Staff of The Washington Post

Correction to This Article: An April 17 Page One article about the Virginia Tech shootings incorrectly described the relationship between Eric Anderson and a wounded student. Anderson is Kristina Heeger's stepfather, not a friend. Additionally, the article incorrectly quoted Anderson on details about Heeger's condition. His quote should have read: "She's doing better. She's recovering. We're praying for her right now."

By Ian Shapira and Tom Jackman

Washington Post Staff Writers

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 16 -- An outburst of gunfire at a Virginia Tech dormitory, followed two hours later by a ruthless string of attacks at a classroom building, killed 32 students, faculty and staff and left about 30 others injured yesterday in the deadliest shooting rampage in the nation's history.

The shooter, whose name was not released last night, wore bluejeans, a blue jacket and a vest holding ammunition, witnesses said. He carried a 9mm semiautomatic and a .22-caliber handgun, both with the serial numbers obliterated, federal law enforcement officials said. Witnesses described the shooter as a young man of Asian descent -- a silent killer who was calm and showed no expression as he pursued and shot his victims. He killed himself as police closed in.

He had left two dead at the dormitory and 30 more at a science and engineering building, where he executed people taking and teaching classes after chaining some doors shut behind him. At one point, he shot at a custodian who was helping a victim. Witnesses described scenes of chaos and grief, with students jumping from second-story windows to escape gunfire and others blocking their classroom doors to keep the gunman away.

Even before anyone knew who the gunman was or why he did what he did, the campus community in Southwest Virginia began questioning whether most of the deaths could have been prevented. They wondered why the campus was not shut down after the first shooting.

The enormity of the event brought almost immediate expressions of condolences from President Bush, both houses of Congress and across the world.

"I'm really at a loss for words to explain or to understand the carnage that has visited our campus," said Charles W. Steger, president of Virginia Tech, one of the state's largest and most prestigious universities.

The rampage began as much of the campus was just waking up. A man walked into a freshman coed dorm at 7:15 a.m. and fatally shot a young woman and a resident adviser.

Based on witness interviews, police thought it was an isolated domestic case and chose not to take any drastic campus-wide security measures, university officials said. But about 9:45 a.m., a man entered a classroom building and started walking into classrooms and shooting faculty members and students with the two handguns. Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said investigators were not certain that the same man committed both shootings. But several law enforcement sources said he did.

As police entered Norris Hall, an engineering and science building, shortly before 10 a.m., the man shot and killed himself before officers could confront him. One witness said the gunman was "around 19" and was "very serious but [with] a very calm look on his face."

"He knew exactly what he was doing," said the witness, Trey Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va. He said he watched the man enter his classroom and shoot Perkins's professor in the head. "I have no idea why he did what he decided to do. I just can't say how lucky I am to have made it."

The university canceled classes yesterday and today and set up counseling for the grief-stricken campus. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), who had just arrived in Japan on a trade mission, immediately flew back to Virginia. He was expected to attend a vigil today.

"We've been devastated as the death toll has been rising," said Payton Baran, 20, of Bethesda, who is a junior majoring in finance. "I've been calling everyone I know, and everyone I talk to is pretty much in tears. It's really, really depressing."

None of the victims' names was released yesterday by officials, pending notification of their families. University officials said 15 people were injured, but spokesmen at four area hospitals said they treated 29.

Initial reports from the campus raised the specter of "another Columbine," in which two teenagers in Littleton, Colo., killed 13 people inside a high school in 1999 before killing themselves. But soon, the Virginia Tech rampage dwarfed Columbine to become the biggest shooting rampage by an individual in U.S. history.

Students and parents launched a frenzied round of phone calls and text messages yesterday morning, monitoring news reports and waiting for information. And the shootings prompted intense questioning of Steger and Flinchum from a community still reeling from the fatal shootings of a security guard and a sheriff's deputy near campus in August on the first day of classes and the arrest of the suspect on the edge of campus that day.

Although the gunman in the dorm was at large, no warning was issued to the tens of thousands of students and staff at Virginia Tech until 9:26 a.m., more than two hours later.

"We concluded it was domestic in nature," Flinchum said. "We had reason to believe the shooter had left campus and may have left the state." He declined to elaborate. But several law enforcement sources said investigators thought the shooter might have intended to kill a girl and her boyfriend Monday in what one of them described as a "lover's dispute." It was unclear whether the girl killed at the dorm was the intended target, they said.

The sources said police initially focused on the female student's boyfriend, a student at nearby Radford University, as a suspect. Police questioned the boyfriend, later termed "a person of interest," and were questioning him when they learned of the subsequent shootings at Norris Hall. A family friend of the boyfriend's said the boyfriend was stopped by police alongside Route 460 in Blacksburg, handcuffed and interrogated on the side of the road and later released.

Students who lived in the dorm said they received knocks on the door telling them to stay in their rooms but nothing else. Shortly before 9:30 a.m., the university sent out this e-mail: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston [dorm] earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.

"The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case."

Steger said that, even though the gunman was at large, "we had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur." He said only a fraction of the university's 28,000 students live on campus, and "it's extremely difficult if not impossible to get the word out spontaneously."

Students on campus and parents were angry. When Blake Harrison, 21, of Leesburg learned of the shootings, he said, he called an administrative help line and was told "to proceed with caution to classes." He said: "I'm beyond upset. I'm enraged."

Yesterday, as officials began to sort out the shootings, tales of the horror began to emerge.

Alec Calhoun, a junior, was in Room 204 in Norris. When the shootings began, people suddenly pulled off screens and pushed out windows. "Then people started jumping," he said. "I didn't just leap. I hung from the ledge and dropped. Anybody who made it out was fine. I fell and I hit a bush to cushion my fall. It knocked the wind out of me. I don't remember running."

He started to move away, but he also pulled out his cellphone, which has videorecording capability, and he began filming. His video, which he later shipped to CNN, captures officers running toward the brown three-story building, a couple of flashes from the second floor and 27 gunshots.

The video soon became the defining image of the rampage. "I just didn't think I was in great danger," Albarghouti said later.

In a German class in Room 207, Perkins was seated in the back with about 15 fellow students. The gunman barged in with two guns, shot the professor in the head, then started shooting students, Perkins said.

Panic ensued, he said. "And the shots seemed like it lasted forever."

The gunman left Room 207 and tried to return several minutes later, but Perkins and two other students had blocked the door with their feet. He shot through the door.

The last time anyone spoke with Kristina Heeger, she was headed for a 9 a.m. French class in Norris. Within an hour, the sophomore from Vienna had been shot in the back. But she survived.

It was a story that played out across campus, and far beyond, with so many wounded, so many dead. "She's doing better," said a friend, Eric Anderson, last night after seeing her. "She's recovering. We're praying for her right now. She couldn't talk to them yet, or anyone, and they didn't know any details about what happened."

Tucker Armstrong, 19, a freshman from Stephens City, Va., passed by Norris as he headed to a 10 a.m. class. He said in an e-mail that he "noticed several kids hanging and jumping from the second floor windows trying to land in bushes."

Armstrong said he heard repeated bangs. He went to help the people who had leapt from the building, but they yelled at him: " 'Get out of here, run!' At that point I realized they were shots and they just kept going and going."

Police and ambulances poured into the area. Dustin Lynch, 19, a sophomore from Churchville, Md., watched from the nearby Drillfield as unresponsive students were carried out of Norris Hall. "I saw police officers literally carrying kids out," Lynch said. "It basically looked like they were carrying bodies."

Parents arrived at the Inn at Virginia Tech to meet with other grieving families and were distraught at the university's management of the incident. "I think they should have closed the whole thing. It's not worth it. You've got a crazy man on campus. Do something about it," said Hoda Bizri of Princeton, W.Va., who was visiting her daughter Siwar, a graduate student

Brett Hudner, 23, communications major from Vienna, was heading toward one of the dining halls and suddenly a scrum of police cars raced by. "The scary thing is I know I'm going to go into classes, and there's going to be empty spaces," Hudner said.

The Bizris, meanwhile, were waiting for news about a friend whom they could not locate. They think she was inside Norris Hall.

Jackman reported from Washington.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

By Alec MacGillis and Adam Kilgore

Washington Post Staff Writers

A single question stood out yesterday at Virginia Tech: Would more students be alive if the university had stopped them from going to class after a shooting occurred in a campus dorm?

The first shooting was reported at 7:15 a.m. in a dormitory, West Ambler Johnston Hall, where police found two people fatally wounded. But the first e-mail message from the Virginia Tech administration to students did not go out until more than two hours later, at 9:26 a.m., stating that a shooting had occurred but with no mention of staying indoors or staying off campus or canceling classes.

