Gunman in Virginia shootings identified as South Korean
By John M. Broder and Christine Hauser
Published: April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Virginia: The gunman who killed 32 people and himself on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute on Monday was identified Tuesday as a South Korean student who lived in a dormitory on campus.
Law enforcement authorities said the name of the gunman was Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States. He was described as an English major in his senior year at Virginia Tech.
Investigators were trying to sift through what Colonel W. Steve Flaherty, the state police superintendent, described as a "horrific crime scene" at Norris Hall, where the shooting had caused tremendous chaos and panic. A 9-millimeter handgun and 22-caliber handgun were recovered from Norris Hall.
Personal belongings were strewn about on the second floor. Victims were found in four classrooms and a stairwell.
"We know that there were a number of heroic events took place," he said.
The university's president, Charles Steger, said Tuesday that the campus would host a convocation attended by President George W. Bush later in the day. Classes have been canceled for the week to allow students to grieve. Norris Hall will be closed completely for the semester.
"I want to assure you that we are doing everything possible to move forward," he said.
Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 wounded in two shooting attacks at the university on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.
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.
The police and witnesses said some victims were executed 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.
Survivors told stories of compelling drama.
Zach Petkewicz, a student, said he barricaded a classroom door to keep the gunman out, and the gunman shot through the door.
"Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on," he said on CNN. "He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn't get it in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That's when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out."
Petkewicz said the gunman reloaded and "kept firing down the hall."
Joseph Cacioppo, a surgeon at Montgomery Regional Hospital who treated some of the wounded, said on CNN that the injuries showed that the gunman was "brutal." None of the wounded that he treated had "less than three to four wounds in them," he said.
At least 17 of the wounded were still in the hospital Tuesday morning.
Bush sent his condolences on Monday to the families of the victims and the university community. "Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning," Bush said. "When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community."
A university spokeswoman, Jenn Lazenby, said the university was looking into whether two bomb threats at the campus - one last Friday, the other earlier this month - might be related to the shootings.
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 a gunman stalked through the halls of an engineering building across campus, shooting at professors and students in classrooms and hallways, firing dozens of rounds and killing 30. Officials said he then shot himself so badly in the face that he could not be identified.
The university did not send a campus-wide alert until the second attack had begun, even though the gunman in the first had not been apprehended.
In a news conference Tuesday, authorities said ballistic tests showed that one of the two weapons was used in both Norris Hall and the other location, West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory.
State, local and federal investigators were piecing together evidence from the crime scene. Flaherty of the state police superintendent, said that it was "reasonable" to assume that Cho was the gunman in both places, but there was no evidence yet with certainty that the same shooter was involved in both the dormitory and the classroom building.
There was also no evidence at this point of an accomplice, but authorities did not rule it out. "We are exploring whether or not there was someone that may or may not have helped Cho at any point during his planning or during his execution of this particular event," he said.
A number of people were being questioned. The Virginia Tech police chief, Wendell Flinchum, said that an acquaintance of a female victim killed at the dormitory had been stopped in his vehicle off campus for questioning when the shootings at Norris Hall were reported. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first attack was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a "domestic" dispute.
"We had one shooting early in the morning that initially, and we don't know the answer to this, appeared to be a domestic fight, perhaps a murder-suicide," Steger said. "It was characterized by our security people as being contained to that dorm room."
"As we were working through what we were going to do to deal with that, the message came on over the radio that another shooting across campus was taking place, and that's when the large number of people were killed."
Responding to criticism and suggestions that there was a delay between the first shooting and the first e-mail notifying students that something had happened, he said that the first dormitory was immediately closed down after the first incident and surrounded by security guards. Streets were cordoned off and students in the building notified about what was going on, he said.
"We also had to find witnesses because we didn't know what had happened," he said.
Wounded people were sent to the hospital and, based on the interrogation of witnesses, they thought "there was another person involved."
The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to the police at 7:15 from, 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 two people, a senior identified as Ryan Clark, from Augusta, Georgia, and a freshman identified by other students on her floor as Emily Hilscher.
The shootings at the engineering building, Norris Hall, began about 9:45.
Some of the professors who were killed were named. Among them were Liviu Librescu, a Romanian-Israeli who has lived in the United States for several years, and G.V. Loknathan, who was originally from India and became an American citizen after arriving in the United States in 1977.
Scott Hendricks, an associate professor of engineering, was in his office on the third floor when he heard 40 to 50 shots from what sounded like the second floor. 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," 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."
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 clips 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. The police evacuated students and faculty members, taking many of them to local hotels. A Montgomery County school official said 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, Virginia, whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. "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 e-mail?' " The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent gunman. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.
The university's first bulletin warned students to be "cautious." Then, 20 minutes later, at 9:50, a second e-mail warning was sent, saying a gunman was "loose on campus" and telling students to stay in buildings and away from windows. At 10:16, a final message said classes were canceled and advised everyone on campus to stay where they were and lock their doors.
Bernhards recalled walking 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 that 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 Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized something was wrong.
"I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris," she recalled.
Chief Flinchum on Monday defended the university's decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying the information at the time indicated that it was an isolated event and that the attacker had left campus.
Classroom buildings are not locked and dormitories are open throughout the day but require a key card for entry at night, university officials said.
Flinchum confirmed that the 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 there were injured leaping from windows to escape.
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." Students are not allowed to have guns on the campus.
John M. Broder reported from Blacksburg and Christine Hauser from New York. Graham Bowley, Sarah Abruzzese, Edmund L. Andrews, Neela Banerjee, Micah Cohen, Shaila Dewan, Cate Doty, Manny Fernandez, Brenda Goodman, David Johnston, Michael Mather, Marc Santora, Amy Schoenfeld, Archie Tse and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.
