BLACKSBURG, Va. — Ten years after a mentally ill student fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech, survivors and families of the slain returned to campus to honor the lives that were lost that day.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, widely known as Virginia Tech, held a series of events Sunday to mark the anniversary of the deadly campus shooting on April 16, 2007. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine were among the thousands of people on the Blacksburg campus for the solemn occasion.

Kaine, who was governor at the time of the shooting, said he vividly remembers the horrors of that day, but has also grown close to many of the survivors and the victims’ families.

“We’re going with a lot of different emotions, but we wouldn’t be anywhere else,” said Kaine.

The shooting at Virginia Tech was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history. A massacre that claimed 49 lives at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub surpassed it last year. The 2007 attack forced schools across the country to rethink campus security and reignited the debate over gun control.

On Sunday morning, McAuliffe and his daughter participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at 9:43 a.m. — the time when Seung-Hui Cho’s rampage in Norris Hall began.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families, survivors and the entire Virginia Tech community who have shown incredible strength and resilience while facing unimaginable grief,” McAuliffe said. “We should ... come together to ensure an incident of this magnitude never happens again in our Commonwealth.”

Kaine said April 16, 2007 remains “the worst day of my life.”

After Kaine’s remarks, short biographies of each of the victims were read aloud.