Victims Parents Held on to Hope

Associated Press
Published: April 27, 2007

     More than a day passed between the moment Bryan and Renee Cloyd realized their daughter, Austin, might be among the students shot at Virginia Tech and the moment they knew she was gone.

     It was a period punctuated by emotional highs and lows, they said in an interview this week with The (Champaign) News-Gazette.

     Moments of hope were scattered through those long hours, but they eventually ended with the reality that their 18-year-old daughter was among the 32 people killed April 16 by gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

     Bryan Cloyd, an accounting professor at Virginia Tech, moved his family to Blacksburg in 2005 from Champaign.

     He works two buildings away from Norris Hall, where his daughter and most of the other victims were shot, and was in his office that Monday morning when he learned that something was wrong at the hall.

     Checking his daughter's class schedule, he found that she should be in French class in the building. Austin, a freshman, was majoring in International Studies and French, hoping one day to work with the United Nations.

     Bryan and Renee Cloyd both started calling their daughter's cell phone and sending her text messages. There was no response.  But they reasoned that, if she ran from the building, she might have left her phone behind.

     The parents then began calling local hospitals, none of which had Austin Cloyd. The parents initially took that to be good news.

     "Then at some point it dawned on us," Bryan Cloyd said. "If she's not there, it's bad news."

     But there would be more hopeful moments for the Cloyds.

     A federal agent with whom Bryan Cloyd talked earlier in the day called that evening, saying Austin Cloyd might be at a hospital in nearby Roanoke.

     Renee Cloyd packed a bag, ready to spend the night. But when they arrived at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, they learned their daughter wasn't there.

     "What I learned from that was when I had given up hope, I could still hope again," Bryan Cloyd said.

     Late the next morning, they got a call asking them to come to a local inn, where parents had gone the previous day to wait for their children. The Cloyds were being asked to identify a photo of a girl who was among the dead.

     "We knew they were bringing a picture, and we were pretty sure that the picture was Austin," Renee Cloyd said.

     By 1:30 that afternoon, they'd seen it and knew for sure.

     Later Brian and Renee Cloyd went to their daughter's dorm room to pick out clothes for her funeral. They'd last seen her the week before, when they dropped her off there after a rainy walk to the hilltop spot where the Cloyds plan to build a home.

     From their daughter's room, the Cloyds took note of the books she was reading - among them Barack Obama's "Audacity of Hope" - and retrieved a blanket that belonged to her.

     In the end, Renee Cloyd said, they were lucky to have their daughter as long as they did.

     "Everything had been said, on her side and on our side," Cloyd said. "We knew she loved us, and she knew we loved her."