April 17, 2007
32 Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus
By JOHN M. BRODER
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 16 — Thirty-two people were killed and at least 15 injured in two shooting attacks at Virginia Polytechnic Institute Monday in three hours of horror and chaos at this sprawling southwestern Virginia campus.
According to the police and witnesses, some victims were lined up in classrooms and executed with handguns while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.
It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.
As of Monday evening, only one of the Virginia Tech victims had been officially identified. Police officials said they were not yet ready to identify the gunman or even say whether there was more than one, saying only that the gunman in the second attack took his own life after wreaking devastation on this campus of 36,000 students, faculty members and staff.
The university’s president, Charles W. Steger, expressed his “horror and disbelief and sorrow” at what he described as a tragedy of monumental proportions. But questions were immediately raised about whether university officials had responded adequately to the shootings.
There was a two-hour gap between the first shootings, when two people were killed, and the second, when 30 died. The university did not send a campuswide alert until the second incident had begun.
Mr. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first incident was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a “domestic” dispute.
“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.
President Bush sent his condolences to the families of the victims and the university community. “Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning,” Mr. Bush said. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.”
The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to police at 7:15 from West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory, as students were getting ready for classes or were on their way there.
Students said a gunman had gone room to room looking for his ex-girlfriend. He killed a woman and a male student at the residence hall, identified as Ryan Clark, a senior from Augusta, Ga.Though two students were dead and their killer not apprehended, the university did not alert the campus until two hours later. That was when the gunman — assuming it was the same person, which was not certain — had moved to Norris Hall, a classroom and engineering building on the other end of campus. It was there that he killed 30 more victims, the police said, before killing himself. .
One student described barricading himself in a classroom with other students and hearing dozens of gunshots nearby. Someone tried to force his way into the classroom and fired two shots through the door that did not hit anyone, the student said.
Scott L. Hendricks, an associate professor of engineering, was in his office on the third floor of Norris Hall at about 9:45 a.m. when he heard 40 to 50 shots from what sounded like the second floor. Mr. Hendricks said he had called 911, but the police were already on the way.
The police surrounded the building and he barricaded the door to his office. After about an hour, the police broke down his door and ordered him to flee.
“When I left, I was one of the last to leave,” Mr. Hendricks said. “I had no idea of the magnitude of the event.”
According to the college newspaper, The Collegiate Times, many of the deaths took place in a German class in Norris Hall.
“He was just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit,” one student in the class, Erin Sheehan, told the newspaper. “He wore a tan button-up vest and this black vest — maybe it was for ammo or something.”
Ms. Sheehan added: “I saw bullets hit people’s bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don’t know maybe from shock from the pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured.”
Heavily armed local and state police officers swarmed onto campus. Video shown on local stations showed them with rifles at the ready as students ran or sought cover and a freakish snow swirled in heavy winds. Police evacuated students and faculty, many of them to local hotels. A Montgomery County school official said that all schools throughout the county were being shut down.
Many parents and students questioned the university’s response to the two fatal shootings in Ambler Johnston Hall, suggesting that more aggressive action could have prevented the later and deadlier attack.
“As a parent, I am totally outraged,” said Fran Bernhards of Sterling, Va., whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Tech. “I would like to know why the university did not immediately shut down.”
Kirsten Bernhards, 18, said she and countless other students had no idea that a shooting had occurred when she left her dorm room in O’Shaughnessy Hall shortly before 10 a.m., more than two hours after the first shootings.
“I was leaving for my 10:10 film class,” she said. “I had just locked the door and my neighbor said, ‘Did you check your email?’ “
The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent shooter. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.
Ms. Bernhards said she walked toward her class, preoccupied with an upcoming exam and listening to music on her iPod. On the way, she said, she heard loud cracks, and only later concluded they had been gunshots from the second round of shootings. But even at that point, many students were walking around the campus with little sense of alarm.
It was only when Ms. Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized something had gone wrong.
“I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris,” she recalled.
Virginia Tech police Chief Wendell Flinchum said the gunman shot himself inside Norris Hall and defended the university’s decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying their information at the time indicated that it was an isolated incident and that the shooter left campus.
At an evening press conference, Chief Flinchum would not say that the same gunman was responsible for the shootings in the dormitory and in the classroom two hours later. He said he was awaiting ballistics tests and other laboratory results until declaring that the same person carried out both attacks.
He said that accounts from students at the dorm had led police to a “person of interest” who knew one or both of the victims there. Police were interviewing him off campus at the time of the mass shootings at Norris Hall. Mr. Flinchum said that officers had not arrested the man.
“You can second-guess all day. We acted on the best information we had,” Mr. Flinchum said. “We can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year.”
Classroom buildings are not locked and dormitories are open throughout the day but require a key card for entry at night, university officials said.
Chief Flinchum confirmed that police found some of the Norris Hall classroom doors chained shut from the inside, which is not a normal practice. Some of the people hurt in Norris Hall were injured leaping from windows to escape.
Elaine Goss’ son, Alec Calhoun, a junior engineering major, jumped out of a second-story window as the shooter entered his classroom in Norris Hall. She said she first spoke to her son at about 9:30 a.m. “I couldn’t understand him. It was like gibberish,” she said. “It took a while to figure out shootings, lots of shootings, and that his whole class had jumped out the window.”
He landed on his back, and “We made him go to the emergency room,” she said. He went to Montgomery Regional, where two fellow engineering students, had been taken with gunshot wounds. “I think they were just wounded,” Ms. Goss said. “He’s counting on them being just wounded.”
Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said. Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.
“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.” He demanded a thorough investigation into the provenance of the weapon or weapons used in Monday’s rampage.
At Ambler Johnston Hall, where the first shootings took place, many if not most students had left and those who remained stayed close to their rooms by late afternoon. Jessica Paulson and Tamara Fetters, freshmen, were on the 4th floor, the same as the shootings but on the opposite, east wing of the dorm.
“You could hear two shots,” one followed shortly by a second, recounted Ms. Paulson, who was preparing to go to an 8 a.m. Neither she nor most of the other students nearby understood what had happened until several hours later, and Ms. Paulson went off to her class.
As students learned later in the day, a gunman had shot two people. The first was a female student whose name has not been disclosed. The second victim, according to several students, was Ryan Clark, a resident advisor on the fourth floor of the dorm. Mr. Clark, a senior who went by the nickname “Stack”‘ on Facebook.com, was well liked and a member of the university’s marching band, the Marching Virginians, according to students in the dorm. A senior from Augusta, Ga., Mr. Clark was studying biology and English and had hoped to pursue a doctorate in psychology with a focus on cognitive neuroscience. “He was a cool guy,” said one fourth-floor resident.
The event unfolded in an age of instant messaging, cell phone cameras, Internet blogs and social networking sites like Facebook, as students who were locked in their classrooms and dormitories passed on news and rumors.
In one cell phone video shown repeatedly on television networks, the sound of dozens of shots can be heard and students can be seen running from Norris Hall. The student who made the video, Jamal Al Barghouti, a graduate student who was born in the Palestinian territories, said that he was already on edge because of two bomb threats on campus last week. “I knew this was something way more serious,” he told CNN.
The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to lock down the campus. In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The atmosphere in the dorm and on campus was desolate and preternaturally quiet by Monday afternoon. Students gathered in small groups, some crying, some talking quietly and others consoling each other.
Reporting was contributed by Sarah Abruzzese, Edmund L. Andrews, Neela Banerjee, Micah Cohen, Shaila Dewan, Cate Doty, Manny Fernandez, Brenda Goodman, Michael Mather, Marc Santora and Matthew L. Wald.
