LATROBE, Pa. -- Before Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Canaan Severin watched video of a car ramming that killed one and injured 19 others less than a block away from his favorite place to eat breakfast, he reveled in Charlottesville and the University of Virginia.
He still does.
"I just think it's such a wonderful place, a beautiful place," Severin said. "Why? Just like, why there? You know?"
The Charlottesville city council voted in March to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Right-wing blogger Jason Kessler organized a "Unite the Right" rally on Saturday of white supremacists groups protesting the decision to remove the statue.
A Friday night tiki torch-lit march of hundreds, according to The Daily Progress, ended with white supremacist protesters chanting "blood and soil" - a Nazi policy slogan - and swinging torches at counter-protesters. Saturday's rally, planned for Emancipation Park, formerly known as Lee Park, was declared an unlawful assembly as members of the Ku Klux Klan, "alt-right," white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups clashed with counter-protesting activists and anti-fascists downtown, according to multiple reporters.
Severin, who graduated from UVA in 2016 and is black, was surprised to receive texts from friends asking if he and others he knew were OK when a Steelers' team flight landed after Friday's preseason opener against the New York Giants. He had dropped a couple passes, but finished the game healthy.
By the time his weekend ended, Severin had scrambled to check if his former teammates and friends in Charlottesville were safe. He found himself without answers to familiar questions in a Sunday morning conversation with Steelers teammates about the events in Charlottesville that left 1 dead and at least 34 injured, according to multiple reports.
One of Severin's best friends and former roommates and teammates, Jackson Matteo, lives in The Range, a prestigious residence hall designed by Thomas Jefferson that overlooks the lawn leading up to UVA's iconic rotunda.
"It's very prestigious to live on the lawn where they had the tiki torches. It's very prestigious to live on the lawn. That's the oldest, like Thomas Jefferson dorms, where the professors used to live," Severin said. "It's an honor to live there. I mean you got to be cum laude to live on the lawn and the master's students live on the range. And he lives on the range, like the back side. So all that is happening right outside his window.
Matteo, a UVA football graduate assistant, seemed all right when Severin talked to him on Saturday. The scene Matteo described and Severin watched online shocked them, but his friend was fine.
When then-Cavaliers head coach Mike London recruited Severin, he tried to sell the three-to-four-star receiver on UVA's academics and how they could help him in post-football life. Seeing campus and Charlottesville helped seal his commitment.
"In my mind it was like 'Damn, this place is kind of beautiful,' especially coming from the North I wanted to -- you know, that's the four years in your life where you can kind of make a decision to be somewhere and I thought that was a great opportunity," Severin said.
College, though, brought realizations about the school, the land the university was built on and the man, Jefferson, who once owned it.
Severin didn't know UVA hadn't admitted black students until the 1950s or that Jefferson was a slave owner who, according to The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, fathered six children into slavery.
"So when that comes into play it's like 'Man. I didn't really think about that until I was really here.' But I mean 'I don't know,'" Severin said.
"I'm like 'Well, dang. What can I do?,'" Severin said. "What could I do? I'm just like 'Hey.' I don't know man."
He didn't know what to do then, beyond trying to get his degree and make the NFL. He completed the former, but he was still trying to make the league on Sunday when his teammates asked him about Charlottesville, knowing he went to college there.
On Saturday, all Severin felt he could do was check on his friends and former teammates. UVA canceled its annual "Meet the Team" event. A state of emergency was declared. Severin was pleased to hear Cavaliers head coach Bronco Mendenhall was enforcing the same directions Severin was giving to people he knew in Charlottesville: stay away from the protests and counter-protests downtown, it's not safe for you there.
Mendenhall, Severin said, kept his players in the McCue Center.
Severin gushes about his alma mater in the lingo of UVA students and alumni, calling freshmen "first years," the campus "the grounds" and what would be considered a quad most anywhere else, "the lawn." He rattles off the names of restaurants around or in the Downtown Mall where Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others were hurt by a James Alex Fields Jr., who is accused of second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and failing to stop at a deadly wreck, according to multiple reports.
Yet on Saturday when he thought of The Nook, where he, his teammates, his coach and his coach's wife and kids used to eat breakfast, it wasn't in recognition, but in sadness that someone could be -- and would be -- dying there.
"Seeing all that happen right there is like 'Man, like dang, people are right there? There's a war, right there, where I would just go when I was there,'" Severin said. "Like last month I was over there."
When Severin checked in with Matteo on Sunday, his friend told him he could see SWAT teams on the rotunda. Severin couldn't imagine the site any more than he could explain Charlottesville to his Steeler teammates on Sunday morning.
They talked about LeBron James' tweet criticizing, yet not naming, President Donald Trump.
"This is what you wanted. And especially with the [former] KKK leader [David Duke] out there in Charlottesville, like I don't know why Trump is saying that 'This is sad, sad.' It's like 'Yo, this is what we thought you wanted us to do,'" Severin said. "It's like, damn. That is kind of unbelievable."
The fact that his friends were safe made him happy. Watching people get maimed around some of his favorite college hangouts on Saturday did not.
Yet in the same way he struggled for words or actions when he learned more about the man his favorite college was founded by, he had no idea what more to do on Saturday or Sunday, beyond going back to work.
He practiced Sunday from about 2:55 p.m. to 5:15 p.m., hit a blocking dummy on a side field afterward and signed autographs from 5:44 p.m. to 5:58 p.m.
There weren't, he felt, any other options.
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