ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512110032
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG
People in America are murdered every day.
But not here.
Here, it happens sporadically, the result of a domestic quarrel, a fight over a poker game, a drunken brawl.
More rare are those murders where the victim doesn't know the person pointing the gun.
When the gun goes off so near our homes, we say: "That can't be. I walk there with my dog. I shop there with my children. I hunt there with my friends."
We stop feeling safe.
Gina Hall. Meredith Mergler. Andrea Walnes.
And now, Alexander DeFilippis.
These college students were victims of particularly shocking murders in recent years. Their names make our news pages for weeks.
They are etched in our minds for longer - on campus and in the community. And in Burruss Hall, where Virginia Tech administrators try to teach students that although this isn't Washington or New York, still, please, be careful.
"Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg area are known as safe places to live and study," Tech Provost Peggy Meszaros said after DeFilippis was found dead by the side of a road in Montgomery County. "It is a brutal irony that this murder took place the day after release of crime statistics showing our campus as one of the safest in the state."
A recent ranking of 17 colleges, with one being the most dangerous and 17 being the safest, put Radford 12th and Tech 14th.
At the same time, Blacksburg falls 36 percent below the national crime index, which monitors major crimes from murder to car theft.
"We tell students and parents each July during orientation that we do sit in a geographically safe area," said Mike Jones, chief of Virginia Tech Police. Deaths, like those of Hall, Mergler, Walnes and DeFilippis - all names he knows well - are anomalies.
To make sure they stay anomalies, he urges students to use safety nets like shuttle and escort services and emergency phones.
And it's important that students always be aware of where they are and who they're with.
"Tech is a safe campus. Blacksburg is a safe town," Jones said. But "mean people in the world go crazy. We don't live in a glass bubble here."
In a clean town decorated with Christmas lights, it's easy to forget that.
Tuesday night, when DeFilippis was forced from the parking lot of a convenience store in Hethwood and left, dead, on a lonely road in the county, the bubble burst.
"It's extremely distressing," said Blacksburg's Ron Secrist. "I say that as town manager and a resident, but also as the parent of a college-age student in another community. It's a much more dangerous world."
When he heard the news, he said, his heart and prayers went straight to DeFilippis' family. "I could see myself on the other end of the phone," he said.
Last week's events, brutal though they were, shouldn't make people label the town - or society - as dangerous and unsafe, he said.
But it should make us more careful, more feeling, and more indignant.
It should make us angry at those whose bullets break the glass.
Madelyn Rosenberg is The Roanoke Times' assistant New River editor.
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB