Post by UnoBomber on Apr 17, 2007 9:04:01 GMT -5
Courtesy of FoxNews.com-
BLACKSBURG, Va. — The gunman responsible for at least the second of the two Virginia Tech attacks that claimed 33 lives to become the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history has been identified Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a student and native of South Korea, Virginia Tech police said Tuesday.
The campus president confirmed Tuesday that the shooter was a campus student.
Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said the shooter was a 23-year-old resident alien who was an undergraduate senior English major. He had a residence in Centreville, Va., but was also living on campus in Harper Hall.
While authorities have not explicitly said the student — now dead after taking his own life — was also the gunman in the first shooting, they have made clear they don't believe there was a second shooter. But school officials said again Tuesday that they have not yet confirmed the same person was responsible for both shootings.
"It's certainly reasonable for us to assume Cho was the shooter in both places but we don't have the evidence to take us there at this point in time," said Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. Steve Flaherty said during a press conference Tuesday. "We also have no evidence to indicate there was an accomplice at either event" but officials are still investigating whether the shooter had any help during the day.
"Quite frankly, we have the one chance to get it right," Flaherty said, so authorities want to make sure all evidence points to one shooter before they rule out the possibility of a second gunman.
Flinchum said a 9-mm and 22-caliber handgun was recovered from Norris Hall. Bullets, shell casings and other evidence was examined by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
"Lab results confirmed that one of the two weapons seized in Norris Hall was used in both shootings," Flinchum said.
One female and one male were killed at the West Ambler Johnston residence hall Monday morning before the gunman went to Norris Hall on the opposite side of campus and killed 30 more before shooting himself in the head.
Steger also said authorities are investigating whether there was a relationship between the gunman and the first woman killed that day at West Ambler Johnston.
The school administration is under fire by some who say it didn't inform students sooner about the first shooting. Many students went to campus after the shooting for class, unaware that a shooting had taken place at West Ambler Johnston. Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then, the second shooting had begun.
Steger said the university was trying to notify students who were already on-campus, not those who were commuting in. With 9,000 students on campus, 15,000 or 16,000 more in transit on their way to class, and 7,000 employees, Steger said, "if you don't do it right and you report misinformation, you've got chaos, and we were trying to manage the incident the best we could."
Steger said authorities believed the first shooting was a domestic, isolated incident confined to the building and that authorities closed down that building and surrounded it with police as a safety precaution. They thought the incident was a murder-suicide.
Asked by FOX News whether he did everything he could to save lives on campus, Steger said: '"I believe, based on the information we had at the time, we took the appropriate steps.
• List of Victims in Virginia Tech Massacre
No weapons were found in West Ambler after the first shooting and police took off in pursuit of a suspect, whom they later picked up and questioned, Steger said. "He's still a person of interest," Steger said of that individual.
Steger expects to get the ballistics report on Tuesday so that authorities can confirm whether all the shootings were carried out with the same weapon.
A federal law enforcement source told FOX News that the investigation into who the shooter was is "confused and fluid," but local law enforcement is still in the lead.
Based on their most recent information, the source said officials have had a tough time identifying the shooter.
"They've had trouble running the prints," the source said, and the shooter has serious facial disfiguration, suggesting the shooter may have shot himself in the head.
The same source said one of the working theories is that the shooter was possibly from China or korea. Once the student is positively identified, then they can investigate the type of visa he was in the United States on.
The slayings left people of this once-peaceful mountain town and the university at its heart praying for the victims of the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, 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 15 people were hurt in the second attack, some seriously. 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 next door to Calhoun's class, 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 they got no warning from the university until an e-mail that 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.
Steger said authorities believed 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.
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." The message warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.
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.
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.
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.
Also killed was Ryan Clark, a student from Martinez, Ga., who had several majors and carried a 4.0 grade-point average, said Vernon Collins, coroner in Columbia County, Ga.
His friend Gregory Walton, a 25-year-old 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," said Walton, a banquet manager. "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."