About 9:45, the shootings began in Norris Hall, a classroom building at the other end of the sprawling campus. Police said the gunman killed 30 people at Norris and wounded about 30 before killing himself.

"I don't know why they let people stay in classrooms," said Sean Glennon, a junior from Centreville and the quarterback on the Hokies football team. "A lot of people are angry that campus wasn't evacuated a little earlier."

The university president and campus police chief said they decided not to cancel classes after the first shootings because the initial indication at the dorm, based on interviews with witnesses, was that the attack might have been a domestic-violence incident and that the shooter probably had fled the campus.

"We were acting on the best information we had at the time," said Wendell Flinchum, the campus police chief. "We felt that this incident was isolated to that dormitory."

University President Charles W. Steger said officials also were unsure what the alternative would be to allowing classes to proceed. More than 14,000 of the university's 26,000 full-time students live off campus, and, with some classes starting at 8 a.m., many of them were en route when officials were having to decide, he said. The university and police decided that students would be safer in their classrooms than milling around the campus or in their dorms, he said.

"The question is, [where] do you keep them that is more safe?" Steger said. He added: "We concluded that it was best, once they got in their classrooms . . . to lock them down" there.

Officials characterized the response as a "lockdown" in classrooms, but with the first e-mail alert not going out until 9:26, most students were oblivious to any trouble.

Dustin Lynch, 19, a sophomore from Churchville, Md., said that at the time of the Norris Hall shootings, he was out on the Drillfield, a large oval lawn on campus, raising money for charity with other members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. It was only when he saw a swarm of police cruisers racing to Norris Hall that he knew something was amiss.

University officials said classroom buildings are open at all times except late at night. The university could have restricted access to the building using an electronic key-card system built into many doorways, according to a law enforcement source, but investigators thought the shooter might have been a student with a key card that would have given him access to the buildings despite the lockdown.

"The question everyone is asking is: How can you have two hours between the shootings and the place not be locked down?" said the source, who was given an intelligence briefing yesterday but was not authorized to speak publicly.

The university was aware of the challenges involved in reaching students during a crisis, even in an age when everyone seems to be wired. In August, a jail inmate escaped, fatally shot a hospital guard and a sheriff's deputy and then hid on campus on the first day of classes, setting off a manhunt that shut down campus.

The university posted updates on its Web site that day and sent out e-mails, but it took longer for the news to reach students who were commuting to school and were not online.

A campus spokesman said earlier this semester that the university was working with a company to provide a service that would send out text-message alerts to students' cellphones. The university was considering requiring students to give their cellphone numbers when they register for classes, he said.

Yesterday, Steger said that the university would review its emergency response policies again in light of the shootings but that only so much could be done to prepare for unforeseen disasters.

"It's very difficult. This is an open society and an open campus with 26,000 people, and we can't have armed guards in front of every classroom every day of the year," he said. "It was one of those things no one anticipated. . . . Honestly, every situation we face is different."

It was not until 9:50 a.m., after the Norris Hall shootings, that a stronger e-mail warning from the university reached students: "A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows."

A third e-mail went out at 10:16, canceling classes and asking students to stay put. And it was 10:52, more than an hour after the Norris Hall shootings, that an e-mail went out stating that the attack had occurred.

Justin Born, a junior from Centreville, had left for his 10:10 class after checking his e-mail and seeing the first 9:26 notice about being "cautious."

"I was like, 'All right.' I decided to go to class, because I didn't think it was that big of a deal," he said

After parking on campus and walking to class, he saw people running to cars and running from the campus, shouting about the second shooting. It was only after he got home that he saw the e-mail about classes being canceled.

"I don't know how to describe it," he said. "It just seems, I don't know, immature. I don't if immature is the right word, but it doesn't seem like Virginia Tech did the right thing by not canceling class after a shooting. It was ridiculous."

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

By Michael E. Ruane and Jose Antonio Vargas

Washington Post Staff Writers

Yesterday morning. Second floor. Norris Hall. In Room 207, Mr. Bishop's German class is underway. A few doors down, Professor Librescu is posting slides for his engineering students in 204. Outside, the Virginia Tech campus is gray and chilly but pretty normal for a Monday.

"It couldn't have been much more normal," said Richard Mallalieu, one of Liviu Librescu's students.

Suddenly, sometime after 9 a.m., a young man walked into the German class with two handguns and shot instructor Christopher James Bishop in the head.

Then he began firing at the students. Shot after shot, "some 30 shots in all," said Trey Perkins, who was seated in the back of the German class. He shot a girl in the mouth, a boy in the legs.

There were about 15 students, and Perkins said the relentless gunman had a "very serious but very calm look on his face."

"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va., a sophomore studying mechanical engineering.

The gunman left, and Perkins, sounding shaken in a telephone interview yesterday, said "three or four" students appeared to be dead.

In Room 204, the engineering students were watching Librescu's slides on the subject of virtual work when they began to hear shots from what sounded like an adjacent classroom, said Mallalieu, 23, a student from Luray, Va.

"At first I tried to convince myself they weren't gunshots, that if anything, maybe a presentation was going on, to try to convince myself it wasn't," Mallalieu said in a telephone interview from his Blacksburg apartment. "It became evident pretty quick what was going on."

Plus, he said, "there were a few screams." At first, he got down and hid behind a desk as Librescu held the classroom door closed. Then the students went to the windows.

As they pondered whether to jump, the gunshots went on. "A steady pop, pop, pop, pop," Mallalieu said. The gunfire was "more or less continuous." He said he heard 20 to 30 shots as he and other students noticed there was grass below and decided it was time to jump. "It was scary," he said, "but it wasn't as panicked as you might think it was."

The engineering students pushed open the windows.

On the first floor, custodian Gene W. Cole, 52, was preparing to clean a bathroom when someone reported a shooting in a second-floor lab. Cole took an elevator and got off at 2.

"I walked around the corner, and I saw something in the hallway there," Cole said in a telephone interview. "As I got closer, I saw it was a girl lying on the floor jerking around as if she was trying to get up. There was blood all over her and all over the floor around her."

A man dressed in bluejeans, a dark sweat shirt and a hat stepped out of a classroom and flashed a black handgun.

"He acted like he was angry," Cole said. "I just thought, 'Oh my God, he's fit to kill me.' He didn't say nothing; he just started shooting. He shot at me five times."

Bullets zipped past Cole's head. He ran down some back stairs, saw that several exits had what looked like new chains and locks on them, and escaped through an auditorium. Cole, who has worked at Virginia Tech for 20 years, said the chains and locks had to have been put on the doors shortly before the shooting because they were not there earlier that morning.

Back in Room 207, Perkins, a student named Derek and a female student headed toward the heavy wooden classroom door and held it shut with their feet.

Other students were crying. One vomited. Two minutes later, Perkins said, the gunman came back. But now he couldn't get in. So he started shooting through the door, Perkins said, before leaving again. "Fortunately, we were lying down and weren't in front of the door," he said.

Whispering and trying to compose himself, Perkins, an Eagle Scout, said he told Derek and the female student to keep their feet on the door in case the gunman returned.

Perkins said he went around the room, tending to the wounded students. A student named Garrett was shot in both legs. Perkins wrapped his gray pullover sweater around Garrett's right leg.

Perkins used Garrett's tank top to wrap the other leg. Perkins saw a sweat shirt on a desk and covered the girl with the mouth wound.

"He knew exactly what he was doing," Perkins said of the gunman. "I have no idea why he did what he decided to do. I just can't say how lucky I am to have made it."

In 204, the students had opened the windows and were jumping for their lives.

"It's kind of hard to believe that something like this would happen," Mallalieu said. "You hear things about Columbine... But you never think you'd be involved in that. But at that point I realized it was really happening."

Mallalieu, the son of a chemist, said he climbed out, hung for a moment from the ledge, looked down and let go. "I kind of tried to roll when I landed," he said.

He suffered some scratches. He's not sure everybody got out. Those who did ran for a nearby campus building. As they did, Mallalieu said it sounded as though the gunshots, and the screams, were now coming from 204. He said he heard about 40 shots in all.

There was little conversation as the students fled. "At that point, it was just, get away," he said. "I think everybody kind of had the same feeling about what was going on. We didn't really need to talk about it.

"I don't think it's settled in yet," he said. "I haven't heard how my other classmates who I think were still left behind, you know, what happened to them, be it good or bad."