Published: April 17, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Virginia: The gunman who killed 32 people and himself on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute on Monday was identified Tuesday as a South Korean student who lived in a dormitory on campus.
Law enforcement authorities said the name of the gunman was Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States. He was described as an English major in his senior year at Virginia Tech.
Investigators were trying to sift through what Colonel W. Steve Flaherty, the state police superintendent, described as a "horrific crime scene" at Norris Hall, where the shooting had caused tremendous chaos and panic. A 9-millimeter handgun and 22-caliber handgun were recovered from Norris Hall.
Personal belongings were strewn about on the second floor. Victims were found in four classrooms and a stairwell.
"We know that there were a number of heroic events took place," he said.
The university's president, Charles Steger, said Tuesday that the campus would host a convocation attended by President George W. Bush later in the day. Classes have been canceled for the week to allow students to grieve. Norris Hall will be closed completely for the semester.
"I want to assure you that we are doing everything possible to move forward," he said.
Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 wounded in two shooting attacks at the university on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.
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.
The police and witnesses said some victims were executed 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.
Survivors told stories of compelling drama.
Zach Petkewicz, a student, said he barricaded a classroom door to keep the gunman out, and the gunman shot through the door.
"Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on," he said on CNN. "He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn't get it in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That's when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out."
Petkewicz said the gunman reloaded and "kept firing down the hall."
Joseph Cacioppo, a surgeon at Montgomery Regional Hospital who treated some of the wounded, said on CNN that the injuries showed that the gunman was "brutal." None of the wounded that he treated had "less than three to four wounds in them," he said.
At least 17 of the wounded were still in the hospital Tuesday morning.
Bush sent his condolences on Monday to the families of the victims and the university community. "Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning," Bush said. "When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community."
A university spokeswoman, Jenn Lazenby, said the university was looking into whether two bomb threats at the campus - one last Friday, the other earlier this month - might be related to the shootings.
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 a gunman stalked through the halls of an engineering building across campus, shooting at professors and students in classrooms and hallways, firing dozens of rounds and killing 30. Officials said he then shot himself so badly in the face that he could not be identified.
The university did not send a campus-wide alert until the second attack had begun, even though the gunman in the first had not been apprehended.
In a news conference Tuesday, authorities said ballistic tests showed that one of the two weapons was used in both Norris Hall and the other location, West Ambler Johnston Hall, a 900-student freshman dormitory.
State, local and federal investigators were piecing together evidence from the crime scene. Flaherty of the state police superintendent, said that it was "reasonable" to assume that Cho was the gunman in both places, but there was no evidence yet with certainty that the same shooter was involved in both the dormitory and the classroom building.
There was also no evidence at this point of an accomplice, but authorities did not rule it out. "We are exploring whether or not there was someone that may or may not have helped Cho at any point during his planning or during his execution of this particular event," he said.
A number of people were being questioned. The Virginia Tech police chief, Wendell Flinchum, said that an acquaintance of a female victim killed at the dormitory had been stopped in his vehicle off campus for questioning when the shootings at Norris Hall were reported. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first attack was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a "domestic" dispute.
"We had one shooting early in the morning that initially, and we don't know the answer to this, appeared to be a domestic fight, perhaps a murder-suicide," Steger said. "It was characterized by our security people as being contained to that dorm room."
"As we were working through what we were going to do to deal with that, the message came on over the radio that another shooting across campus was taking place, and that's when the large number of people were killed."
Responding to criticism and suggestions that there was a delay between the first shooting and the first e-mail notifying students that something had happened, he said that the first dormitory was immediately closed down after the first incident and surrounded by security guards. Streets were cordoned off and students in the building notified about what was going on, he said.
"We also had to find witnesses because we didn't know what had happened," he said.
Wounded people were sent to the hospital and, based on the interrogation of witnesses, they thought "there was another person involved."
The Virginia Tech attacks started early in the morning, with a call to the police at 7:15 from, 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 two people, a senior identified as Ryan Clark, from Augusta, Georgia, and a freshman identified by other students on her floor as Emily Hilscher.
The shootings at the engineering building, Norris Hall, began about 9:45.
Some of the professors who were killed were named. Among them were Liviu Librescu, a Romanian-Israeli who has lived in the United States for several years, and G.V. Loknathan, who was originally from India and became an American citizen after arriving in the United States in 1977.
Scott Hendricks, an associate professor of engineering, was in his office on the third floor when he heard 40 to 50 shots from what sounded like the second floor. 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," 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."
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 clips 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. The police evacuated students and faculty members, taking many of them to local hotels. A Montgomery County school official said 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, Virginia, whose daughter Kirsten attends Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as it is formally known. "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 e-mail?' " The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent gunman. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.
The university's first bulletin warned students to be "cautious." Then, 20 minutes later, at 9:50, a second e-mail warning was sent, saying a gunman was "loose on campus" and telling students to stay in buildings and away from windows. At 10:16, a final message said classes were canceled and advised everyone on campus to stay where they were and lock their doors.
Bernhards recalled walking 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 that 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 Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized something was wrong.
"I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris," she recalled.
Chief Flinchum on Monday defended the university's decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying the information at the time indicated that it was an isolated event and that the attacker had left campus.
Classroom buildings are not locked and dormitories are open throughout the day but require a key card for entry at night, university officials said.
Flinchum confirmed that the 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 there were injured leaping from windows to escape.
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." Students are not allowed to have guns on the campus.
John M. Broder reported from Blacksburg and Christine Hauser from New York. Graham Bowley, Sarah Abruzzese, Edmund L. Andrews, Neela Banerjee, Micah Cohen, Shaila Dewan, Cate Doty, Manny Fernandez, Brenda Goodman, David Johnston, Michael Mather, Marc Santora, Amy Schoenfeld, Archie Tse and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.
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