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Virginia Tech Killer Identified
NewsMax.com Wires Tuesday, April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- A Virginia Tech senior from South Korea was behind the
massacre of at least 30 people locked inside a campus building in the
deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, the university said
Tuesday.
The Virginia Tech Police Department identified him as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a
senior in the English department.
Police also said ballistics tests showed one of the guns found after a
deadly shooting at Virginia Tech was used in both shootings, at the doom at
the classroom building.
The bloodbath ended with the gunman's suicide, bringing the death toll from
two separate shootings - first at a dorm, then in a classroom building - to
33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with
unspeakable tragedy.
President Bush planned to attend a memorial service Tuesday afternoon at the
university, the White House said, and Gov. Tim Kaine was flying back to
Virginia from Tokyo 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."
At an evening news conference, Police Chief Wendell Flinchum refused to
dismiss the possibility that a co-conspirator or second shooter was
involved. He said police had interviewed a male who was a "person of
interest" in the dorm shooting and who knew one of the victims, but he
declined to give details.
"I'm not saying there's a gunman on the loose," Flinchum said. Ballistics
tests will help explain what happened, he said.
Some students bitterly complained that the first e-mail warning arrived more
than two hours after the first shots.
"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of
action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the
seventh floor of the dorm.
Steger emphasized that the university closed off the dorm after the first
attack and decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means to spread
the word, but said that with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing
in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out.
He said that before the e-mail was sent, the university began telephoning
resident advisers in the dorms and sent people to knock on doors. Students
were warned to stay inside and away from the windows.
"We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time.
You don't have hours to reflect on it," Steger said.
The 9:26 e-mail had few details: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber
Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are
investigating."
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,
all of them stable, 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.
Previously, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history was a rampage that
took place in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles
Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the
28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before he was shot to death
by police.
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 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."
Virginia Tech Killer Identified
NewsMax.com Wires Tuesday, April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- A Virginia Tech senior from South Korea was behind the
massacre of at least 30 people locked inside a campus building in the
deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, the university said
Tuesday.
The Virginia Tech Police Department identified him as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a
senior in the English department.
Police also said ballistics tests showed one of the guns found after a
deadly shooting at Virginia Tech was used in both shootings, at the doom at
the classroom building.
The bloodbath ended with the gunman's suicide, bringing the death toll from
two separate shootings - first at a dorm, then in a classroom building - to
33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with
unspeakable tragedy.
President Bush planned to attend a memorial service Tuesday afternoon at the
university, the White House said, and Gov. Tim Kaine was flying back to
Virginia from Tokyo 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."
At an evening news conference, Police Chief Wendell Flinchum refused to
dismiss the possibility that a co-conspirator or second shooter was
involved. He said police had interviewed a male who was a "person of
interest" in the dorm shooting and who knew one of the victims, but he
declined to give details.
"I'm not saying there's a gunman on the loose," Flinchum said. Ballistics
tests will help explain what happened, he said.
Some students bitterly complained that the first e-mail warning arrived more
than two hours after the first shots.
"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of
action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the
seventh floor of the dorm.
Steger emphasized that the university closed off the dorm after the first
attack and decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means to spread
the word, but said that with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing
in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out.
He said that before the e-mail was sent, the university began telephoning
resident advisers in the dorms and sent people to knock on doors. Students
were warned to stay inside and away from the windows.
"We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time.
You don't have hours to reflect on it," Steger said.
The 9:26 e-mail had few details: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber
Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are
investigating."
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,
all of them stable, 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.
Previously, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history was a rampage that
took place in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles
Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the
28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before he was shot to death
by police.
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 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."