A man identifying himself as one of Bishop's relatives said the family had no comment. Last night, a woman who answered the phone at Librescu's home and identified herself as his wife said she did not know whether he had survived.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

By Jose Antonio Vargas

Washington Post Staff Writer

When Jamal Albarghouti first heard the gunshots, he ran toward them.

Then he took out his cellphone.

Albarghouti, a graduate student at Virginia Tech, is "the cellphone guy" -- a 24-year-old who used the camera in his sleek, silver Nokia N70 smartphone to capture video of police rushing toward Norris Hall, the building where the shots rang out.

This is what this YouTube-Facebook-instant messaging generation does. Witness. Record. Share.

In the minute-long video, first aired on CNN.com, you can see Albarghouti's hand shake as he recorded the scene -- the wind blowing, the cops running, some 20 shots fired. At one point, to get an even better look, he tried to get closer to the building but was stopped by police.

Yes, he retreated. But he kept recording.

"I didn't think I was in danger at any point in time," said Albarghouti, who's Palestinian and originally from the West Bank. "My country is at war. Maybe I'm just used to the fact these things do happen."

Albarghouti then went on CNN.com and sent the video.

As it happens, Virginia Tech -- the school slogan reads "Invent the Future" -- is full of techies. It's home to the Blacksburg Electronic Village, a pioneering project launched in the mid-'90s that sought to link everyone in an online community. A Reader's Digest headline in 1996 called Blacksburg "The Most Wired Town in America."

The school's student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, filed up-to-the-minute online dispatches. At 4:44 p.m.: "Police have confirmed that the shooter took his own life." At 4:54 p.m.: "University Relations has confirmed 31 deaths at Norris Hall, in addition to two deaths at West Ambler Johnson."

And many Hokies, past and present, are on Facebook, the popular online directory for college and high school students. Nearly 39,000 are listed on Virginia Tech's network, putting it among the top 25 college networks on Facebook, a spokesman for the directory said.

When Albarghouti got back to his apartment, he had about 279 new messages on his Facebook account.

"Dude, Jamal, you're crazy," wrote a friend.

Wrote another friend: "You are one brave guy Jamal! Glad you are safe!"

A stranger wrote in: "I don't know you at all, but I hope [you're] all right. . . . "

Jamal wasn't the only one getting online messages. Yesterday afternoon, student Trey Perkins was overwhelmed by IMs and Facebook messages when he returned to his apartment, still shaken with grief.

IMed a friend: "U okay?"

Another one: "Where are u? Where are u?"

And another: "Hey, hey, I just heard..."

Perkins, 20, was in his German class in Norris 207 when the gunman barged in at around 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and half -- "some 30 shots in all," said Perkins, a sophomore from Yorktown, Va. He hit the floor and couldn't take out his cellphone. An hour later his younger brother Daniel, a senior at Tabb High School in Yorktown, heard about the shootings and text-messaged him: "Hey, what's going on," he asked. The older brother couldn't answer at the time.

"He [the shooter] knew exactly what he was doing," Perkins said. "I have no idea why he did what he decided to do. I just can't say how lucky I am to have made it."

Albarghouti, too, is unsure what the root of the tragedy was.

He just knew that the moment he heard the shots -- "bang! bang! bang!" he said -- he had to get it on his cellphone.

"How can someone do this? I can't explain. No one can explain," said Albarghouti, who's getting a master's degree in construction management. Yesterday, before the shooting started, he was on his way to meet his adviser, Anthony Songer, to work on his thesis.

The thesis is on leadership skills.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

By Ian Shapira and Michael E. Ruane

Washington Post Staff Writers

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 -- They met across the professor's desk. One on one. The chairman of the English department and the silent, brooding student who never took his sunglasses off.

He had so upset other instructors that Virginia Tech officials asked whether the professor wanted protection. Lucinda Roy declined. She thought Cho Seung Hui exuded loneliness, and she volunteered to teach him by herself, to spare her colleagues. The subject of the class was poetry.

Roy, other officials, investigators, acquaintances and neighbors helped fill in a dark portrait Tuesday of the bespectacled young South Korean citizen who had sought bizarre expression in literature and then massacred 32 fellow students and teachers here Monday in the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history. As police closed in, he shot himself and was found on the floor of a classroom building with his weapons nearby.

Cho, of Centreville, the son of immigrants who run a dry cleaning business and the brother of a State Department contractor who graduated from Princeton, was described by those who encountered him over the years as at times angry, menacing, disturbed and so depressed that he seemed near tears.

He often spoke in a whisper, if at all, refused to open up to teachers and classmates, and kept himself locked behind a facade of a hat, sunglasses and silence.

Authorities still are not sure what set him off and what propelled him Monday as he stalked the halls and classrooms of Norris Hall with two semiautomatic pistols, chaining doors closed and murdering and maiming as he went.

Authorities found two three-page notes in his dorm room after the shootings. They weren't suicide notes and provided no clue about why he did what he did. Instead, they were expletive-filled rants against the rich and privileged, even naming people who he thought had kept him down, federal and state law enforcement sources said. Two government officials said he had been treated for mental health problems.

Police also are uncertain why Cho stopped and shot himself to death in Norris Hall, where most of his victims lay scattered around him.

Any comprehension of what happened seemed to come only in hindsight.

Cho (whose full name is pronounced joh sung-wee) appears first to have alarmed the noted Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class in fall 2005, Giovanni said.

Cho took pictures of fellow students during class and wrote about death, she said in an interview. "Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made all of us pay attention closely. None of us were comfortable with that," she said.

The students once recited their poems in class. "It was like, 'What are you trying to say here?' It was more sinister," she said.

Days later, seven of Giovanni's 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked them why the others didn't show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho.

"Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something," she said.

She approached Cho and told him that he needed to change the type of poems he was writing or drop her class. Giovanni said Cho declined to leave and said, "You can't make me."

Giovanni said she appealed to Roy, who then taught Cho one-on-one. Roy, 51, said in a telephone interview that she also urged Cho to seek counseling and told him that she would walk to the counseling center with him. He said he would think about it.

Roy said she warned school officials. "I was determined that people were going to take notice," Roy said. "I felt I'd said to so many people, 'Please, will you look at this young man?' "

Roy, now the alumni distinguished professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program, said university officials were responsive and sympathetic to her warnings but indicated that because Cho had made no direct threats, there was little they could do.

"I don't want to be accusatory or blaming other people," Roy said. "I do just want to say, though, it's such a shame if people don't listen very carefully and if the law constricts them so that they can't do what is best for the student."

Cho wrote poems, a novel and two plays, acquaintances and officials said, in addition to the rambling multipage "manifesto" directed against the rich, the spoiled and the world in general, which police found in his dorm room.

Paul Kim, a senior English major, said Cho was so withdrawn on campus that he did not know "we had a Korean person who was in the English department and was male until I met him in class."

"He never spoke a word," Kim said. "Even when the professor asked questions, he never spoke. He constantly looked physically and emotionally down, like he was depressed. I had a strong feeling to talk to him on the first day of class, but I didn't get to talk to him because he sat right beside the door, and as soon as class was over, he left."

For Kim, one detail stood out. The classroom was rectangular. The class was split in half, with one half facing the other. "I always sat directly across, looking directly at him," Kim said. "He never looked up."

Kim said he might have seen signs of Cho's deterioration: He disappeared from class.

"For the past month, he stopped coming," Kim said.

Charlotte Peterson, a former Virginia Tech student, said she shared a British literature class with Cho in 2005. On the first day, when the instructor asked students to write their names on a sheet of paper and hand it up, Cho wrote a question mark.

"Even the teacher laughed at him," Peterson said. "Nobody understood him."

Brooke Kistner, 22, a senior English major from Chester, Va., said she had three classes with Cho.

"He would keep his headphones on a lot," she said. "I remember one instance where the teacher had addressed a question to him and he really just stared off into space. He didn't even recall acknowledging that she was talking to him. We were like, 'What are you doing?' The teacher said, 'Will you please see me after class?' and he still didn't even acknowledge her. It was an awkward silence, and then she went back to lecturing."

In his Centreville community, residents recalled him as a strange young man.

"He just seemed odd," said Greg Kearns, a neighbor who tried unsuccessfully now and then to strike up conversations with Cho.

Kearns recalled seeing Cho in front of his parents' townhouse a few years ago. Kearns was walking his dog. When he said hello, Cho turned his head and shoulders away. "It was like he was carrying on a conversation with himself," Kearns said.

Abdul Shash, who lives next door to the Chos, said Cho never seemed to have any friends over the years.

"If you walk and you come close to him, he'd walk away," Shash said. "I have kids, and he never talked to them."

