Virginia Tech police say a South Korean student shot and killed 32 people Monday at two buildings on campus.
The shooter was identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old legal immigrant living in Harper Hall, a dorm near the residence hall where two people were killed Monday morning.
Police say Cho took his own life. Two handguns were found at the scene of the mass shooting at Norris Hall, and police say one of those guns was used in the first shooting.
Virginia State Police Superintendent Steve Flaherty said it’s reasonable to assume Cho was responsible for all the shootings but police are trying to confirm that.
Police said they found bodies in four classrooms and stairwells in Norris Hall, where most of the shootings took place and where Cho took his own life.
“We know there were a number of heroic events that took place,” Flaherty said. He did not elaborate.
All of the deceased have been taken to the medical examiner’s office in Roanoke for examination and identification. The victim's names were not to be released until all were identified and their families notified.
Cho’s family has been contacted, officials said.
No possible motive for the shootings, the worst on an American campus ever, was provided by authorities, who called Cho a loner.
Cho was in his senior year as an English major at Virginia Tech.
A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, said Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol
The Virginia State Police Web site at http://www.vsp.state.va.us/Firearms.shtm addresses the issue of whether one needs to have U.S. citizenship to be eligible to purchase a firearm.
The site says: A buyer who is not a citizen of the United States must have lawful alien status and must establish that he or she is a resident of a state by providing a valid photo identification and documentation such as a utility bill or lease agreement which would establish that he or she has resided in the state for at least 90 days prior to the date of the sale.
Congress has passed prohibitions that apply to "any alien in the United States in a non-immigrant status" with certain exceptions and a waiver process. Contact the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives if you have questions about these regulations.
Meanwhile, University President Charles Steger and university spokesman Jeff Douglas said officials don’t believe another gunman is at large, but they aren’t certain that one shooter was responsible for both attacks.
President George W. Bush planned to attend a memorial service Tuesday afternoon at the university, the White House said, and Gov. Tim Kaine was flying back from Tokyo to Virginia for the 2 p.m. convocation.
The first deadly attack, at a dormitory around 7:15 a.m., left two people dead. But some students said they didn’t get their first warning about a danger on campus until two hours later, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then the second attack had begun.
Two students told NBC’s “Today” show they were unaware of the dorm shooting when they walked into Norris Hall for a German class where the gunman later opened fire.
Derek O’Dell, his arm in a cast after being shot, described a shooter who fired away in “eerily silence” with “no specific target — just taking out anybody he could.”
After the gunman left the room, students could hear him shooting other people down the hall. O’Dell said he and other students barricaded the door so the shooter couldn’t get back in — though he later tried.
“After he couldn’t get the door open he tried shooting it open ... but the gunshots were blunted by the door,” O’Dell said.
A federal law enforcement official said Tuesday he had been told by other federal law enforcement officials that the two guns recovered in the shooting had had their serial numbers scraped off. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced.
The slayings left people of this once-peaceful mountain town and the university at its heart praying for the victims and struggling to find order in a tragedy of such unspeakable horror it defies reason.
“For Ryan and Emily and for those whose names we do not know,” one woman pleaded in a church service Monday night.
Another mourner added: “For parents near and far who wonder at a time like this, ’Is my child safe?’ ”
That question promises to haunt Blacksburg long after Monday’s attacks. Investigators offered no motive, and the gunman’s name was not immediately released.
The shooting began about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory where two people died.
Police were still investigating around 9:15 a.m., when a gunman wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus.
At least 26 people were taken to hospitals after the second attack, some seriously injured. Many found themselves trapped after someone, apparently the shooter, chained and locked Norris Hall doors from the inside.
Students jumped from windows, and students and faculty carried away some of the wounded without waiting for ambulances to arrive.
SWAT team members with helmets, flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed over the campus. A student used his cell-phone camera to record the sound of bullets echoing through a stone building.
Inside Norris, the attack began with a thunderous sound from Room 206 — “what sounded like an enormous hammer,” said Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior who was in a solid mechanics lecture in a classroom next door.
Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks to make hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said.
“I must’ve been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last,” said Calhoun, of Waynesboro, Va. He landed in a bush and ran.
Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at his professor, who had stayed behind, apparently to prevent the gunman from opening the door.
The instructor was killed, Calhoun said.
Erin Sheehan, who was in the German class near Calhoun’s room, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of about two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.
She said the gunman “was just a normal-looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout-type outfit. He wore a tan button-up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something.”
The gunman first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the class, another student, Trey Perkins, told the Washington Post. The gunman was about 19 years old and had a “very serious but very calm look on his face,” he said.
“Everyone hit the floor at that moment,” said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va., a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. “And the shots seemed like it lasted forever.”
Until Monday, the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history was in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, when George Hennard plowed his pickup truck into a Luby’s Cafeteria and shot 23 people to death, then himself.
Nine students remained hospitalized Tuesday at Montgomery Regional Hospital in the Virginia Tech shooting, all of them in stable condition, CEO Scott Hill said. Two others had been transferred to other hospitals with a Level I trauma center.
Their families “are by the bedside, which is a good thing,” Hill said.
Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem had three remaining patients, all in stable condition, with one expected to be discharged later Tuesday, Hill said. That hospital originally had five patients, another hospital initially had four, and Montgomery was initially sent 17, one of whom died en route, Hill said.
The massacre Monday took place almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High bloodbath near Littleton, Colo. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.
Founded in 1872, Virginia Tech is nestled in southwestern Virginia, about 160 miles west of Richmond. With more than 25,000 full-time students, it has the state’s largest full-time student population. The school is best known for its engineering school and its powerhouse Hokies football team.
Police said there had been bomb threats on campus over the past two weeks but that they had not determined whether they were linked to the shootings.
It was second time in less than a year that the campus was closed because of gunfire.
Last August, the opening day of classes was canceled when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled to the Tech area. A sheriff’s deputy was killed just off campus. The accused gunman, William Morva, faces capital murder charges.
Among the dead in Monday's shooting were professors Liviu Librescu and Kevin Granata, said Ishwar K. Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department. Librescu, an Israeli, was born in Romania and was known internationally for his research in aeronautical engineering, Puri wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.
Granata and his students researched muscle and reflex response and robotics.
Puri called him one of the top five biomechanics researchers in the country working on movement dynamics in cerebral palsy.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview, citing e-mail he said students had sent to his family. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
Also killed was Ryan Clark, a student from Martinez, Ga., who had several majors and carried a 4.0 grade-point average, said Vernon Collins, coroner in Columbia County, Ga. He was a resident assistant at Ambler Johnson Hall, the dorm where the first shootings took place.
Gregory Walton, a 25-year-old friend of Clark’s who graduated last year, said he feared the nightmare had just begun.
“I knew when the number was so large that I would know at least one person on that list,” Walton said. “I don’t want to look at that list. I don’t want to.
“It’s just, it’s going to be horrible, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070417/NEWS07/70417005&imw=Y
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