Oregon Killings Amplify Crusade of Virginia Tech Victim’s Father
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERGOCT. 10, 2015
 
After his daughter’s death in the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, Joseph Samaha grew weary of empty political promises on gun control legislation and sought a middle ground to promote safer campuses. 





ANNANDALE, Va. — Two days after yet another gunman opened fire on yet another college campus, Peter Read, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, was eating lunch on a paper plate in a gray cinder-block church basement here before two of his sons, Brendan, 11, and Patrick, 12, received Boy Scout badges and honors.

But Mr. Read’s mind, after the mass shooting in Oregon, was on the first of his six children, his daughter Mary, murdered at age 19 in the 2007 campus massacre at Virginia Tech. His blue eyes rimmed with red, he drew a large circle in the air with his hands, in the shape of a giant hole.

“Mary’s a hole,” he said. Life goes on, with Boy Scouts and swim practice and homework, but “everything else flows around” the hole, “a space that doesn’t close up.” He can’t stand it when people talk about moving on. “You can go forward,” Mr. Read said, “but you cannot move on.”

Like so many Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence, in places etched into the national psyche — Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown and now Roseburg, Ore. — Mr. Read has sought to fill that hole through advocacy, in his case by pushing for tougher gun safety laws.

It has been a long and often dispiriting fight — one grieving father’s frustrating crusade.

The Virginia Tech massacre, on April 16, 2007, holds a singular place in American history. Thirty-two students and faculty members were killed, and 17 others wounded, in what remains the nation’s deadliest shooting rampage by a single gunman.

But with each new mass shooting, the circle of families like the Reads expands. Many have grown close, through gun safety vigils and rallies around the country. After each tragedy, text messages begin flying among survivors and families, asking, “Are you O.K.?” said Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was wounded at Virginia Tech. Today, Lori Haas is the Virginia director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

In the years since his daughter’s death, Mr. Read, 53, has given interviews (“The Oprah Winfrey Show” showed up just days after Mary died), spoken at Hollywood fund-raisers for gun control advocacy groups, addressed legislatures in states as far away as Montana and knocked on more lawmakers’ doors than he can count. These days, fewer reporters come to call; there are newer grieving parents to interview.

Virginia, home to the National Rifle Association, has long been hostile to limiting gun rights. Mr. Read, a well-built, ruddy-faced former intelligence officer who has “carried semiautomatic and automatic weapons all over the world in places where bad guys wanted to kill me,” knows that even some families of victims at Virginia Tech, in Oregon and elsewhere think the solution is more guns, not fewer. Still, Tim Kaine, a Democrat who was governor at the time of the Tech shooting and is now a United States senator, “thought for certain,” he said, that the massacre would spur action. He thought his legislature would expand background checks, now required only for those who buy guns from federally licensed arms dealers, to all gun sales. So did Mr. Read.


Instead, Mr. Kaine made other changes. He used his executive powers to require mental health records to be entered into the background check database for gun buyers, signed legislation requiring colleges to have safety plans and increased funding for mental health services.

“There was only one thing I was not able to do,” he said. “The punch line is: I was not able to get my legislature to even seriously contemplate any improvements to Virginia’s gun laws.”


Born in Seoul, South Korea, Mary Karen Read was a freshman, an aspiring elementary school teacher and an avid clarinet player. The daughter of Mr. Read and his first wife, she became a high school homecoming princess and faithful Christian who hoped to lead a campus Bible study group.

The last time her father saw her was the day before she died.

She had come home to Annandale, where she lived with her father and stepmother, Cathy Read, also a retired military intelligence officer, to see her grandparents, who were visiting for Easter. That weekend, Mrs. Read taught Mary how to bake a pumpkin pie. Later, cleaning out her dorm room, they found the empty pie container on her desk.

These are the little things, the memories that stick in an anguished father’s mind. His younger daughter, Colleen, was 10 months old when Mary died. Now 9, she lives in Mary’s old room, where some of Mary’s dresses still hang in the closet. “I always thought Colleen would have an older sister,” Mr. Read said.


Mr. Read’s advocacy began in May 2007, four weeks after he buried his daughter, when he learned the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group whose president boasts it is “to the right of the N.R.A.,” planned to raffle off firearms at a government building just miles from his home.

Incensed, he called another Virginia Tech father, Joseph Samaha, a commercial real estate broker whose daughter, an accomplished 18-year-old dancer named Reema, had been killed in the same French class as Mary. They decided to stand outside in silent protest, holding photographs of their beautiful, dark-haired, murdered daughters.

