Other residents on her floor heard gunshots from a building just a couple of hundred feet from Oxley's dormitory, she said. An announcement over the public address system warned students to get in their rooms and lock their doors.

"A couple of us, my friends and I, had gone to the window when a bunch of students ran back into the building saying, 'Don't go outside,' " she said. "We could just see people running everywhere trying to get into buildings, we saw a couple of police and we heard the ambulances."

Students who arrived at the dorm described a scene in which heavily armed police crouched behind vehicles and trees and shouted at the students to get off the drill field that is the hub of the campus. Students sprinted for cover, but witnesses also described one girl who strolled across the empty field by herself, apparently oblivious.

Oxley, 19, said the school was on lockdown until almost 3 p.m., with the news on in every room on the dorm floor. The administration e-mailed updates, including the tally of the people who were killed.

Oxley said she contacted people she knows in the dorm where the shootings started about 7:15 a.m. to make sure they were safe.

In Hilo, Dr. Richard Lee-Ching's sister called his home shortly before 6:30 a.m. Hawai'i time yesterday morning and told him to turn on CNN.

LITTLE TIME TO WORRY

Lee-Ching's daughter, Leslie Mae-Geen Ching, is a first-year medical student at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.

Lee-Ching watched apprehensively until his daughter called about 15 minutes later to assure him she was safe.

"The phone calls came in such quick succession that I really didn't have too much time to get too worried," he said. The medical school is about two miles from the main campus in Blacksburg, and "I knew she had no business being in those areas (where the shootings occurred), so I was pretty sure that she wasn't in that."

Leslie Ching said via e-mail she had just completed a test at the college when school administrators walked in to announce there had been shootings, and that the building was in lockdown.

"At first, they weren't sure if it was only one gunman or not, so there was still a high level of anxiety about another possible gunman roaming around," Ching said via e-mail. "Through the next couple of hours, everybody was online, trying to find out more."

The students stayed put until 1 p.m., when classes were officially canceled.

Ching said the shootings happened about 4 a.m. Hawai'i time, so she waited before calling home.

Former O'ahu resident Empress Aquarian Oramas said her class at the medical school was interrupted by an administrator who announced a shooting had happened at Virginia Tech.

"They told us that a lot of the facts were unclear, but, that if we were at (the medical school), we should stay there," Oramas said by e-mail. "They also said that they would only allow students with a valid ID into our building and that we were not to let anyone in the building that we did not know."

'CLOSE-KNIT' CAMPUS

Oramas, a 1995 graduate of Baldwin High School on Maui, also waited to call her mother on O'ahu.

"When I finally spoke with my mother, the situation was under more control, so, she was just thankful that I was safe and couldn't believe that something of this magnitude occurred," Oramas wrote.

"The campus is pretty close-knit; I only know a handful of VT students and they are all safe," she said. "My heart goes out to all who were affected by this tragic event."

Lee-Ching said the town is not much bigger than Hilo and is dominated by the college. His daughter likes the atmosphere, he said.

"She really liked the community. We really liked the community," said Lee-Ching, a family practice physician in Hilo. "In a lot of ways we thought it was probably even safer than Honolulu, so this comes as kind of a shock."