the capstone senior design project team he was on that was designing a biomimetic walking robot.

Professor Granata was a victim on April 16, 2007. He heard the commotion from his office on the third floor of Norris Hall and escorted about twenty students from a classroom nearby to his office. After they were locked in, he went downstairs with another professor, Wally Grant, to investigate. Both teachers were shot. Professor Grant was wounded and survived, but Dr. Granata died from his injuries. The students locked in his office were all safe.

Kevin Granata was 45 years old. He was married with three children.

He seems, from all I have learned of him in the past year from my son and from news stories, to be everything we hope to be as teachers, and the kind of teacher we want our own children to experience.

More on Kevin Granata on the Virginia Tech remembrance site, on the ESM department's site and on Wikipedia.