Our neighbors' son, a freshman engineering student at Virginia Tech University, knows he's fortunate. You can tell by his hushed voice and his sad eyes. We kept up a vigil for three days last week through the kitchen window, watching our neighbors' driveway. The father's car was gone. We saw the mother's car, but at odd hours. We scrutinized the updated casualty lists released by Virginia Tech several times a day. We thought about calling our neighbors several times, but were afraid of what we might hear.

Last Wednesday, the son's car finally turned up in their driveway. We immediately walked over and rang the doorbell, the family dog in tow. No answer. We rang it again. Finally, the son opened the door. We told him how relieved we were to see him.

He told us his class schedule included a regular Monday engineering class at noon in Norris Hall, where 30 Virginia Tech students were murdered a week ago. The shooting started less than three hours before his class. As he related the horrible details, it was clear that the son realized he may have literally dodged a bullet.

We were reluctant to ask too much about what had happened to him so soon after the national nightmare that claimed the lives of 32 teachers and students, and spawned America's latest twisted mass murderer—a desperately confused 23-year-old South Korean immigrant. All the son said was that a friend of his "didn't make it." He looked down at the ground. No one said anything until our dog yipped when I accidentally stepped on her paw.

We decided to leave the boy alone in the sanctuary of his own home, a ball game playing on the TV in the background.

There were, of course, countless stories last week like that of our neighbors' son. For 33 families who were not as fortunate, the pain will last for the rest of their lives. The campus of Virginia Tech, nestled hard against the West Virginia border in the beautiful Virginia Blue Ridge, will never, ever, be the same.

There was a prelude to this disaster last August. We and many of our friends had just shipped our kids off to college, many for the first time. On the first day of classes, Virginia Tech and nearby Radford University, where our son is a freshman, were eventually locked down when an escaped jail inmate allegedly shot and killed a hospital guard off campus and a sheriff's deputy near the Tech campus.

This was an ominous way to start the school year. It reminded us of the father who walked up to the microphone during summer orientation and said to Radford's president, "I'm turning over to your care the most precious thing in my life, my daughter. Will you protect her?" That question was probably asked at college orientations all over America last summer. Little did the parents at Tech know then what would happen eight months later on a cold, windy April morning in a dormitory and at Norris Hall.

How could such a thing happen? What kind of country have we become? How did Cho Seung-Hui, involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, get his hands on two semi-automatic weapons and walk into a Wal-Mart to buy ammo?

How could a 76-year-old engineering professor and Holocaust survivor be placed in a position where he had to sacrifice his own life to protect his students at their moment of maximum danger? ("He saved them, he saved them," professor Liviu Librescu's wife said last week.)

There have been some awful days in Virginia over the last six years, fueling a slow-burning siege mentality and a culture of victimization. First, a plane was flown into the Pentagon. An anthrax scare followed. A year later, two snipers picked off their victims at area gas stations, stores and bus stops. An endless string of military funerals are held at Arlington National Cemetery. And now, the worst gun rampage in American history. Where will it end? When will we stop acting like victims, look reality in the eye and act to prevent the next tragedy?

No time soon, I suspect.

The only solace was seeing our neighbors' son's car in the driveway. What a relief to see him when he opened the front door last week.

—George Leopold, managing editor of EE Times.com, lives in northern Virginia