Ching, who grew up in Hilo and is a 1999 graduate of Mid-Pacific Institute, is a first-year medical student at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.

The medical school was locked down during the shootings, and Ching was safe in a building about two miles from campus, but she struggled through "a really hard day" yesterday after learning her friend had been killed, she said in an e-mail to The Advertiser.

Ching identified the friend only as "Jeremy." She said she wasn't ready to talk about the shootings, and could not be reached for comment by telephone.

In an earlier e-mail sent Monday, Ching wrote that her circle of friends was worried about another student no one had heard from, and who was believed to have been in a civil engineering class when the gunman entered.

"I went to the convocation today, and it was an obscenely beautiful, mild day (except for the wind)," she said in an e-mail yesterday. "There were about 20,000 of us in the football stadium. ... It was such a nice day that the whole thing didn't seem real ... "

The students took up a school chant, "Let's Go Hokies," and Ching said she expected some people would be critical of their reaction. She didn't care, and she explained why.

"Maybe you'd never understand it if you weren't here at this time and had somebody you know killed or injured," she wrote. "But it's the hardest thing to be a part of a place you love and then have something like this happen."