Amid the Chaos of Deaths, a Minister Attends to Those Who Are Grieving
By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: April 19, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 18 — Over the last three days, the Rev. Alexander W. Evans has spent his time in a cluster of small meeting rooms on the second floor of the hotel and conference center at Virginia Tech, listening over and over to a shared lexicon of grief, spoken in so many different voices.

“The reaction was the same: devastation, overwhelming pain,” said Mr. Evans, who accompanied the Blacksburg and Virginia Tech police chiefs as they took families into private rooms to give them the news. “That means crumbling to the floor, crying out, ‘No, no! My baby! It can’t be!’ ”

“You could hear it from outside the rooms, all around you,” he said.

The pastor of Blacksburg Presbyterian Church, Mr. Evans, 49, also serves as a Blacksburg Police Department chaplain. From the time he got a phone call from the police Monday morning, he has listened and spoken to those closest to the killings of the 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty members: the police officers who rushed into Norris Hall and found all but the two victims who had been shot dead about two hours earlier in a dormitory, and the families who now wait to take them home. the rest