33 dead in Virginia Tech massacre

Lauren Sutherland Senior Editor

On the morning of Monday, April 16, two deadly shootings at a dormitory and a classroom building at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Va., eclipsed all recorded incidents of public shootings in American history.

Each day following the massacre has yielded new information, arresting the nation with grief and horror, although many details of both the shooter and victims remain unconfirmed. There have been 33 confirmed deaths, including the presumed suicide of the shooter, and an additional 15 people have reportedly been injured.

According to the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech’s newspaper, campus police identified the gunman as 23-year-old undergraduate senior Cho Seung-Hui. Seung-Hui was a citizen of South Korea and had been living in the United States since 1992 as a legal permanent resident.

As of April 17, police had neither denied nor confirmed that Seung-Hui acted with an accomplice, although ballistic tests done at a federal lab in Maryland have verified that the same 9 mm handgun was fired in both shootings. An additional .22 caliber firearm was recovered from Seung-Hui.

The first shooting occurred at West Ambler-Johnston Hall at approximately 7:15 a.m., killing freshman Emily Jane Hilscher and graduate student Ryan Clark, who was a resident advisor of the dorm. The police identified the shooting as an isolated domestic incident and shut down the dormitory, but the student body was not notified until 9:26 a.m. via campus-wide email.

Most students and teachers continued to go about their mornings unaware of what had transpired, until a larger shooting at Norris Hall nearly two and a half hours later claimed the lives of 31 more, including Seung-Hui. When police arrived on the scene at 9:45 a.m., they continued to hear gun shots from within the building and had to forcibly breach doors that had been chained shut from the inside.

By the time police reached the second floor classrooms where the majority of the shooting occurred, Seung-Hui had already taken his own life. Several of the injuries reported were students who had jumped from the second-story windows while attempting to flee the violence. The campus was alerted of the events at Norris Hall at 9:55 a.m.

Only four students emerged from the German class of 25 students physically unscathed. In a statement made to the Collegiate Times, student Erin Sheehan described the peculiar way that Seung-Hui peered into the classroom twice, as if looking for someone, before opening fire.

“I saw bullets hit people’s bodies,” Sheehan told the Collegiate Times. “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.”

Still reeling from the day’s events, students have called into question the responses of local and campus authorities, which many consider to have been unreasonably delayed given the nature of the emergency.

“I really thought they should have cancelled classes sooner,” commented student Sam Leake to the Collegiate Times in an article published April 16. “If they had, maybe some of these deaths could have been prevented.”

A New York Times article published on April 17 after the release of search warrants and police statements detailing the tragedy explained the delay not as the result of procedural inertia, but of a lengthy pursuit of a false lead from the first shooting.

According to the documents, police went in search of non-student Karl D. Thornhill after receiving a tip from Hilscher’s roommate. Thornhill has been described as Hilscher’s boyfriend, and had reportedly made a recent visit with the roommate to a local shooting range. He has since been released from police custody.

State police and officials maintained that the police and the University responded to their full capacity under the circumstances. The Times reported Virginia Secretary of Public Safety John W. Marshall as saying that President of Virginia Tech Charles W. Steger and Campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum “made the right decisions based on the best information that they had available at the time.”

President Steger has also asked Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine to form a committee that will examine the University’s response, and shed further light on the gunman and his final hours.

All classes at Virginia Tech were canceled for the rest of the week, and Norris Hall will be completely closed for the rest of the semester. On April 17, thousands from the Virginia Tech community gathered at the University’s basketball arena for a convocation attended by President and Laura Bush.

Those attending the convocation eschewed mourning garb in favor of the Virginia Tech orange and maroon, and in a stirring confirmation of prevailing school spirit, the students, faculty and staff wiped away their tears and unleashed a mighty cry of “Let’s Go Hokies!” into the packed stadium.