[jdm]

Usually in crimes of passion like that there is very little chance of further violence. It was a reasonable assumption by the police. Blaming the police for this is stupid. Blaming the administration is not.

Let's get real here for a second. In a crime of passion, which was believed to be a murder/suicide initially, wouldn't there have been a gun left behind?

How can you shoot someone else and then yourself, without a gun being left behind?

The fact that no gun was left behind should have kept officials on their toes - but apparently it didn't.

[ketsu]

Let's get real here for a second. In a crime of passion, which was believed to be a murder/suicide initially, wouldn't there have been a gun left behind? How can you shoot someone else and then yourself, without a gun being left behind? The fact that no gun was left behind should have kept officials on their toes - but apparently it didn't.

I can't speak for the police. But as far as I've read the police thought the killer had run off and they were looking for him.

I'll reiterate, anybody looking to blame the police for this need to have *concrete* evidence that the police did something wrong. Not idle speculation.

The police have a near impossible job already, trying to pin the blame on them for this smacks of trying to score political points.

You think this whole situation doesn't eat them alive? They used their best judgement and they were wrong. If they had known do you really think they would have sat around?

[MacDorcha]

A crime of passion doesnt mean suicide. He shot a woman and the woman’s lover. That means it looked like a man shot his ex and his ex’s new squeeze, thus- a crime of passion.

After that, usually the shooter goes into hiding. A sectioned off dorm means that they can investigate the crime-scene, and pursue based on evidence later.

[JoeGar]

How can you shoot someone else and then yourself, without a gun being left behind?

Initially, the police thought it a murder-suicide; however, after the initial investigation and after questioning witnesses in the building, they knew it wasn't, they got an ID of the perp, found him, and were questioning him when the second shooting occurred. It seemed reasonable to not lockdown the campus if you thought you had the perp in custody.

[panthermom]

I had on Fox from the 1st shooting, I don’t remember ever hearing a murder/suicide angle. I do remember hearing that the killer was a boyfriend who caught his girlfriend with another man, and shot them both.

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

In a crime of passion, which was believed to be a murder/suicide initially, wouldn't there have been a gun left behind?

The Blacksburg police didn't think it was a murder/suicide. They believed that the new boyfriend had killed the girl and RA at first (this was why they had the confusion of two separate descriptions of the perp; because the West AJ folks remembered the new boyfriend leaving after he dropped her off and thought he did it), and they chased down his car and detained him on his way out of town (he's a Radford student). They thought they were chasing the perp, and that he was in custody shortly. By the time they established he wasn't involved, the other shooting had already occurred...