Lost Lives
Ryan Clark
Clark was called “Stack” by his friends, many of whom he met as a resident assistant at Ambler Johnson Hall, where the first shootings took place.
Clark, 22, was from Martinez, Ga., just outside Augusta. He was a fifth-year student working toward degrees in biology and English, and a member of the Marching Virginians band.
“He was just one of the greatest people you could possibly know,” friend Gregory Walton, 25, said. “He was always smiling, always laughing. I don’t think I ever saw him mad in the five years I knew him.”
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Daniel Perez Cueva
Perez Cueva, 21, from Peru, was killed while in a French class, said his mother, Betty Cueva, who was reached by telephone at the youth’s listed telephone number.
Perez Cueva was a student of international relations, according to the Virginia Tech Web site.
His father, Flavio Perez, spoke of the death earlier to RPP radio in Peru. He lives in Peru and said he was trying to obtain a humanitarian visa from the U.S. consulate here. He is separated from Cueva, who said she had lived in the United States for six years.
A spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Lima said the student’s father “will receive all the attention possible when he applies” for the visa.
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Jarrett Lee Lane
Lane, 22, was a senior civil engineering student who was valedictorian of his high school class in tiny Narrows, Va., just 30 miles from Virginia Tech.
His high school put up a memorial to Lane that included pictures, musical instruments and his athletic jerseys.
Lane played the trombone, ran track, and played football and basketball at Narrows High School. “We’re just kind of binding together as a family,” Principal Robert Stump said.
Lane’s brother-in-law Daniel Farrell called Lane fun-loving and “full of spirit.”
“He had a caring heart and was a friend to everyone he met,” Farrell said. “We are leaning on God’s grace in these trying hours.”
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Liviu Librescu
Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer, was known for his research, but his son said the Holocaust survivor will be remembered as a hero for protecting students as the gunman tried to enter his classroom.
Librescu taught at Virginia Tech for 20 years and had an international reputation for his work in aeronautical engineering
After surviving the Nazi killings, Librescu escaped from Communist Romania and made his way to the United States before he was killed in Monday’s massacre, which coincided with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Librescu’s son, Joe, said his father’s students sent e-mails detailing how the professor saved their lives by blocking the doorway of his classroom from the approaching gunman before Librescu was fatally shot.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Librescu’s son, Joe Librescu, said. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
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Juan Ramon Ortiz
Ortiz, 26, who was from Puerto Rico, was teaching a class as part of his graduate program in civil engineering at Virginia Tech.
The family’s neighbors in the San Juan suburb of Bayamon remembered Ortiz as a quiet, dedicated son who decorated his parents’ one-story concrete house each Christmas and played in a salsa band with his father on weekends. “He was an extraordinary son, what any father would have wanted,” said Ortiz’s father, also named Juan Ramon Ortiz.
Marilys Alvarez, 22, heard Ortiz’s mother scream from the house next door when she learned of her son’s death. Alvarez said she had wanted to study in the United States but was now reconsidering.
“Here the violence is bad, but you don’t see that,” she said. “It’s really sad. You can’t go anywhere now.”
(c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.