A grim haze over S.C. campus

Terry Walden was in his Ohio home Monday, some 600 miles from the grieving University of South Carolina campus where he had sent his daughter off to college. He was turning over the details of a father’s worst nightmare.

His daughter, Allison, was a 19-year-old sophomore and member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority. On Sunday morning, she was one of seven students -- six from her school, one reportedly from Clemson University -- who died in a fire after a house party on the North Carolina coast.

A student who survived the blaze told Terry Walden that his daughter was still awake as the party raged on past 4:30 a.m. A few hours later, the fire alarms in the house rang out.

But Walden wondered if Allison ever heard them. She was always sleeping through alarms, he said.

“When kids go away to college, you realize you have absolutely no control over the situation,” said Walden, who lives in the Cleveland suburb Chagrin Falls. “I bought her a car this summer. I thought, Maybe this is against my better judgment: She could get in a wreck, she could go anywhere. But as it turned out, on this trip, she didn’t even use her car.” Walden’s voice registered the same kind of dull shock that spread across the campus of South Carolina’s flagship university Monday, as many students returning to class heard the news for the first time.

“Did someone die here?” asked David Stubblefield after walking past a line of camera crews focusing on a procession of students on their way to a gathering to grieve.

Officials at the 27,000-student school decided not to cancel classes Monday, and in some quarters, life approached normal. Thousands of students waited in line for tickets to a football game against the University of Florida. In a courtyard, African musicians beat out complex polyrhythms as students clapped along.

The mood was somber, however, at Greek Village, home to the school’s 17 grand white- columned fraternity and sorority houses. North Carolina officials did not release the names of the victims Monday, but school officials confirmed that the dead included members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and Allison Walden’s sorority, known as the Tri-Delts.

Garnet-and-black banners with the school’s mascot hung at half-staff outside many of the big brick houses. Black ribbons adorned the columns, alongside carved pumpkins and pots of bright yellow chrysanthemums.

Not long after daybreak, a young woman hugging a brown teddy bear walked into the Tri-Delt house. Around the corner, a minister walked toward the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, his face ashen as he knocked on the back door.

At lunchtime, Sarah Davis, 18, a Tri-Delt freshman, sat on the lawn outside the student center with a copy of the Daily Gamecock student newspaper spread across her lap. “It’s just difficult, especially seeing it in the newspaper,” she said as she scanned the front page. “This is really putting it in perspective.”

On Sunday, Davis said, it had been surreal to watch TV knowing more than the newscasters did. She spent most of the day answering her phone, assuring friends and family she was OK, telling and retelling the story of the fire. In the evening, she went to her sorority house to pray.

Morgan Gauthreaux, 20, a junior, said her father called Sunday morning after hearing about the fire on the news. “The first thing he said is, ‘Are you sitting down?’ Then he told me there had been a terrible tragedy.”

Over the autumn weekend, students had left the lush, well-manicured campus in the state capital of Columbia -- some following the football team to Knoxville, Tenn., where the Gamecocks lost to the University of Tennessee, 27-24, in overtime; others heading east to the Atlantic coast to enjoy one of the last reliably warm weekends of the year.

Thirteen students stayed in a two-story raised vacation home in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., a quiet vacation town with a year-round population of about 500. The house was owned by the family of Katherine Auman, a pharmacy student who survived the blaze, according to Mayor Debbie Smith.

The fire there was reported just after 7 a.m., and the local fire department -- made up of volunteers and professionals -- arrived within five minutes. But Smith said the heat and flames were too intense for them to enter the house right away.

According to numerous reports, at least one student jumped from the stilt-raised house to a canal below. That student survived.

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is leading an inquiry, aided by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A cause of the fire has not been determined, but “no one’s used the word arson,” ATF spokesman Earl Woodham said. Smith said investigators thought the fire might have started on a back porch.

On Monday morning, flags around the beach town were flying at half-staff. Smith said they would remain that way for seven days, in honor of the seven students who died.

“We’ve had fires before, but nothing of this magnitude, and nothing where we’ve had this loss of life,” she said.

“It’s been devastating to this small community.”

In Columbia, the news darkened what was to have been a lighthearted Sunday. In the morning, faux talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who grew up in South Carolina, visited the Horseshoe, the open space in the center of campus. He played up his presidential bid, encouraging the children of the state to dress like him for the day.

A few hours later, a reporter for the student paper, Katie Jones, was calling the friends of the dead.

“Stephen Colbert is pretty much my hero,” she wrote that afternoon on the paper’s fire blog, Courage Under Fire (https://dgcourage.wordpress.com). “I was ELATED to see him this morning on the Horseshoe. Now, I can barely remember what he said.”

On Monday evening, hundreds of students gathered at the student center for a candlelight vigil. They clustered around seven wreaths and prayed. Then the Greeks walked back to their houses in silence.

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Times researcher Lynn Marshall contributed to this report.