Virginia ? Kevin Granata was the kind of professor whose door was always open to his students.

When he heard gunfire Monday, he didn’t run away. He found some frightened students and brought them back to the safety of his office. He ventured out again.

The students lived. Granata was shot in the head and died.

On Friday, in a crowded Presbyterian church in Blacksburg, friends, family, students and colleagues memorialized a man whose life was lost to senseless violence because he put others before himself.

Hundreds attended Granata’s memorial service, so many that the crowd spilled out of the chapel. The audience was a cross-section of the small college town: students in Virginia Tech sweatshirts, mothers holding crying babies, teenagers in Boy Scout uniforms, professors dressed in dark gray suits. Flower arrangements in the Hokies’ colors – maroon and orange – adorned the inside of the church.

Granata, 45, was a professor of biomechanics.

He was a man, they said, devoted to his three young children – Alex, Eric and Ellen – and his wife, Linda. He was a compassionate friend and mentor who reminded his academic counterparts that one could become a top specialist and still have a full life, as well as a sense of humor.