From safety of S'pore school, student is plunged into heart of violence at V Tech
April 21, 2007
HE spent most of his schooling years
cocooned in the safety of the Singapore school system.
Then he went to Virginia Tech - and experienced his first brush with mindless gun violence.
Undergrad Kevin Lee's years at Gan Eng Seng Secondary and then at StAndrew's JC were mostly uneventful.
On Monday, however, he was just 15minutes away from the massacre that claimed 32 lives at the university.
Cho Seung-Hui, a US student of Korean descent, went on a shooting rampage and then shot himself.
The place where the killings took place was where Mr Lee, 22, was headed to on Monday morning. He was about to board a bus to school when a second alert was sounded. It stopped the bus he was about to take.
His close shave has left him full of 'what ifs'. Would he have been shot, too, if it'd been a Friday, when he had class at Norris Hall? Would he have had the courage to save other lives?
The final year electrical engineering student told The New Paper from his off-campus apartment in Blacksburg: 'Like many, I have thought of heroic situations where I could have attempted to stop the shooter. But you never know in situations like that.
'Some of the survivors of the incident said that they had to play dead during the shooting. I might have done that too.'
He had also attended a number of classes in Norris Hall, where most of the killings took place, in his first and second years.
The New Paper was put in touch with Mr Lee through the president of the Singapore Students' Association at the University of Virginia.
His Burmese flat-mate, Nyan Htet Win, also a former Gan Eng Seng student, chose to stay put in the apartment (See report on page 4.)
During those anxious and confusing hours after the bloodbath, Mr Lee's parents in Singapore were asleep while his aunt, who lives in Virginia, was fraught with worry.
She tried calling him but the networks were jammed. They communicated through e-mail.
'When it happened, my aunt's employee told her about it,' said MrLee. 'I sent e-mails to my family in Singapore. They were sleeping and didn't know about what had happened.'
His mother later called to check on him.
Said Mr Lee: 'She was a bit afraid so I tried to tell her briefly what was happening. She asked me to be careful.'
She did not ask him to return to Singapore as he is returning next month for his summer break. He will graduate in December. His parents could not be reached for comment.
Mr Lee, was born in the US and is a US citizen. His family moved to Singapore when he was 2 and he grew up here. His father is Singaporean, while his housewife mother is from Taiwan.
He enrolled at Virginia Tech in August 2003 after leaving SAJC.
On Monday, he got ready to go to school like normal. But before he left, he read an e-mail to students telling them about a shooting incident.
Mr Lee later found out it was referring to the first of two killings of students in a campus dormitory.
He didn't react because he thought the first alert was over a another minor incident. Last August, there was another shooting when an escaped prisoner tried to hide on the campus.
'I didn't think much of it because, like the previous incident, I thought it was contained,' he said.
He thought he would miss the bus as it was already at the bus-stop when he looked out of his window.
'But when I went down, it was still there. I saw some students milling around,' said Mr Lee.
'The driver was also standing outside the bus, so I figured it had something to do with the shooting.'
An alert had been sent out to all bus drivers to stop where they were until orders were given.
Mr Lee then decided to go home. He rushed straight to his computer and found a second, more chilling e-mail from school administrators.
It was about a second shooting.
'We were told to stay indoors,' he recalled.
He turned to Fox News online as he doesn't have cable TV.
Mr Lee recalled: 'My room-mate was home and we followed the news. First, it was 20 (people killed), then it became 32. We couldn't believe it was happening in our school.
'Before the August incident, I never thought these things would happen on campus. We are situated in the mountains, and the town is a quiet and nice place.'
ONLINE FRENZY
He has been glued to his computer - his main source of information for the past few days. Friends in Singapore and the UK have also been chatting with him online about the shooting.
Soon after the massacre, there was a frenzy of e-mails. People were trying to account for friends and trying to figure out who the victims were, he said.
Mr Lee said: 'I received about 30e-mails. Everyone was encouraging each other to stay strong. All my friends are fine, but I know friends who know friends who were victims.'
Then there is the fear of a backlash against Asians.
His friends prepared him for possible hate mails, while the Korean and Chinese associations sent out notices telling students to alert them if any one tried to harm them.
'There might be people who'd go out and do that but I don't care for such people,' said Mr Lee, adding that he wasn't afraid.
'The community is safe, and I feel that the school and police reacted well.'
Still, after he drove out alone to buy dinner on Tuesday night, his mother told him to be careful and not to go out alone again.
On the way home that night, he tried driving to campus but the roads were closed. Classes have been stopped for a week, and Norris Hall is shut for the rest of the school year.
'I imagine going back to school would be weird,' he said.