Shash described Cho's parents as quiet, modest and hardworking people who seemed devoted to helping their son. During his years at Virginia Tech, his parents regularly shuttled him to and from Blacksburg, more than four hours each way.

"Nobody knows him really," Shash said. "He's always quiet. When I talk to him, there's no response."

Cho graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly in 2003. He turned 23 on Jan. 18 and had lived as a legal permanent resident since entering the United States through Detroit on Sept. 2, 1992, when he was 8 years old, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Cho held a green card through his parents, and he renewed it Oct. 27, 2003, according to Homeland Security. He listed his residence as Centreville.

Cho's sister, Sun Cho, graduated from Princeton University with a degree in economics in 2004 after she completed summer internships with the State Department in Washington and Bangkok.

A State Department spokesman said Sun Cho works as a contractor specializing in personnel matters.

Investigators said Cho procured one of the guns he used in the rampage, a Walther .22-caliber pistol, Feb. 9 from a pawnshop on Main Street in Blacksburg near the Virginia Tech campus.

On March 16, he bought the second gun, a 9mm Glock 19, from Roanoke Firearms, a gun shop on Cove Road in Roanoke.

He used his driver's license as identification and had no problem buying the guns because he was complying with Virginia law, which permits the purchase of one gun a month, investigators said.

The Glock was used in two shootings, first in a dormitory and then in Norris Hall more than 2 1/2 hours later, officials said. A surveillance tape, which has now been watched by federal agents, shows Cho buying the Glock, sources said. Both guns are semiautomatic, which means that one round is fired for every finger pull.

Cho reloaded several times, using 15-round magazines for the Glock and 10-round magazines for the Walther, investigators said, adding that he had the cryptic words "Ismale Ax" tattooed on one arm. Although there are many theories, sources said, no one knows what it means.

As the university mourned Tuesday and the identities of the dead were made public, more details of Monday's tragedy emerged.

One of Cho's suitemates in Harper Hall said the killer began the day looking like he had every other day since moving in. Karan Grewal said Cho's face was blank and expressionless. "He didn't have a look of disgust or anger," Grewal said. "He never did. There was always just one look on his face."

In August, when Grewal, Cho and four others moved in, Cho's suitemates tried to talk to him but never got a word in return.

"My impression was that he's shy," said Grewal, 21, a senior accounting major who lived in a room across the hall. "He never looked anyone in the eye. If you even say hi, he'd keep walking straight past you."

The six students lived two to a room in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom suite. The others never saw Cho with any women or friends. He would turn his head away to avoid conversation. His room had the typical college dorm look, strewn with cereal boxes and clothes, Grewal said.

Recently, Cho had started going to the gym. Other than that, his suitemate had been behaving exactly as he always had.

"He had that blank expression," Grewal said, "nothing else."

Ruane reported from Washington.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

By Michael D. Shear and Alec MacGillis

Washington Post Staff Writers

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) ordered an independent review yesterday of Virginia Tech's handling of Monday's massacre after 24 hours of criticism that the university waited too long to inform students and faculty of a potential danger.

Kaine's announcement came in response to a request from the school's president and board of visitors that the governor take the lead in finding a group of credible, experienced outside examiners. He said the investigation will cover actions taken Monday and questions about whether university officials were warned earlier that the shooter, Cho Seung Hui, was troubled.

As the shooting unfolded, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said his department did everything it could to keep students safe. Yesterday, Kaine's top law enforcement officials praised Flinchum, calling the university's handling of the shooting "coordinated, prompt and professional."

At the time, Kaine was returning from an aborted trade mission to Japan. In a convocation speech after he returned, Kaine referred to questions about the response as "deep and troubling." Speaking to reporters later, he said he will appoint a panel of independent law enforcement officials to examine what the university knew about Cho and how it dealt with his rampage, which killed 32.

"There will be a very thorough after-action report," Kaine pledged. "Before we talk about any policy changes, we have to get an assessment of what occurred."

The Attacks and the Aftermath: A convocation and candlelight vigil were held yesterday at Virginia Tech to remember the victims who died in Monday's shootings. The university has canceled classes for the rest of the week to allow students to mourn. The campus will reopen tomorrow for administrative operations.

Among the questions was why it took campus police more than two hours after an initial shooting at a dormitory to inform students of danger. The delay between that shooting, which killed two students, and a more devastating one two hours later in an academic building could have exposed more students and faculty to danger, critics said. Thirty people were killed in the second shooting.

New details provided yesterday might help explain the delay. Authorities said they spent much of the time between the shootings pursuing a young man -- not Cho -- who was romantically connected to one of the initial victims. Police revealed other new information yesterday, including that 9mm and .22-caliber guns had been recovered from Norris Hall, the scene of the second round of shootings, and that ballistics tests showed that the 9mm Glock had been used in both incidents.

Police also searched Cho's dorm room, looking for, among other things, "ammunition, weapons, explosives" in response to discovering a "bomb threat note... directed at engineering school department buildings" near the Norris shootings, according to an affidavit filed with a local court. Officials said in the document that they think Cho was the author of the threat.

Norris was "a horrific crime scene," Flinchum said yesterday. "What went on there caused tremendous chaos and panic" that have complicated police officers' ability to process the crime scene.

Personal effects were strewed in many places. Victims were found in four classrooms on the second floor and in a stairwell. Cho was found among several victims in a classroom. He had shot himself, police said.

State officials characterized the outside review as standard procedure for emergencies and compared it to state reviews conducted after Hurricane Isabel and the Washington area sniper shootings.

But after a closed-door meeting of the board of visitors that followed the afternoon convocation, university leaders recognized the intensity and magnitude of the nation's worst shooting rampage by an individual by requesting higher-level involvement from Kaine than the usual report.

Kaine, who said he would appoint the panel members within a few days, said he had several people in mind. He vowed they would find answers to some of the "natural questions" that have been raised on television programs and in headlines.

"That is the purpose for immediately commencing this review," the governor said.

Many parents of Virginia Tech students continued to question the decisions made by university administrators and police -- notably, the decision not to send out an e-mail about the first shooting until 9:26 a.m., more than two hours after the attack was reported, and not to cancel classes or shut down the campus until after the classroom shootings.

"These students had the right to know there was an incident in the morning, that there was a murder and a gunman on the loose, and for them to make a decision based on that about whether to go to class or not," said Carl Ruggiero of Stafford, whose daughter Sarah is a freshman. "That opportunity was not given to them... They had absolutely no help whatsoever. These kids were sitting ducks."

Ruggiero contrasted the university's reaction to the dorm shooting with its decision in August to shut down the campus and order students to stay indoors while police searched for a man who escaped from a local jail and shot a sheriff's deputy near campus early on the first day of classes.

State and law enforcement sources said the investigation has not allowed them to fully explain some of their actions Monday, and they said they think an independent review will show their actions were proper. One official said, for example, that the decision to treat the first shooting as a domestic dispute was a common-sense policing decision that was logical at the time.

But some campus security specialists questioned whether the university might have had other reasons to delay notification during the shooting crisis.

"We can't know what was going on in their heads," said Katherine Andriole, assistant program director for Security on Campus, a national advocacy organization, "but they may have been reluctant because of their image. We urge that, as hard as it is, that they disregard their concern for image in a situation like this."

In 2005, the Virginia Crime Commission conducted an evaluation of college and university police departments. Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), chairman of the commission, said Virginia Tech had one of the most professional and highly trained college police departments in the state.

Staff writer Tim Craig contributed to this report.

Pawnshop, Dealer Supplied Handguns

By Brigid Schulte and Sari Horwitz

Washington Post Staff Writers

On Feb. 9, Cho Seung Hui walked into a pawnshop on Main Street in Blacksburg, directly across the street from the Virginia Tech campus, and picked up one of the guns he would use in his deadly rampage Monday: a Walther .22-caliber pistol, a relatively inexpensive firearm most commonly used for target shooting or plinking cans.

One month later, on March 16, Cho stepped into Roanoke Firearms, a 3,000-square-foot, full-service gun dealer where more than 350 guns are on display. Cho offered his driver's license, a checkbook that showed a matching address and an immigration card.

Once an instant background check confirmed his clean criminal record, Cho had little else to do, other than pay $571, to become the legal owner of a Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartridges.

 

 

With those two handguns -- both easy to use, reliable and semiautomatic -- Cho, 23, carried out a shooting rampage that left 33 people dead, including himself, and injured nearly as many.

Cho's choice of weapons and ammunition explained how he could kill and injure so many people so quickly.

