Answers elusive after massacre

“This is a rural area. … You usually think of these things happening in downtown Baltimore or Washington.” Why Gunman Murdered 32 Is Unknown Virginia Tech shooting spree is deadliest in U.S. history
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BLACKSBURG, Va. — A shaken nation was seeking answers today after a gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

The gunman cut down his victims in two attacks two hours apart Monday morning before the university could grasp what was happening and warn students.

The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy.

Investigators gave no motive for the attack. The gunman’s name was not immediately released, and it was not known whether he was a student.

“Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions,” Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger said. “The university is shocked and indeed horrified.”

But he was also faced with difficult questions about the university’s handling of the emergency and whether it did enough to warn students and protect them after the first burst of gunfire at a dormitory. Some students bitterly complained that they got no warning from the university until an e-mail that arrived more than two hours after the first shots rang out.

Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, the killer opened fire at about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory, then stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus. Some of the doors at Norris Hall were found chained from the inside, apparently by the gunman.

Two people died in a dorm room, and 31 others were killed in Norris Hall, including the gunman, who put a bullet in his head. At least 15 people were hurt, some seriously.

During 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 “person of interest” in the dorm shooting who knew one of the victims, but he declined to give details.

“I’m not saying there is someone out there, and I’m not saying there is someone who is not,” Flinchum said. Ballistics tests would help explain what happened, he said.

Sheree Mixell, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the evidence was being moved to the agency’s national lab in Annandale. At least one firearm was turned over, she said.

During the ordeal, students jumped from windows in panic. Young people and faculty members carried out some of the wounded, without waiting for ambulances to arrive. Many found themselves trapped behind chained and padlocked doors.

Alec Calhoun, a junior from Waynesboro, said he was among those who jumped. He was in a second-floor engineering class when shooting erupted next door. The gunman came to his classroom, he said, but by then students had begun leaping from windows.

“Two people behind me were shot,” he said, adding that he was not seriously injured.

Trey Perkins, who was sitting in a German class in Norris Hall, told the Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and a half, squeezing off 30 shots.

The gunman, Perkins said, first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the students. Perkins said the gunman was about 19 years old and had a “very serious but very calm look on his face.”

“Everyone hit the floor at that moment,” said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. “And the shots seemed like it lasted forever.”

Erin Sheehan, who was also in the German class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, she was one of only four out 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.”

Students said there were no public address announcements after the first shooting at the dorm. Many said they learned of it in an e-mail that arrived shortly before the gunman struck again.

“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.

“This is a rural area, a college town,” student Austin Eckerd, 21, said in an interview. “You usually think of these things happening in downtown Baltimore or in Washington.”

Steger defended the university’s conduct, saying authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.

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.

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.