U.S. & World News

BLACKSBURG, Va. (CBS News) ― Chemistry professor Joe Merola tried to give a lecture Monday, but looking out at 100 Virginia Tech students' faces -- and the sweat shirt he'd placed on the seat of a slain student -- he couldn't do it.

"I lost it halfway through class," he said. "I burst into tears and had to turn it over to the counselors."

Classes at Virginia Tech resumed Monday, one week after gunman Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people before turning a gun on himself.

"People are at different stages," Zenobia Hikes, vice president of Student Affairs, told an afternoon news conference.

But officials were encouraged by the student turnout.

"To the extent possible, we are returning to normalcy," said Lay Nam Chang, Dean of the College of Science.

"The same students who sit in the last row were still nodding off," University Provost Mark McNamee said a faculty member told him.

However, there is still no indication what connections, if any, Cho had to his victims.

At 9:45 — the time of the second shooting — the university held a moment of silence, with a single bell tolling from the tower of the main administration building. A minute later, the bell tolled 32 times — once for each victim — as 32 white balloons were released, one at a time, from the field below.

After that, 1,000 maroon-and-orange balloons were released.

"As the balloons drifted skyward, people stood for several minutes, in silence, watching the balloons float off into the distance," reports CBS News correspondent Jim Krasula.

Earlier, students and faculty gathered at about 7:10 a.m. near the dormitory where the first victims, Ryan Clark and Emily Hilscher, were killed. They also gathered on the main campus lawn, the site of several impromptu memorials to the victims.

In front of the dorm, a small marching band from Alabama played "America the Beautiful" and carried a banner that read, "Alabama loves VT Hokies. Be strong, press on."

Hokies is a nickname for people affiliated with the university.

By the time the moment concluded, more than 100 people had gathered to remember the dead. Afterward, a group of students and campus ministers brought 33 white prayer flags — one for each of the dead, including the gunman, Cho — from the dorm to the school's War Memorial Chapel. They placed the flags in front of the campus landmark and adorned them with pastel-colored ribbons as the Beatles' song "The Long and Winding Road" played through loudspeakers.

On the main campus lawn stood a semicircle of stones — 33 chunks of locally quarried limestone — to remember each person who died in the rampage.

Someone left a laminated letter at Cho's stone, along with a lit purple candle.

"Cho, you greatly underestimated our strength, courage and compassion. You have broken our hearts, but you have not broken our spirits. We are stronger and prouder than ever. I have never been more proud to be a Hokie. Love, in the end, will always prevail. Erin J."

The media was kept at a distance Monday, and "there is a heavy police presence around campus this morning," reports CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. "But most students say they're not worried. This is exactly where they need to be. This morning they have returned by the thousands to reclaim their campus."

"I think we need to be here as a community. And we're not going to get better if we just run away everything that happened last week," said student Kyle Clayton, who returned to campus Sunday.

"I thought last week as time goes by that I could forget this tragic incident," graduate student Sijung Kim said. "But as time goes by I find I cannot forget."

Richard Shryock, a French professor and chairman of Virginia Tech's Foreign Languages and Literatures department, was making himself available Monday morning for students of Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French instructor killed by Cho.

"I'll see if any of the students show up," Shryock said on CBS News' The Early Show.

Shryock said the university has provided counseling and other information for instructors and students. "Talking with friends and family and colleagues has been also a big help," he told co-anchor Harry Smith.

"My most important job right now is just to do everything I can to try to make sure that today goes as well as it possibly can. And I'm trying to take things one step at a time," Shryock added.

Virginia Tech is allowing students to drop classes without penalty or to accept their current grades if they want to spend the rest of the year at their parents' homes grieving last week's campus massacre.

But whatever decisions they make academically, many students say they will do their mourning on campus — and that they can't imagine staying away now.

"Is it overstating it to say that students and faculty at Virginia Tech want to take their school back?" Smith asked Shryock.

"Oh, there's no doubt about that. There's no doubt. And we will. And we will," the foreign languages chairman replied.

Virginia Tech officials say victims' families are their top priority. They have been given a private e-mail address and direct phone number for school president Charles Steger.

State police investigators still have not connected Cho to his victims but were reviewing data, including Cho's computer files, looking for such a connection.

"We're going back to the hard drives," state police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. "They're still in the processing and analysis stage."

Police have pulled from the university server all e-mails to and from Cho, as well as e-mails to and from Hilscher, the first victim, according to court documents filed Monday. Police also recovered other e-mail logs and Cho's personal cell phone records.

A Virginia Tech freshman who survived last week's campus massacre was killed in a car crash, his father said Sunday.

Jeff Soriano died from his injuries Friday in a Norfolk, Va., hospital after he was pulled from the wreckage of his burning vehicle, police said. He had been an engineering student.

(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)