Mr. Samaha’s wife, Mona, an elementary school teacher, was aghast. “What are you doing with Reema’s picture?” she demanded. But the husband was insistent; he said he needed to go.

But after about two years on what he called “the treadmill” of fighting for gun control, Mr. Samaha, an elegant and soft-spoken man of Lebanese descent, instead turned his focus to a less contentious issue, campus safety.

As president of the Virginia Tech Victims Family Outreach Foundation, a group representing families and survivors, Mr. Samaha has steered the organization toward pushing campuses to adopt new warning systems — sirens and cellphone alerts — in emergencies, to expand mental health services, to counter sexual assault, and to carry out other safety measures.

“I’m a doer,” he said over tea and Lebanese pastries in his living room, where a large, black-and-white oil painting of Reema, in a dance pose, rests against the marble fireplace. “I can’t wait for politicians to pass laws.”


At the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, the federal holiday commemorating the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has come to be known as “Lobby Day,” when hundreds of gun rights advocates and opponents face off in public. Each year since Mary’s death, Mr. Read, who now works as a national security contractor, has gone.

Lobby Day in 2008, the first one after the Virginia Tech shooting, was particularly intense. Virginia is an “open-carry” state — anyone over 18 who is legally permitted to own a firearm may carry it in public — and the Reads were startled to find themselves surrounded by people toting weapons at the bell tower on the Capitol grounds.

“It was scary,” Mrs. Read said; she was glad she had worn flat shoes, in case she felt the need to run.

Over time, the two sides reached a truce. “They do their thing in the morning now,” Mr. Read said, “and we do ours in the afternoon.”

Virginia has expanded gun rights at least twice since the Tech massacre. In 2010, then-Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, signed a bill allowing people with permits to take concealed weapons into bars — so long as they do not drink. In February 2012, he signed a repeal of a nearly 20-year-old law barring Virginians from purchasing more than one handgun a month. Before he did, he spoke to Ms. Haas and Mr. Read by phone.

“We begged him not to do it,” Mr. Read said. “And he listened politely, and thanked us for our input, and then he ignored us.”

That December, a gunman in Newtown, Conn., shot and killed 20 schoolchildren and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School; President Obama vowed to make changing gun laws his top priority. The wife of Representative Gerald E. Connolly, a Northern Virginia Democrat to whom Mr. Read has grown close, gave Mr. Read her ticket to Mr. Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address; he watched from the House gallery as Mr. Obama called for new gun restrictions.

On April 17, 2013 — six years and one day after Mary was killed — Mr. Read was seated in the gallery on the other side of the Capitol as the Senate blocked a vote on a bipartisan measure to expand background checks. Next to him was Ms. Haas; she shouted, “Shame on you!” at the lawmakers down below, and was promptly escorted out by the police.

Had Mr. Read joined her, he would have risked his job. He bit his tongue.

To ask Mr. Read how he goes on is to see a man struggling to contain his rage. Sometimes his wife will motion with her hands to try to quiet him. (“My adviser is telling me I’m being too angry,” he will say.) But he is angry, so he answers the question with questions of his own.

“How do I not?” he exclaimed, his face reddening. “When the time comes for me to see my daughter again, what do I tell her that I did?”

Today, some advocates of gun control see progress in the states. Over the past two years, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon and Washington have expanded background checks; Nevada voters will consider an initiative to do so next year. Daniel Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says a state-by-state strategy — much like the movement for same-sex marriage — may be the answer. But not in Virginia, vowed Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.


“Background checks are a waste of time,” Mr. Van Cleave said. As to Mr. Read, he said, “I have to write him off as a grieving parent who is not being rational.”

Mary Read’s grave is in an Annandale cemetery a short drive from the Reads’ home, under a shady oak tree in a section called “Garden of Peace.” On the Saturday after her younger brothers received their Boy Scout honors, her father stopped by.

It was raining, and Mr. Read picked up a wet wooden blue windmill that he had put there on the Fourth of July; he often decorates the spot with “things I know Mary would like.” Often he finds notes and photographs or T-shirts left by Mary’s friends. They give him comfort, he said. But when his thoughts turned to politicians, his jaw tightened, and his face grew red again.

“They’ll never get rid of me,” the father said, jabbing an angry finger at the ground. “They’ll have to bury me here, right next to her, before they’ll never see me again.”

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