The Glock, often carried by police and members of the military, is also a popular choice for civilians interested in self-defense, gun experts say. Once the trigger is depressed and the bullet fired, the gun ejects the empty shell casing, chambers a new round and is ready to shoot again immediately. The .22-caliber pistol operates in a similar fashion.

Cho's Roanoke purchase, captured on the store's video surveillance, was unremarkable. The owner described Cho as low-key and clean-cut.

"He filled out the paperwork. I sent it to the state police. They gave him a clean bill of health," said owner John Markell. "We're very careful about screening people. We size people up all the time. If we think they're fidgety, we won't sell them a gun."

Joe Dowdy, owner of JND Pawnbrokers in Blacksburg, said Cho did not purchase the gun from him but came into his shop to pick it up, probably after buying it on the Internet. Dowdy said he received the gun from another vendor. Cho came into the shop, showed his ID, filled out some paperwork, waited for a background check and paid a $30 fee.

"People are saying I sold him the firearm," Dowdy said. "I did not."

Dowdy said he cannot be sure that Cho purchased the gun online but that is the most likely explanation for why another vendor would have sent it to the pawnshop for Cho.

Both transactions were legal. Unlike some other states, Virginia has no waiting period before purchasing a handgun; nor does it require registration. State law does limit purchasers to one gun per month.

Law enforcement officials say the Glock that Cho used had a 15-round magazine, illegal under the federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. Several empty magazines were recovered at the scene.

"If you have four or five rounds in a clip rather than 15, the shooter has to reload and reload," said Brian Malte, with the Brady Campaign, a gun safety group. "That gives someone an opportunity to do something to stop him."

Law enforcement officials have tied the 9mm Glock to both the shootings at a residence hall early Monday morning and to the massacre at Norris Hall two and a half hours later. Investigators were easily able to trace the Glock to Roanoke Firearms in Roanoke because the receipt for the gun was in the backpack Cho carried Monday.

Officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives hand-delivered the two handguns, shell casings and bullet fragments found at the crime scenes to the ATF National Laboratory outside of Beltsville, according to ATF Special Agent Rich Marianos. There, investigators worked through the night to "raise" or reveal the serial numbers on the guns, which had been obliterated, so they could be traced to their manufacturer, distributor and then gun shops.

Tool mark examiners were able to match the bullet fragments and casings to the firearms through a process sometimes called "ballistics fingerprinting."

When a bullet is fired, it is rotated in a gun barrel like a spiraled football. The passage through the barrel marks the sides of the bullet, leaving a pattern of alternating raised lines called "lands" and gouged lines called "grooves." These patterns and even more minute impressions, which can be examined and measured under a microscope, are unique in every firearm.

An individual weapon leaves the same distinct marks on every bullet fired, allowing recovered bullets to be matched to a particular gun. The guns are also test-fired into a tank of water and the bullets recovered to be compared with bullets from crime scenes.

By yesterday morning, the ATF had provided the Virginia State Police with all the information matching the bullets to the guns.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

For Mike and Marcy, Forever Ended on Monday Morning

By Tamara Jones

Washington Post Staff Writer

Mike Pohl with friend Greg Gecik on the Virginia Tech campus at a memorial to the shooting victims. His 23-year-old son Mike Jr. was killed in his German class. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 -- There was a trivia game Mike Pohle and his fiancee, Marcy Crevonis, liked to play called Imaginiff, where they took turns posing silly questions: Imagine if you were a circus performer, what would you be? Imagine if you were a car, a color, a movie. They had their own version of the game, too, where they imagined the life they planned to spend together. Mike already had named the five children they would have.

He was 23 when he was killed in his Monday morning German class at Virginia Tech.

She is 19, left trying to imagine a life without him.

Michael Stephen Pohle Jr. was due to graduate with a degree in biochemistry in just three weeks, worrying about finding the right job and staying close to Marcy, a freshman who graduated from Langley High in McLean and met him at a mutual friend's party last fall. They argued over their favorite sports teams, and were inseparable from then on. She gave him a Phillies jersey last Christmas, and he slept in it every night. Yesterday she went back to his apartment and put it on, inhaling the lost scent of him as she lay on his empty bed and wept.

"We were the same person. We shared the same thoughts. We finished each other's sentences," she says, standing on the emerald green Drillfield, where they often met between classes, and where state troopers now order Marcy and Mike's grieving family to move back, move back, move back because President Bush is about to arrive to pay respects at the makeshift VT shrine to 31 students and faculty members murdered in Monday's rampage.

Marcy remembers waking up in Mike's arms that morning. "He's a big guy, so it's hard for me to sleep with my head on his chest, but I did Sunday night, and I heard his heart beating."

Go back to sleep, he told her, you don't have to get up.

But they always walked each other to class, so Marcy sleepily got dressed and joined him on the way to his 9:05 Intro to German class in Room 207 of Norris Hall. They had time to stop at Marcy's dorm first -- she needed her book for Russian in an hour -- but a police officer at the door of West Ambler Johnston Hall turned her away. The dorm was locked down, he said without explanation. Marcy thought nothing of it. "People were always pulling the fire alarm, and there had been the bomb threats."

Mike urged her to go back to his apartment. She remembers that it was 9:02. The last time she would ever speak with him.

Marcy headed back to the dorm, determined to get her book. She slipped in unchallenged through a side door, and went up to her room. People in the hallway were talking about a shooting or someone being hurt on the fourth floor. Marcy sent Mike a text message saying something seemed to be going on.

Where are you? Lock your door. I don't want you roaming. Be safe, keep me updated, he replied. He was always protective that way. Marcy felt invincible with Mike beside her. "He could bench-press like 400 pounds," she boasts.

Marcy was watching something stupid on TV, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," she thinks, when a news bulletin broke in reporting a gunman on the loose at Virginia Tech. A girl returning to the dorm from class said police cars were everywhere, that something was going on across campus. "I was panicked," Marcy recalls. She tried to call Mike, but he didn't answer. She messaged him: Call me asap.

At 9:55, when his German class was supposed to be out, Marcy raced across the campus toward Norris Hall. She had to reach him, tell him they needed to get away, something bad was happening. A police cordon stopped her.

Forced to wait back at the dorm, "I called and I called and I called," but Mike didn't answer, she says. "I thought, there are so many buildings over there, he's never going to choose Mike's building." Friends began calling to ask how she was. "I didn't care how I was. I was just trying to find Mike." Hours passed without word. Marcy reached Mike's younger sister, Nicole, at college in West Virginia, and she called home to Flemington, N.J. Mike Sr. began driving south.

Now they stand grieving together on the Drillfield, Mike's father, his sister and her boyfriend, his godfather and the brown-eyed girl he gave a Tiffany heart to last Christmas. "Mike told me every day: We're getting married," Marcy says. It was more a given than a proposal. She had been wondering if the ring might come on her 20th birthday -- May 13. The day after Mike's graduation. He always said he didn't want to be officially engaged for more than a year, but he'd been hinting about a big present.

"He was a tough guy on the outside, but he was romantic," Marcy says. He filled her dorm room with rose petals and chocolate kisses on Valentine's Day. When they went to the Bahamas for spring break, he dipped his powerful arms in the surf and cleared a path because Marcy was scared of "random things in the sea" touching her.

His father is waiting to collect what the coroner's office refers to as Mike's "effects" and what Marcy says is a book bag stuffed with every paper he probably had this semester. She was the organized one.

They cooked dinner together on the weekend nights when he wasn't tending bar at the Nerv, and she laughs through sobs remembering their attempt at fried chicken -- was it only three days ago? -- and how they nearly set his apartment on fire. The smoke was so thick they couldn't see each other. They loved to sleep past noon on Sundays and argue whether their imaginary daughter's name should be Emily Rose or Victoria Rose. Mike favored the latter.

And if their kids ever got in trouble, Mike vowed, he wouldn't lay a hand on them but, Marcy recounts, "he would make them run obstacles and wind sprints instead."

"Always the jock," his father comments, managing a smile. The dean of students told the Pohles that Mike will be awarded his diploma posthumously. Marcy has been excused from classes for the rest of the year, and will go home with the Pohles to bury the man she loved. She'll come back to Tech next year, she says, "because Mike would have wanted it that way." He loved this place.

They would live someday in a cozy house near the water, maybe Savannah or Williamsburg, and backpack through Europe, and sleep past noon on Sundays and argue forever about her beloved Yankees and his Phillies. She would let him name their daughter Victoria, not Emily, and fall asleep each night in the arms of a man who would sweep the ocean floor for her.

