NORTH COUNTY -- For Santa Fe Christian School graduate Sarah Munoz of Encinitas, the universe shifted Monday when a gunman shot and killed 32 of her Virginia Tech classmates.

"Things are never going to be the same," Munoz said Monday during a telephone interview from her apartment near the university. "You think you are safe, but you are never really safe.

"There is a whole sense of security that is gone now."

The 20-year-old was on campus when she learned of the early-morning shootings but returned to her apartment in the city of Blacksburg, Va., home to the 26,000-student university.

Munoz is in the second year of a volleyball scholarship. About the time of the first shootings, she was at a gym across the street from the dormitory where the first two killings occurred. She left with a friend at one point to get a cup of coffee.

"When I came back, I saw all these cop cars lined up," she said.

Two hours after the dormitory shooting was reported, dozens of other students were killed and wounded in a different area of the 2,600-acre campus. The school is known for its engineering curriculum and a strong football program.

She immediately called her mother, Lindy Munoz of Encinitas, to let her know that she was all right. Then she began worrying about her teammates, the 2005 high school graduate said.

"It's just scary the thought that we might know somebody," she said.

She later learned all were OK.

As she spoke, the blare of a television newscast could be heard in the background.

"My heart goes out to the families," she said.

It's times like these that her Christian faith serves as a support, she added.

"It's something to hold onto," she said.

Her mother said that her first reaction was relief and thankfulness that she got the news of the shootings directly from her daughter. Now Lindy Munoz' concerns are for the families of those who died.

"What their parents must be going through, those parents who are getting the those phone calls that it's their kid -- I am just grieving for them," she said.

Robert Stavros, a Poway resident and former Virginia Tech faculty member, said he is worried about former colleagues and co-workers at the school whose athletic teams are known as the Hokies.

"It's like a ton of bricks," said Stavros, who graduated from Virginia Tech in the mid-1980s. "I don't know where to go, what to say. I don't know how the universe is ever going to be the way it was."

Stavros said this is the kind of tragedy that he would expect at a big city university, "not an idyllic campus in farming country in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains."

Stavros used to work in the engineering building where the second outbreak of shootings occurred.

Likewise, Sarah Munoz has classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the same building.

"I never want to step foot in that building again," she said. "I just can't wait for the school year to end." Virginia Tech's school year ends in mid-May.

Santa Fe Christian's Diane Pascua was Munoz' high school volleyball coach for four years. As soon as she heard about the shootings, she called Munoz.

"All I wanted was to hear her voice," she said.

One of Munoz' older sisters, Rachel, is a student at the University of Miami and was planning to take a one-year internship in Virginia Tech's athletic department, her mother said.

After talking with her, Lindy Munoz said that plan is now uncertain.

"Rachel said, 'Now, I'm afraid to go there,' " she said.

She said she wasn't surprised that the nation's worst mass shooting would happen on a university campus in a small town nestled in the mountains, she said.

"It can happen anywhere," she said. "Maybe there are no small towns anymore."

Contact staff writer William Finn Bennett at (760) 740-5426 or wbennett@nctimes.com.