Posted on 04/17/2007 8:11:45 AM PDT by ribosomal soup
BLACKSBURG, Va. - A gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead, the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, was identified Tuesday as a senior English major from South Korea.
Ballistics tests show one gun was used in two attacks on the campus Monday morning — at a dormitory were two people were killed and in a classroom building where 31 people, including the gunman, died locked inside, Virginia State Police said.
Police identified the classroom shooter as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui (pronounced Choh Suhng-whee) of South Korea. There was no indication Tuesday of a possible motive for the attacks.
"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
Cho was in the U.S. as a resident alien with a residence established in Centerville, Va., but living on campus in Harper Residence Hall, the university said.
Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of because the information had not been announced, said Cho's fingerprints were found on the guns used in both shootings. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said.
One law enforcement official said Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol.
Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said it was reasonable to assume that Cho was the shooter in both attacks but that the link was not yet definitive.
"There's no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we're exploring the possibility," he said.
A memorial service was planned for the victims Tuesday afternoon at the university, and President Bush planned to attend, the White House said. Gov. Tim Kaine was flying back to Virginia from Tokyo for the 2 p.m. convocation.
South Korea's Foreign Ministry also expressed its condolences, saying there was no known motive for the shootings and that South Korea hoped that the tragedy would not "stir up racial prejudice or confrontation."
"We are in shock beyond description," said Cho Byung-se, a ministry official handling North American affairs. "We convey deep condolences to victims, families and the American people."
The first deadly attack was at the dormitory around 7:15 a.m., 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.
The victims in Norris Hall were found in four different classrooms and a stairwell, Flaherty said. Cho was found dead in one of those classrooms, he said.
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 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 20 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.
University President Charles 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.
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 were: Emily Jane Hilscher, 19, of Woodville; Mary Karen Read, 19, of Annandale; Ross Abdallah Alameddine, 20, of Saugus, Mass.; and Daniel Perez Cueva, 21, a native of Peru, friends, local officials and relatives said.
Ryan Clark, a student from Martinez, Ga., who had several majors and carried a 4.0 grade-point average, was also among the victims, said Vernon Collins, coroner in Columbia County, Ga. Clark 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."
‘South Korea’s Foreign Ministry also expressed its condolences, saying there was no known motive for the shootings and that South Korea hoped that the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.”’
Oh good God.
Why is it the US is assumed always to be full of these problems, and noone else is?
What kind of statement is this to a victim?
Has South Korean released a statement yet? I am surprised if they have not. This is a horrible situation for South Korea I am sure. They are probably very embarassed. I am sad that it is a South Korean one of our allies. The South Koreans are such nice and great people. I am surprised that this even happened because they tend to be very even tempered. I was stationed there for four years.
I mean, this sort of thing happens literally five times a day in Iraq, and the dems want to run away and leave the mad gunmen in charge and unmolested, don't they?
Or maybe what they really mean by multiculturalism and tolerance is that it is just fine to kill Iraqis but not US college students...
I’d have to ROFL if it weren’t supposed to be a somber moment....
This tells us alot about 'those people' over there. We don't have 'those type' of knee-jerk emotions over here, so no need to warn us. BUT, it seems that THEY THINK that WE THINK like THEY do.
They know that if the reverse were to happen over there in their country, we all know what the reaction would be.
You said — “When did he get his training?”
Well, a lot of these conspiracy nuts, in order to continue to support their whacky theories are soon going to be claiming to have unearthed previously-secret information that South Korea is now training 4 year olds, as part of a secret plan to destabilize the United States.
Look for it on a thread of your choosing, coming in the next day or two...
Regards,
Star Traveler
The remarkable thing about the aftermath of this event is the number of totally ignorant people who are inclined to state their (wrong) opinion, and both wrong, plus eager to repeat their ignorance over and over..
Better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
I do not buy the “just snapped” theory. This was planned well ahead of time.
The statements are in the article. And the 1st quote doesn’t please me.
But otherwise, it’s fine.
we don't know if that was continous, or just as an exchange student from year to year. Surely he traveled back and forth?
What i'm interested in learning is what after school activities he was involved in. The web sites he visited, etc. This has Islamic jihad written all over it, and media trying to avoid any mention of that angle.
I’m still baffled as to why he “just snapped†now. He was a senior meaning there was no freshman panic. He’s been in our country for a while so there was less cultural differences than new arrivals. Finals are in a couple of weeks and graduation is May 12 so that isn’t much of a factor.
try enter any dead links into the way back machine.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mag-gen.com
It’s likely you don’t know. I didn’t conjecture-—you did.
I bet top dollar he was a major player of video games, especially fps’s such as Counter Strike
And so much for all the freepers that were sure it was a crazed ME terrorist...
I guess he must have been ronery.
If we look at modern-day spree killing incidents, the highest body count so far is by Woo Bum-Kon, a Korean cop who killed 58 people and wounded 35 in South Korea. Prior to him, the highest record was held by a Japanese.
I think one reason why Korean and Japanese governments look the other way at their red light district is because they want to have a place where people can go party and let off steam. If you’re blowing your top your coworkers would take you to have some beers and women at some karaoke bar.
In this case the shooter probably had no friends and just stayed home to boil steam until it blew up.
Ismail’s Ax Relates to the twisted Islamic story of abraham smashing idols with his ax and calling his people to worship “Allah”.
Aside .... “Compton’s in the m******** house!”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.