Imagine if.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

By David Maraniss

Washington Post Staff Writer

The roommates crossed paths near the bathroom door at 5 in the morning. In the Monday darkness, another school week at Virginia Tech was about to begin. Karan Grewal had pulled an all-nighter to finish his accounting paper. His eyes were bleary as he saw Cho Seung Hui, in boxer shorts and T-shirt, moving around him to get into the bathroom. No words were exchanged, but that is how it always was with Cho, the silent stranger among six guys in Suite 2121 of Harper Hall. Cho, or Seung as his suitemates called him, never looked you in the eye, rarely changed expression, would just walk right on by.

Grewal returned to his room and collapsed on his bed, falling into a deep sleep. He would not stir until mid-morning, awakened by an uncommon sound on campus, the wail of sirens.

Cho left the bathroom, got dressed, pulled a stocking cap over his head, and set out from the dorm on his way to kill 32 students and teachers and then himself in the bloodiest mass murder by a lone gunman in American history.

The malevolent force that emerged from Suite 2121 that morning set in motion a day of enormous tragedy. There was one murderous villain on the Blacksburg stage with all the familiar characteristics: lonely, angry, mentally unstable, desperate, uncommunicative. But with the world watching, scores of other people were drawn into the unfolding drama, from a brave old Holocaust survivor who tried valiantly to save his students and died in the trying, to the kid in German class who became an eloquent voice of the survivors, to the quick-thinking student in computer class who placed a heavy table to block the doorway just in time, to the young man in mechanical engineering who made it through by pretending that he was dead.

 

April 16, 2007 -- another date of death for people to absorb, if not fully comprehend. Another unthinkable worst in this violent world. This time it was on a college campus tucked away in southwestern Virginia, but the heartache was familiar and universal. Like a string of little jewels, one upon another, came the stories of priceless lives cut short: Alameddine, Bishop, Bluhm, Clark, Cloyd, Couture-Nowak, Granata, Gwaltney, Hammaren, Herbstritt, Hill, Hilscher, Lane, La Porte, Lee, Librescu, Loganathan, Lumbantoruan, McCain, O'Neil, Ortiz, Panchal, Perez Cueva, Peterson, Pohle, Pryde, Read, Samaha, Shaalan, Sherman, Turner, White.

* * *

The first call came into campus police at 7:15 that morning. A female resident assistant on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall, a short walk from where Cho lived. She said there had been a shooting. She had heard screams, then more screams, then a pop, pop, and went down the hall to discover two bodies, a male and female, near Room 4040 in what was known as the "elevator" section, an area in the middle of the dorm between the men's side and the women's side.

Police later identified the female as Emily Hilscher, a freshman from Woodville, Va. The male was one of the dorm's resident assistants, Ryan Clark, from Georgia. The officers began interviewing other students. Aside from the resident assistant, most had not heard or seen anything, even though there was a trail of bloody footprints down the hallway.

Among the first medical responders were student leaders of the Virginia Tech rescue squad. Matthew Lewis was brushing his teeth at the squad office on the northwestern perimeter of the sprawling campus when the fire alarm went off. Moments later, another alarm sounded, and both EMT ambulances were on their way. One of the victims had been taken away by the time Lewis arrived. His group took the second victim. The dorm's fourth floor was nearly empty. All the students had been taken down to a common room a floor below, where resident assistants and counselors talked with them.

Rumors were flying about shootings and death. Most of the students on those floors were freshmen, and they were visibly distraught. They were ordered to stay put; the hall was under lockdown. After a year on campus, they had finally started to think of their hall as home, said Sarah Peet, a student from Columbus, Ohio. Now all they were talking about was getting out of there, going home.

Investigators, in their initial interviews with those who knew Hilscher, learned about her boyfriend, a student at nearby Radford University. Maybe it was a domestic incident, they concluded. Most are. Some officers were dispatched to go find the boyfriend, Karl D. Thornhill, operating under the assumption that they had the problem contained.

Two hours later, another 911 came in, this one from Norris Hall.

Not a Hint Of a Problem

It was supposed to be an easy week for Trey Perkins, a sophomore from Yorkville, Va. -- "no tests or anything, kind of laid-back week." He had stayed up late Sunday night at his off-campus apartment with three friends, watching a National Hockey League playoff game between the Dallas Stars and the Vancouver Canucks. He got up at 7, plenty of time to make his 8 a.m. class in engineering dynamics at Randolph Hall. It was a lecture, going over material for a test, and the professor let them out a few minutes early. Randolph is right behind Norris Hall, where Perkins had a 9:05 in elementary German. He walked over and sat in the second-floor hallway outside Room 207.

When the previous class let out, Perkins was the first one in, greeting his instructor, Christopher James Bishop, known as Jamie to his friends, Herr Bishop to his students, a bespectacled 35-year-old with a long pony tail and perpetual smile. They enjoyed a comfortable relationship that revolved more around sports than German. Bishop, from Georgia, was an Atlanta Falcons fan, and Perkins, who had lived in New Orleans before his family moved to Virginia, rooted for the Saints. Just because the Falcons had the most famous Virginia Tech player ever, quarterback Michael Vick, didn't mean that Perkins could switch allegiances. As classmates slowly filtered into the class, Bishop and Perkins bantered about whom their two teams should pick in the NFL draft.

Next door in Room 211, Kristina Heeger had arrived from her off-campus apartment for her intermediate French class taught by Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. Heeger, a sophomore from Vienna, had spent much of the night before with a group of friends who had made a habit of gathering to watch "Planet Earth" on the Discovery Channel and then "Entourage" on HBO. Ten or 12 of them would meet at Ross Berger's place next to a frat house on Roanoke Street, then hang around and talk for a few hours after the television shows.

Monday morning, before leaving for French, Heeger had been on her computer, exchanging instant messages with Berger, up since 6 writing a paper for his Global Ethics class on what he called the totalitarianism of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Most of the messages were quick little contacts: hello, how you, good morning, how's your day, cold and crappy outside. The last IM from Berger read: Have a good day, be safe, and don't let the wind blow you away.

Up and down the hallways, things were getting underway. Haiyan Cheng was preparing to start her computer science class. She was filling in for the professor, who was away at a conference. Liviu Librescu, one of the renowned veterans of Tech's professorial academy, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor, was launching into his course on solid mechanics, and next door to him, G.V. Loganathan was getting into advanced hydrology. One floor above them, Kevin P. Granata, a professor of biomechanics, was working in his office, where he had developed some the country's most advanced thinking on movement dynamics and cerebral palsy. And down on the first floor, his brother-in-law, Michael Diersing, whose wife was the identical twin sister of Granata's wife, was chatting and checking e-mail alongside Granata's doctoral assistant, Gregory Slota.

At 9:26, the first e-mail alert went out to the Virginia Tech community, faculty and students, about the earlier incident at West Ambler Johnston. The university leadership team had been meeting for nearly an hour by then, going over what they knew and what they didn't know, and how they should handle the situation. The university police chief, Wendell Flinchum, had come in with the latest news on the investigation. It still looked to them like an isolated incident. The e-mail popped up on computers across the campus. John Ellerbe, a senior history major from Woodbridge, had just gotten out of the shower and was preparing for his 10 a.m. class when he read it: "A shooting occurred at West Ambler Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating. The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case... We will post as soon as we have more information."

Not long after that posting, the world of Virginia Tech changed forever. Life is mundane until it is not, and then the mundane can look serene.

Popping Sounds In the Hallway

The first attack came in Room 206, advanced hydrology taught by Loganathan. There were 13 graduate students in the class, all from the civil engineering department. There was no warning, no foreboding sounds down the hallway. The gunman entered wordlessly and began shooting. Students scattered to get as far away from the door as possible. One bullet hit Partahi "Mora" Lumbantoruan, an Indonesian doctoral student. His body fell on top of fellow graduate student Guillermo Colman. Then the shooter aimed his two guns around the room, picking off people one by one before leaving. Colman, protected by his classmate's prone body, was one of only four in the room to survive. The professor and so many of his disciples, most of them international students, were dead. Along with Colman, the three who survived were Nathanial Krause, Lee Hixon and Chang-Min Park. Two other members of the class lived because they didn't make it in that morning.

In Jamie Bishop's German class, they could hear the popping sounds. What was that? Some kind of joke? Construction noises? More pops. Someone suggested that Bishop should place something in front of the classroom door, just in case. The words were no sooner uttered than the door opened and a shooter stepped in. He was holding guns in both hands. Bishop was hit first, a bullet slicing into the side of his head. All the students saw it, an unbelievable horror. The gunman had a serious but calm look on his face. Almost no expression. He stood in the front and kept firing, barely moving. People scrambled out of the line of fire. Trey Perkins knocked over a couple of desks and tried to take cover. No way I can survive this, he thought. His mind raced to his mother and what she would go through when she heard he was dead. Shouts, cries, sobs, more shots, maybe 30 in all. Someone threw up. There was blood everywhere. It took about a minute and a half, and then the gunman left the room.

