Virginia State Police held the first of three meetings yesterday with victims and families of victims of the massacre at Virginia Tech last year. The meeting at state police headquarters near Richmond will be followed by two more: one near Chantilly on Saturday for the convenience of the families who live in Northern Virginia or in other states, and another on Sunday in the Richmond area.

Jarell Humphries and 10 other art students at Virginia State University stepped in the middle of North Sycamore Street last week to make a work of art. They painted a VSU logo and two heads of the school’s mascot, the Trojan, in VSU’s colors—orange and blue. The decorations on the Old Towne pavement will help residents and visitors identify Petersburg as a college town, said Humphries, a sophomore studying graphic design.

The disclosure of 59 pages of handwritten notes taken by Virginia Tech officials during the 2007 campus massacre is stirring anger and anxiety among some of the victims’ parents. Andrew Goddard of Short Pump, whose son Colin survived three gunshots in Norris Hall, said yesterday that the notes highlighted for him Tech’s failure to properly notify students that a gunman was on the loose and possibly on campus.

Newly released notes taken by Virginia Tech officials during the April 16, 2007, campus killings show how school leaders scrambled, sometimes amid confusing circumstances, to handle the emerging reality of a massacre. The 59 pages of handwritten notes provide the first public glimpse of the private decision-making process that occurred as Tech’s top executives, known as the policy group, gathered in a war-room environment inside Burruss Hall to stay on top of the escalating tragedy.

BLACKSBURG Some students wrote letters to the families of the victims. Some meditated or prayed at the War Memorial Chapel. Some helped plant trees of remembrance.