By Jason Islas
Staff Writer

June 11, 2013 -- A piece of paper hangs on the front door of the Santa Monica College library announcing that the building would be closed until June 18.

A few hundred feet away, in the quad, students are poring over books, clicking away on laptops and venting their anxieties about the tests they’d just taken or were getting ready to take.

A group of young men pass by talking loudly about how they plan to celebrate the end of another semester at Santa Monica College.

Except for a fleet of news vans and two pop-up memorials -- with flowers, candles and notes scrawled in chalk -- there was little indication Monday that four days earlier, the usual hum of students hurrying about their business, preparing for tests and rushing between classes abruptly gave way to screams and gunfire.

And few may have been aware that the groundskeeper who tended the tidy lawns at the quad, or the smiling woman who collected cans around the library, had been among the victims of 24-year-old gunman John Zawahri, who after shooting dead his father and brother stormed on campus and took three lives before police gunned him down inside the college library.

Photos by Jason Islas

“We're back to normal,” said Don Girard, SMC's senior director of Institutional Communications. “We're back to operating.”

There was a line snaking around the Administration Building, where students waited to sign up for next semester's classes and, nearby, several students talked excitedly about graduation, which will go ahead as planned Tuesday.

“Everything seems to be going on as usual,” said Maura, a second-year SMC student. She had stopped in front of a collection of balloons, photographs and messages scrawled on heart-shaped pieces of red paper -- a make-shift homage to the three members of the SMC community who were shot Friday.

“Life goes on, but I personally don't feel very good,” she said. “Being here was a different experience altogether.”

Maura was in a class in the Cayton Center -- directly across from the library where Zawarhi died in a shoot out with police -- and heard the shots ring out. She was forced to wait out the ensuing events with other students, not knowing what was going on outside.

“Guns and screaming,” Maura said. “It's not the same as in the movies.”

Though the rest of campus is open, the library is still closed. The College has made concerted efforts to insure that students get back the books and bags and computers left behind when they fled the gunman Friday.

“People were extremely relieved to get back their personal belongings,” said Girard, adding that some items remain to be claimed. Students can do that through the SMC website, he said.

Lee Peterson, an instructional specialist for the Academic Computing Department, was also in the Cayton Center Friday where he hunkered down with nearly 50 students until they were eventually evacuated by a Culver City Police unit.

“People are responding as well as can be expected,” he said.

That's partly because the college has offered constant support from counselors since almost immediately after the incident took place. There is a team of six to 12 counselors at any given time on campus, Girard said.

“That effort is continuing all day during the day, at least through this week and possibly longer as needed,” he said. “The staff of the counseling center has been extraordinary in their ability to respond as quickly as they have.”

Nadine, a native of Cameroon and a student at SMC for the past year and a half, had just come from a session. “It helped a lot,” she said. “I wasn't sure if I had the courage to come back to campus.”

Although she wasn't on campus Friday, Nadine said she had friends who were, though none of them were hurt. “I was almost crying to see what was happening,” she said.

Nadine stood in front of the memorial across from the library with her friend, Rose, a second-year psychology student. “I feel sad for the people who were affected,” Rose said.

“Walking past this makes me kind of sad,” she said, referring to the cluster of balloons, candles and notes serving as a memorial.

With the library closed, Rose said she can't get to the book she needs to study for her final. “I'll just have to find some other means of coming by the information,” she said.

For some, the shock of instant terror in a place as quiet as Santa Monica only added to the trauma.

“It hit so close to home,” said SMC student Bradley Wellington, who graduated from Santa Monica High School in 2008, two years after the gunman. “This is my backyard.”

Police are still not sure what prompted Zawarhi go on a violent rampage that started less than a mile away at his father's house in a sleepy corner of Santa Monica's Pico Neighborhood and ended on the main campus of a college of some 34,000 students.

The house, where police found the burned bodies of Zawarhi's father, Samir, and his brother, Chris, is boarded up now, the windows blackened by smoke, the low, white fence around the yard collapsed in most places.

In the heavily-shaded and overgrown front yard sits a sign that reads “R.I.P. Chris,” the centerpiece of a memorial decorated with votive candles and bottles of liquor.

“Things like this don't happen here,” said Peterson, who has been with the college nearly two decades.