by LAUREN FULBRIGHT and NIKKI SCHWAB

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, this small community shows few signs of the tragedy that left 33 people dead Monday.

On Virginia Tech’s main drag, a sea of students dressed in orange and maroon make it look like any normal football game day.

But yellow ‘in loving memory’ ribbons draped from the lampposts and signs of local businesses offering condolences serve as reminders of a tragedy.

Senior Cho Seung Hui, an English major, is suspected of fatally shooting two fellow Virginia Tech students Monday morning in Ambler-Johnston Hall. According to police, he then walked to the Norris Hall engineering building, where he killed or injured professors and students, then shot himself, making it the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

For some, life goes on normally: A group of friends enjoys afternoon beers at the Top of the Stairs, a local bar favored by students.

As 8 p.m. nears, however, the mood turns somber as students stream down the streets that lead to Drill Field for a student-led candlelight vigil.

As students unload boxes of candles from a truck, Virginia State Police officers Justin Stiltner and Solomon Albert, who drove Monday from Fredericksburg, eye the growing crowd.

Stiltner says he has investigated triple homicides, but he has never seen a tragedy of this magnitude.

“No matter how much training experience you have, you can’t prepare yourself for something like this,” the 23-year-old policeman says. “It was unbelievable. It was more like a movie than real life.”

Virginia Tech faculty, students, alumni and their families join students from neighboring colleges, who show their support. The media follow. Some students gather with their friends, while others dash around Drill Field handing out candles and Pepsi and Coke cups that serve as candle holders.

The ceremony begins.

“Look out for each other,” Zenobia Hikes, vice president of student affairs, tells the crowd. “If you see your roommate or your classmate or your friend grieving or having a difficult time, help that person and make sure they get to counseling.”

As she speaks, mourners pass candles from one person to the next, slowly illuminating the field.

“We want the world to know we are Virginia Tech,” she says. “We will recover. We will survive with your prayers.”

A series of cheers bursts from the crowd.

At the end of the brief service, a student speaker asks for a moment of silence. The crowd lulls, then silence gives way to the trumpeting of taps.

A large group sings ‘Amazing Grace,’ which is interrupted by a group on the other side of Drill Field that chants football cheers.

“Hokies.”

“Hokies.”

“Hokies.”

The service concludes, and some students disperse, but others linger for hours.

An engineering student, Anurag Mishra, strides away from the field with his friends. Mishra, a student from India, lost a classmate in the shooting.

“I’m really feeling angry about the possibility that a person can get firearms so easily,” he says. “That is the thing I am most angry about.”

Nearby, Virginia Tech students Jessica Furr, Whitney Thomas and Brady Beemer stand in a semicircle. Furr is angry about how the media blamed Virginia Tech officials for not getting out the message of the first shooting earlier.

“We were informed as they thought fit,” she says. “Twenty-seven thousand people panicking and looking for a shooter is not exactly the ideal situation.”

Senior John Woods huddles amid a group of friends on the ground and wonders about what else the university could have done. Woods lost his former girlfriend and close friend, Maxine Turner, who was one of the students killed in a German class in Norris Hall.

“She was a senior,” he says quietly, then pauses. “She was supposed to be graduating in three weeks.”

“She skips her other classes all the time,” Woods says. “She’d go to the bar and get a drink or something because, what the hell, we’re seniors. But she doesn’t skip German class because she likes German class.”

Most victims were killed in Turner’s German class.

Woods spent Monday looking for Turner, who he describes as a bouncy, talkative person and a good friend. But it wasn’t until 10 p.m. that her mother called.

“Nobody ever said ‘Maxine is dead,’” he says. “Somebody answered the phone. Somebody was sobbing. Everyone was sobbing.”

Woods then notified other friends of Turner’s death.

“I called my friend, John. I forgot to ask if he was sitting down, and he almost drove off the road,” Woods says.

As more students leave the field, others linger to look at the messages left by their peers on white wooden boards. Onlookers continue to light candles at two shrines. Some candles illuminate pictures of the dead, and as the flames intensify, crowd members extinguish them with blue Gatorade.

A group of students forms a circle and begins singing ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Our God is an Awesome God.’

They pause when a lone bagpiper plays ‘Amazing Grace’ from afar.