FOX News' Catherine Herridge, Geraldo Rivera and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
BLACKSBURG, Va. — The gunman responsible for at least the second of the two Virginia Tech attacks that claimed 33 lives to become the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history has been identified Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a student and native of South Korea, Virginia Tech police said Tuesday.
The campus president confirmed Tuesday that the shooter was a campus student.
Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said the shooter was a 23-year-old resident alien who was an undergraduate senior English major. He had a residence in Centreville, Va., but was also living on campus in Harper Hall.
While authorities have not explicitly said the student — now dead after taking his own life — was also the gunman in the first shooting, they have made clear they don't believe there was a second shooter. But school officials said again Tuesday that they have not yet confirmed the same person was responsible for both shootings.
"It's certainly reasonable for us to assume Cho was the shooter in both places but we don't have the evidence to take us there at this point in time," said Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. Steve Flaherty said during a press conference Tuesday. "We also have no evidence to indicate there was an accomplice at either event" but officials are still investigating whether the shooter had any help during the day.
"Quite frankly, we have the one chance to get it right," Flaherty said, so authorities want to make sure all evidence points to one shooter before they rule out the possibility of a second gunman.
Flinchum said a 9-mm and 22-caliber handgun was recovered from Norris Hall. Bullets, shell casings and other evidence was examined by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
"Lab results confirmed that one of the two weapons seized in Norris Hall was used in both shootings," Flinchum said.
One female and one male were killed at the West Ambler Johnston residence hall Monday morning before the gunman went to Norris Hall on the opposite side of campus and killed 30 more before shooting himself in the head.
Steger also said authorities are investigating whether there was a relationship between the gunman and the first woman killed that day at West Ambler Johnston.
The school administration is under fire by some who say it didn't inform students sooner about the first shooting. Many students went to campus after the shooting for class, unaware that a shooting had taken place at West Ambler Johnston. Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then, the second shooting had begun.
Steger said the university was trying to notify students who were already on-campus, not those who were commuting in. With 9,000 students on campus, 15,000 or 16,000 more in transit on their way to class, and 7,000 employees, Steger said, "if you don't do it right and you report misinformation, you've got chaos, and we were trying to manage the incident the best we could."
Steger said authorities believed the first shooting was a domestic, isolated incident confined to the building and that authorities closed down that building and surrounded it with police as a safety precaution. They thought the incident was a murder-suicide.
Asked by FOX News whether he did everything he could to save lives on campus, Steger said: '"I believe, based on the information we had at the time, we took the appropriate steps.
• List of Victims in Virginia Tech Massacre
No weapons were found in West Ambler after the first shooting and police took off in pursuit of a suspect, whom they later picked up and questioned, Steger said. "He's still a person of interest," Steger said of that individual.
Steger expects to get the ballistics report on Tuesday so that authorities can confirm whether all the shootings were carried out with the same weapon.
A federal law enforcement source told FOX News that the investigation into who the shooter was is "confused and fluid," but local law enforcement is still in the lead.
Based on their most recent information, the source said officials have had a tough time identifying the shooter.
"They've had trouble running the prints," the source said, and the shooter has serious facial disfiguration, suggesting the shooter may have shot himself in the head.
The same source said one of the working theories is that the shooter was possibly from China or korea. Once the student is positively identified, then they can investigate the type of visa he was in the United States on.
The slayings left people of this once-peaceful mountain town and the university at its heart praying for the victims of the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, 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 15 people were hurt in the second attack, some seriously. 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 next door to Calhoun's class, 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 they got no warning from the university until an e-mail that 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.
Steger said authorities believed 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.
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." The message warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.
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.
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.
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.
Also killed was Ryan Clark, a student from Martinez, Ga., who had several majors and carried a 4.0 grade-point average, said Vernon Collins, coroner in Columbia County, Ga.
His friend Gregory Walton, a 25-year-old 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," said Walton, a banquet manager. "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."
FOX News' Catherine Herridge, Geraldo Rivera and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
