Normally, the dispatchers were calm, their voices delivering emergency information with a trained composure. That day, Sydney Gay, then a 20-year-old EMT with the Blacksburg Volunteer Rescue Squad, was in an ambulance returning from another call when she heard the panic in the dispatcher’s voice:

“Shots fired! Shots fired! Multiple people down!”

Sydney Gay

At the time, she was a student at Virginia Tech, her father was a Blacksburg police officer and her mother, also a member of the volunteer rescue squad, worked on campus. Gay’s thoughts rushed to them. Her classmates. Her dad. Her mom.

She started to cry in the ambulance as her crew drove to their station, a few blocks from the school’s campus, to pick up more members and another vehicle.

What happened next is blurry-edged and all too vivid.

Gay’s ambulance was one of the first on the scene. She recalls stepping out of the back and seeing people running and officers in tactical gear. She has a hazy memory of an officer in an unmarked Ford Explorer driving up and pulling several injured people from the back of his vehicle.

[A look back at how the Virginia Tech massacre unfolded]

On a normal day, her crew would transport only one patient per ambulance. That day, they drove three gunshot victims at once to the hospital. Then, without stopping to fill out any paperwork, they turned around and returned to the campus.

The next moment is among the vivid ones. When they arrived, Gay walked up to a crew member who was managing triage at the scene.

“We just tagged 26 black,” Gay recalled her saying, knowing “black” meant dead. Gay later learned she knew two of the victims. “We both started hugging each other and started crying, and then it was, ‘Okay, get it together, get back to work.’ ”

A decade later, Gay works as a physician assistant in the same emergency room where she dropped off those patients. She also remains on the rescue squad, now as a paramedic.

After the shooting, Gay said, she would scan for an escape route or a place to hide anytime she walked into class.

“It messes with your trust,” she said. “You want to see the good in people, but it makes you expect the bad.”

She once asked her father how he coped with all he saw during the course of his job. “You have to find that place in the back of your mind to tuck it away and try not to think about it,” he told her. “Because it will ruin you.”

Gay kept the dark blue squad-issued jacket she wore that day and has never washed it, because she says she doesn’t believe it is healthy to forget. Emblazoned on the back with “Blacksburg Rescue,” it preserves “that memory, that pain, that loss,” she said. “I don’t want to lose that.”

The jacket is stained with blood that at one time resembled dried paint. It now has faded into the fabric.

She says the blood is probably from a survivor, because the three people she transported were not fatally injured. But if it is from someone who died that day, she said, there is “something still on this Earth from someone who is not.”

— Theresa Vargas