Perkins and two classmates, Derek O'Dell and Katelyn Carney, ran up to the door and put their feet against it to make sure he could not get back in. They would have used a heavy table, but there were none, and the desks weren't strong enough.

Soon the gunman tried to get back in. The three students pressed against the door with their arms and legs, straining with their lives at stake. Unable to budge the door, the gunman shot through it four times. Splinters flew from the thick wood. The gunman turned away, again. There were more pops, but each one a bit farther away as he moved down the hall. The scene in the classroom "was brutal," Perkins recalled. Most of the students were dead. He saw a few who were bleeding but conscious and tried to save them. He took off his gray hoodie sweat shirt and wrapped it around a male student's leg.

The French class next door was also devastated by then. Couture-Nowak, whose husband was a horticulture professor at Tech, was dead. Most of Kristina Heeger's classmates were dead. Reema Samaha, a contemporary dancer from Northern Virginia, was dead. And Ross Alameddine from Massachusetts and Daniel Perez Cueva from Peru and Caitlin Hammaren from Upstate New York. Heeger was among the few lucky ones; she and Hillary Strollo were wounded. Heeger was hit in the stomach. A bullet sliced through Strollo's abdomen and frayed her liver. Clay Violand, a 20-year-old junior from Walt Whitman High in Bethesda, also survived.

Like those in other classes, the French students had heard the banging, or pops. "That's not what I think it is?" asked Couture-Nowak.

Violand, feeling panicky, pointed at her and said, "Put that desk in front of the door, now!" She did, and then someone called 911. The desk could not hold back the push from outside. The first thing Violand saw was a gun, then the gunman. "I quickly dove under a desk," he recalled. "That was the desk I chose to die under."

He listened as the gunman began "methodically and calmly" shooting people. "It sounded rhythmic-like. He took his time between each shot and kept up the pace, moving from person to person." After every shot, Violand thought, "Okay, the next one is me." But shot after shot, and he felt nothing. He played dead.

"The room was silent except for the haunting sound of moans, some quiet crying, and someone muttering: 'It's okay. It's going to be okay. They will be here soon,' " he recalled. The gunman circled again and seemed to be unloading a second round into the wounded. Violand thought he heard the gunman reload three times. He could not hold back odd thoughts: "I wonder what a gun wound feels like. I hope it doesn't hurt. I wonder if I'll die slow or fast." He made eye contact with a girl, also still alive. They stared at each other until the gunman left.

The small group of 10 in Haiyan Cheng's computer class heard the loud banging outside. She thought it was construction noise at first, but it distracted her. No, they were pops. Then silence, then more pops. Cheng and a female student went to the door and peered out. They saw a man emerge from a room across the hall. He was holding a gun, but it was pointed down. They quickly shut the door. More popping sounds, getting louder, closer. The class was in a panic. One student, Zach Petkowicz, was near the lectern "cowering behind it," he would later say, when he realized that the door was vulnerable. There was a heavy rectangular table in the class, and he and two other students pushed it against the door. No sooner had they fixed it in place than someone pushed hard from the outside. It was the gunman. He forced it open about six inches, but no farther. Petkowicz and his classmates pushed back, not letting up. The gunman fired two shots through the door. One hit the lectern and sent wood scraps and metal flying. Neither hit any of the students. They could hear a clip dropping, the distinct, awful sound of reloading. And, again, the gunman moved on.

There was more carnage in the hallway. Kevin Granata had heard the commotion in his third-floor office and ran downstairs. He was a military veteran, very protective of his students. He was gunned down trying to confront the shooter. His brother-in-law Michael Diersing, down on the first floor, heard the awful sounds and realized that the building was under attack. Diersing stepped out into the hallway with Greg Slota and noticed that the first-floor entry doors had been chained and padlocked. No way out. They shuddered to think that sometime earlier, as they were chatting or working or drinking coffee, the murderer must have walked right past their room on his way to chain the doors. Their room had a lock on it. Several students came rushing toward them, and they let them in and then locked up.

Room 204, Professor Librescu's class, seems to have been the gunman's last stop on the second floor. The teacher and his dozen students had heard too much, though they had not seen anything yet. They had heard a girl's piercing scream in the hallway. They had heard the pops and more pops. By the time the gunman reached the room, many of the students were on the window ledge. There was grass below, not concrete, and even some shrubs. The old professor was at the door, which would not lock, pushing against it, when the gunman pushed from the other side. Some of the students jumped, others prepared to jump until Librescu could hold the door no longer and the gunman forced his way inside.

Matt Webster, a 23-year-old engineering student from Smithfield, Va., was one of four students inside when the gunman appeared. "He was decked out like he was going to war," Webster recalled. "Black vest, extra ammunition clips, everything." Again, his look was blank, just a stare, no expression, as he started shooting. The first shot hit Librescu in the head, killing him. Webster ducked to the floor and tucked himself into a ball. He shut his eyes and listened as the gunman walked to the back of the classroom. Two other students were huddled by the wall. He shot a girl, and she cried out. Now the shooter was three feet away, pointing his gun right at Webster.

"I felt something hit my head, but I was still conscious," Webster recalled. The bullet had grazed his hairline, then ricocheted through his upper right arm. He played dead. "I lay there and let him think he had done his job. I wasn't moving at all, hoping he wouldn't come back." The gunman left the room as suddenly as he had come in.

When Webster opened his eyes, he saw blood everywhere. Some of it was his, though he didn't realize it until he saw blood pouring out the sleeve of his sweat shirt. The girl nearby was unable to speak, only moaning. Blood seeped from her mouth.

Jumping Students And Shocked Police

At 9:45, the Virginia Tech police received the first 911 call from inside Norris Hall. Then more calls started coming in to police and EMTs throughout the region, with reports of mass casualties. The first officers from the university and city police forces arrived in minutes to find a large crowd of students on the Drillfield, a vast expanse across from Norris. They ordered the students to leave the area, immediately.

Tucker Armstrong, a freshman from Stephens City, Va., had been walking by Norris when he heard the shots and saw several students jumping out the second-floor windows. They were landing in bushes and struggling to get up. He saw the police arrive, fully armed, yelling at everyone to get inside. Matthew Murray, a freshman from Herndon, was watching as he huddled nearby in a second-floor doorway at McBride Hall. "People were running out of Norris and screaming. Streams of people were running out constantly. It was controlled, but you could tell everyone was panicked and very upset." An older man came out grabbing his bloody head. Then the jumpers. At least three people leaping out of second-story windows. One missed the grass and "hit the pavement especially hard. He landed kind of crunched up over toward his face, and he didn't get up at all."

Jamal Albarghouti, a Palestinian graduate student in construction management from the West Bank, was nearby. He had been on his way to talk to an adviser about leadership skills when he heard the noise at Norris and instinctively ran toward it. With his silver Nokia N70 smart phone, he captured flitting video of the scene: shots firing, police scampering, wind blowing, terror. It only hinted at the horrific violence, but for the rest of that day and night, it would serve television as the primary video footage of what happened at Norris.

After storming the building, breaking the locks, the police ran up to the second floor and carefully entered each classroom, one by one. At some point, Cho Seung Hui apparently placed one of his guns at his temple and pulled the trigger. The scene was something these experienced officers had never witnessed. As they entered each room, they asked the students to hold out their hands, show that they had no weapons, and then led those who could walk down the stairs and outside. But there were so many bodies. Blood everywhere, pieces of flesh. The shooter himself, with a gun lying nearby, was almost unrecognizable, a face destroyed. And the innocent victims did not just have bullet wounds, the police would recount later, but were riddled with bullets, gushing blood. The scene was so emotionally overwhelming that many officers could not hold back tears even as they went about their business.

Matthew Lewis, the student EMT president, heard the distress call when he was at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where he had taken the second victim of the West Ambler Johnston shooting. By the time he made it back to campus, a staging area for medical treatment and evacuations had been set up on Stanger Street, a block from Norris Hall. Emergency personnel were treating students with minor injuries, the jumpers and others who had been scuffed during the panic, but not shot. People were trickling out from Norris, but it was no longer chaos.

