Massacre at Virginia Tech

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history Monday, cutting down his victims in two attacks two hours apart before the university could grasp what was happening and warn students.

The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy, perhaps forever.

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

"Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," Virginia Tech President Charles 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. 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 rang out.

Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, the killer opened fire 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. Students jumped from windows in panic.

Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior, said he was in a 9:05 a.m. mechanics class when he and classmates heard a thunderous sound from the classroom next door -- "what sounded like an enormous hammer."

Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks for 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 the professor, who had stayed behind, perhaps to block the door.

The instructor was killed, he said.

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 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.

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.

Mixell would not comment on what types of weapons were used or whether the gunman was a student.

Young people and faculty members carried out some of the wounded themselves, without waiting for ambulances to arrive. Many found themselves trapped behind chained and padlocked doors. 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.

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 about 30 shots.

The gunman 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," 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."

A 911 call for the first shooting came in at 7:15 a.m. EDT. Campus and Blacksburg police responded and found a female student and a male resident adviser, later identified as Clark, dead in a fourth-floor room at the West Ambler Johnston dormitory. The building was locked down and witnesses there led police to believe that the shooting was domestic in nature and that the shooter had left.

Flinchum said that while interviewing a "person of interest" off campus, police received another 911 call at 9:45 a.m. EDT about the shooting in Norris Hall. Flinchum said the man they were interviewing off campus was not in custody, but remained a person of interest in the earlier shooting.

He said ballistics tests on the bullets found at the scenes of the two shootings would help determine whether the shooter that killed himself was responsible for all the killings.

At the dorm where the initial shooting occurred, rumors were flying among the student residents. Several said they were told an Asian student somehow got inside the building after 7 a.m. and went up the stairs to a dorm room on the fourth floor, apparently looking for his girlfriend.

Some students said they heard popping sounds, and later found that a popular male resident adviser, Clark, 22, of Martinez, Ga., had been killed along with a female student who the students said was a roommate of the woman the man was looking for.

Police did not confirm any of the students' accounts of the shooting.

Late Monday, outside a campus building where friends and family members awaited word on the identities of the victims, Greg Bringhurst, 18, was pacing nervously. He said his dorm hall adviser, a sophomore, was missing. She would've been in class in Norris Hall at the time of the shooting.

Bringhurst said neither her parents nor her friends had heard from her.

"It's not like her," he said. "We're all getting really worried. Her parents are now on the way from New York."

Sophomore Olivia Folmar said she and her fellow students, still with little definitive information about the shooting, couldn't escape the anxiety of finding out who actually died in Norris Hall.

"Everybody is afraid to see who is on that list," she said. "More than likely, we will know somebody or know somebody of somebody who has been killed."

The carnage at Virginia Tech now supplants a 1991 killing spree in Killeen, Texas, as the country's deadliest shooting rampage. In that incident, a man drove his truck into a Luby's cafeteria and shot 23 people to death before killing himself.

Monday's carnage also marked the deadliest campus shooting in the country since 1966, when Charles Whitman opened fire on students at the University of Texas at Austin from a clock tower on campus, killing 16 people before he was shot to death by police.

President Bush, through a spokesman, offered prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia.

Classes at Virginia Tech were canceled through Tuesday and grief counselors and priests were made available to students, faculty and families.

This was the second time in less than a year that the Virginia Tech campus was closed because of a shooting.

Last August, the opening day of classes was canceled when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled onto the university. A sheriff's deputy involved in the manhunt was killed just off campus. The accused gunman, William Morva, faces capital murder charges.

By E.A. Torriero, Jodi S. Cohen and Rex W. Huppke
Tribune staff reporters