Jay Poole was a little late for lunch, but with good reason. He’d been held up by a phone call, talking with the parent of one of the students who survived last April’s mass shooting at Virginia Tech.
Poole, director of Tech’s Office of Recovery and Support, had spent the morning trying to help his fellow Hokies cope with the news of the latest mass shooting—this one at Northern Illinois University, where five students died and the gunman, a former student, took his life.
Sitting down for lunch in downtown Richmond, Poole shook his head. “You think surely it won’t happen again, but it did. Today’s a tough day” for the parents and survivors of the Tech massacre, which claimed the lives of 27 students and five teachers.
The mid-February shooting at Northern Illinois stirred the simmering memories among the extended Tech family still hurting from last April 16. “This whole business of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] becomes real,” Poole said. “We do the very best we can to take care of them.”
His staff – which includes trained therapists and counselors – is proactive. As soon as the news broke from Illinois, they reached out by phone and e-mails to Tech students and family members to let them know about the unfolding tragedy, all in an effort to blunt the emotional force of hearing the news from a stranger.
“In our simplest form, we are conduits for information,” Poole explained. Parents “want to know if we’ve touched base with their kids.” A common question on the day after the NIU shootings was, “Have you heard from (my child) today?”
The Office of Recovery and Support was established last July by Tech President Charles Steger.
“Jay’s top responsibility will be to address the needs of the April 16 victims … families, injured students, or students closely connected with the event,” Steger said at the time. “He will report directly to me and be our person who works daily with the many ramifications of that terrible day.”
Poole, a 1978 Tech grad, oversees case managers and two faculty members from the Office of the Provost. He divides his time between Richmond, where he has lived for years, and Blacksburg, where he has a second home.
Along with wife Shelly, he hosts a monthly dinner for the students in Blacksburg. “The students just sit and talk. It could be about what happened in April, it could be about politics, or it might be about Tyrod Taylor versus Sean Glennon” – that is, Tech football and its quarterbacks.
Poole is a bear of a man with a white beard and an easygoing manner that reflects his upbringing in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a decade, when he was chief spokesman for Philip Morris USA in Richmond.
As the local reporter covering the unfolding federal investigation of PM USA, I no doubt asked Poole some questions and wrote some articles that probably did not make his day. But he always returned phone calls and acted like a professional. He’d accepted an early retirement package from Altria (parent company of Philip Morris USA) and was setting up a consulting business – Common Sense Strategies.
So when I heard he was heading up Tech’s healing office, I wondered why.
On Friday of the week of the shooting, Poole called the office of Tech’s chief spokesman, Larry Hincker, a long-time friend. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you.’”
An hour later, Hinckler called and accepted Poole’s offer of help with the media deluge. “I was on the periphery of what happened in the aftermath. I was able to observe the confusion.”
A couple of months later, President Steger asked Poole out for breakfast. Would he be willing to head an office to help with Tech’s recovery and support for the shooting victims and their families?
“I had no intention of doing something like that,” Poole reflected. But, he added, “I couldn’t say no, for two reasons.
“First, everything good in my life, with the exception of my wife, was the result of the degree I got from Virginia Tech. Second, I don’t know how I could have gotten through the business with Tom Poole without the Virginia Tech family.”
He was alluding to the tragic loss of his only child, Tom Poole, in 1999. The young man, who was 13 at the time, was training for football tryouts in the fall when his bike struck a minivan near his home.
That fall, Jay and Shelly Poole donated the proceeds of Tom’s savings account to a memorial scholarship established to honor Tech football recruit Marques Hampton and his mother who died in a car wreck on Interstate 81.
The scholarship goes to a walk-on football player who displays a strong sense of family and faith, as well as academic and athletic promise, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The Pooles are long-time friends of Tech coach Frank Beamer. When the Hokies went on a tear that fall in football and played for the National Championship in the Sugar Bowl, it helped Jay Poole get through the hard times. “Somebody from Virginia Tech – a football team manager, Brothers from my fraternity, Tech friends came by to check on us at every home game that year just to see how we were doing.” So when Steger called on him to head up the recovery office, he said, “I couldn’t say ‘no.’”
He also knew something else. Because of his own loss, “I could listen with a different ear.”
None of this has been easy, though, and Poole said, “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.”
He laughed. “A friend of mind in the p.r. business said this is God’s way of getting even for me being a spokesman for Philip Morris all those years.”
But helping this special group of people brings its own rewards. No one can undo what happened last spring, “But we try to help them feel a little less bad about the horrible tragedy that was thrust upon them through no fault of their own.”