If you have ever visited Virginia, hopefully you have ridden on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  My family spent many summers along that road, speechless at the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley, leading into the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It is a peace words cannot describe.

A few weeks ago a 27 year old disabled man and an 18 year old woman sat in his green Honda at Rock Points Overlook, mile marker 10, near Waynesboro on Afton Mountain.  They had gone there to watch the sun set over the valley.  It is a famous look out point on the Parkway.  A man drove up behind them in a red sedan, pointed a shot gun at them and hit both of them in the back.  He then shoved the man over the cliff.  

As he turned to his female victim, he had a fight on his hand.  She was headed right for him, grabbed and ripped his shirt, somehow giving herself time to run to the road where a passsing car stopped to pick her up.  The gunman then shot once more at the fleeing car.  She was not going down without a fight and in the process grabbed valuable fibers from his shirt.  She even asked him why he was doing this.  "Because I'm crazy," he answered.

The young man has since died.  The young lady is expected to live.  The alleged murderer has been caught.   And if convicted, how could it be anything but murder in the first degree?  Several items of evidence were recovered and from that evolved an interesting development. 

Last August two people were gunned down at a popular campground close to Virginia Tech.  They had arrived to set up for a religious retreat.  Both were found dead and very little evidence was found.   But from what was discovered, police are theorizing the same man arrested for the Afton Mountain attack also allegedly killed the two students in Blacksburg.  The two locations are hundreds of miles apart but I trust the police to link the three murders with solid evidence.

There may be tragic victory in death after all.  If it turns out this man did kill the two Tech campers last year, that will leave only one student's killer at large.  It is the person with whom the young lady disappeared in Charlottesville who remains uncaught.  The victim had gone with friends from Blacksburg to Charlottesville for a concert and her remains were found a few months ago.

The victim on the Blue Ridge Parkway lost a dear friend that day but she gained courage she probably never dreamed she had.  In defense of him and her,  she struck back at a man with a shotgun.  She probably figured if she had to die, she'd go down fighting.  Instead, she lived to provide valuable information.

I thought about all this and what it meant yesterday, the third anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre.  It served to remind me that 32 people were murdered  that day.  Later, one was inexplicably murdered a year ago in January by her boyfriend in a cafe on campus.  But it is April 16 that will be etched in our minds forever.  Just let us not forget any of the 36 victims of my university that have been murdered in less than 3 years.