BY JENNIE L. ILUSTRE

WASHINGTON — Jose Antonio Vargas, 27, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news, sharing the award with other Washington Post reporters for a package of nine stories, two of which he wrote.

Interviewed at the Post hours after the awards were announced in this US capital Monday, an elated Vargas said, "This is great!"

"This is a happy day," he said, adding the Post won six Pulitzers, the most it has won in a year.

Internet-savvy Vargas wrote two front-page stories on the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

Standing behind the mural that shows photos of the team that toppled President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal – legendary editor Ben Bradlee and reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward – Vargas recalled how he got his first story.

"I was lucky to get an interview with one of the eyewitnesses. I found this eyewitness on facebook.com. I got him on the phone, we talked for about 25 minutes, and he was the only eyewitness we had on the story, so it was a critical part of it," he said,

Another story he wrote was on how the Virginia Tech students were using the Internet "to let each other know what was going on, because it was chaotic" at that time.

Vargas joined the Post in 2004, two days after graduating from the San Francisco State University in California. He had interned at the paper in 2003 while still a student.

He said that the Post "had toppled a president," and that added to his elation at winning the Pulitzer.

He thanked Leonila Salinas, whom he fondly calls Lola Leoning, who brought him up in Mountain View, California, together with her husband Ted, who died over a year ago, and his Uncle Roland. Vargas, born in Antipolo, came to the US when he was 12.

He said, "I love her very, very much. I wish she could understand what this means. She wanted me to be an accountant, an engineer or a doctor, something like that."

"Now that I’m covering the presidential campaign, and appearing on CNN and MSNBC, she thinks I’m a real reporter," he added.

He also cited the principal and superintendent at Mountain View High School, "who were like second parents to me." They helped him get a scholarship from a venture capitalist who financed his college studies.