Treating Wounds, Consoling Loved Ones

The first wave of wounded patients was carried into Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg shortly after 10 a.m. -- bloodied, mangled, some on the verge of death. Davis B. Stoeckle, a general surgeon, was on call that morning and worked the emergency room from beginning to end with a colleague, Holly Wheeling. They had been told to brace for the extraordinary numbers of victims and levels of trauma that they would face. They established a triage to focus first on the most gravely wounded.

One after another, the students came in.

Gunshot to the leg.

Bullet hole in the stomach.

Gunshot through the liver, part of a kidney and colon.

As accustomed as he was to dealing with morbidity, Stoeckle felt himself thinking the scene was unreal. He had never encountered such a volume of patients, more gunshot victims in a few hours than the hospital had treated in nearly five years. As they worked, Stoeckle and Wheeling heard stories of bravery from the wounded: students pushing others into closets to protect them from the barrage of bullets and helping one another with makeshift tourniquets and bandages. In one case, Stoeckle concluded that a student's quick medical action might have saved his own life. Bleeding significantly from his right leg, this student found an electrical cord in a classroom and wrapped it tightly around his wound, which kept him from bleeding to death until the rescue squad arrived and placed a tourniquet above the bleeding artery.

 

While the doctors began taking the wounded into surgery, the hospital filled with friends and relatives of students who were believed to be there. Some were, some were elsewhere, some, as it turned out, were already dead. The waiting parties were taken to a large, empty room in the back of the building, just drywall and concrete and folding chairs. They sat around in circles, talking, waiting for news. Food and water were brought in. There were no televisions there, so the only updates they could get were from new groups coming in.

Ross Berger arrived at noon and was there all day with more than 20 friends and relatives of Kristina Heeger, who had been shot in the French class. By mid-afternoon there were nearly 200 people, he estimated, all doing the same thing. "We had people running out crying, running in crying. A group of people who got there an hour after I did sat around for two hours, and finally someone came in and read off the names of patients there, and their name was not on it, so they got up and asked, 'Where is he?' and were told, 'We have no idea.' " The news for Kristina was better: she was there, and she was stable, recovering from wounds to her lower abdomen.

The Inn at Virginia Tech was another assembly place for the concerned. Guards at the front door tried to limit admission to friends and families. As the day wore on, names of the dead and wounded trickled out. Parents cried out and clung to each other in grief. In the context of the horror, it was often a relief to hear that a loved one was at the hospital. It could have been worse. At 5:45 p.m., a woman in a long gray coat burst from an inner room, pushing her way past a grief counselor. "My baby!" she said, sobbing, cupping her face in her hands as she collapsed into the arms of a friend.

Here, as elsewhere, one of the rivers of conversation was about whether the university handled the day properly or should have shut down the entire campus after the first shootings at West Ambler Johnston. "I think they should have closed the whole thing. It's not worth it," said Hoda Bizri of Princeton, W.Va., who was visiting her daughter, Siwar, a graduate student. The Bizris, like many others, were waiting for word about a friend who had been inside Norris and could not be reached.

Nearby, Kristen Wickham was looking for news about her friend Caitlin Hammaren, a fellow New Yorker. Everyone was trying to reach Caitlin, with no luck. She should have called by now, Wickham thought, not knowing that her friend was among the dead. Hammaren's parents were trying to reach Blacksburg and couldn't get a plane, so they were making the long drive from Upstate New York. Parents were making similar pilgrimages by car and plane from every corner of the country.

One of the early flights from the West Coast brought Nikki Giovanni, the renowned poet and Virginia Tech professor. At the end of her red-eye flight, she had heard about the shootings and the early reports that generally described the gunman. "When I heard the suspect was an Asian student, I had no doubt in my mind who did it," she said later. Cho had been in one of her classes, and his writing was so violent, so focused on death, that he had scared other students to the point where Giovanni had felt compelled to remove him from the class, sending him to a colleague for tutoring.

Back to Harper And a Killer's Room

It was not until 9:06 that night -- when Virginia State Police investigators knocked on the door at Suite 2121 in Harper Hall -- that Karan Grewal realized that the roommate he had last seen in boxers and T-shirt 16 hours earlier was the cause of all the horror. The investigators interviewed Grewal and the four other roommates. No, they had not seen guns around the suite, but Cho was a strange guy. Wouldn't talk. Played the same songs over and over on his laptop. Didn't like to turn the light off in his room. Had a bike that he rode around campus late at night. Would not go out with them, except one rare time when they got him drinking at a party and he said he had an imaginary girlfriend who called him Spanky. Never saw him with a girl, though, or any friends whatsoever. Before spring break, he had seemed to get obsessed with a few women. Had been stalking them on his computer, and sometimes in person. The cops were called twice. Once he was sent to counseling and said he might as well kill himself. He started shaving his head down to a fuzz cut. Wore contact lenses. Used something for his acne. Was working out at the campus gym. Had been getting up really early recently.

The investigators scoured Cho's room for evidence. The room looked like any college kid's, strewed with papers, food wrappers, cereal boxes. This is what they took away, according to a search warrant filed later by Virginia State Police special agent M.D. Austin:

Chain from top left closet shelf.

Folding knife and combination padlock.

Compaq computer Serial # CND33100IL on desk.

Assorted documents, notepads, writings from desk.

Combination lock.

Tool box.

Nine books, two notebooks, envelopes from top shelf.

Assorted books and pads from lower shelf.

Compact discs from desk.

Items from desktop drawer, mail, three notebooks, check credit card

Items from second drawer -- Kodak digital camera, keys, Citibank statement.

Two cases of compact discs from dresser top.

Six sheets of green graph paper.

Other officers walked the halls of Harper with a photograph of Cho, asking students if they knew him. They were all rattled. Most did not recognize him; a few said they thought they had walked by him now and then. How lucky they were, thought Tom Duscheid, a management student from Pittsburgh. This is the residence hall where Cho lived, not Ambler Johnston, What if he had rampaged through here with his guns?

There were still so many unanswered questions. Why did Cho go to West Ambler Johnston? Why did he choose Norris Hall for his rampage? Whom was he looking for? What did he do between the two incidents? How did he move around the campus unnoticed? Police questions, questions of detail. They went to work on some of the little stuff, tracing Cho's movements. They found out that on Feb. 9 he had stepped into a pawnshop directly across the street from the Tech campus, right on Main Street, JND Pawn Brokers, to make the first purchase of the guns he would use later. It was a Walther .22-caliber pistol, relatively inexpensive, commonly used for target shooting. From then until days before the shooting, he traveled to nearby stores to buy ammunition. Some at the Wal-Mart Supercenter, some at Dick's Sporting Goods over in Christianburg. On March 16, exactly a month before his killing rampage, he went to Roanoke Firearms, a full-service gun dealership with more than 350 guns on display. He showed his driver's license, a checkbook with a matching address and an immigration card. A surveillance camera captured him making the $571 purchase of a Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartridges.

Days later, a larger clue would come from NBC News and Cho himself. At 9:01 Monday morning, before going to Norris Hall, Cho sent an Express Mail package to NBC in New York that included photographs, video and a note including these chilling words: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today."

Little Sleep For the Living

When Ross Berger got home from the hospital Monday night, assured that his friend Kristina Heeger would survive, there was no more storage space for messages on his cellphone, and his computer was flooded with e-mails. Everyone was talking. Names were coming in. He knew four of the dead students. He turned on the television for the first time. Fox News was showing the shaky video footage taken by Jamal Albarghouti outside Norris Hall. A running count of gunshots was displayed alongside the shaky pictures. "And like that was the first thing I saw, and I went into my bathroom and puked," Berger said.

But he came back and watched some more, inevitably, and the more he saw and heard, the more unsettled he became. So many conflicting feelings were banging around in his head. The country seemed to be harping on the police and the university administration and how they had handled, or mishandled, the unfolding tragedy. Berger and all his classmates, except one, were innocent, yet he felt as though they, too, were being tainted by the obsessive focus and the natural human desire to fix blame. The guy to blame was dead, he thought. People didn't understand that 99.9 percent of the time this was a wonderful little place to be, that nothing really goes on. The cops here, what did they know about mass murder? They were used to dealing with some drunk kid, not a psycho. How can you stop something like that? Everyone felt horrible, Berger and all his friends were still bawling, but they also still felt a deep pride in Virginia Tech. He thought about it all night, the killings, the conflict, and never found sleep.

Few who had endured the day could sleep that night. At his off-campus apartment on Patrick Henry Drive, Trey Perkins stayed up in the comfortable embrace of his parents. Don and Sheree Perkins had begun the four-hour car trip from Yorkville that afternoon as soon as Sheree could slip free from an elementary school field trip she had been leading.

Trey had been one of the primary student voices all day, talking coolly and calmly about the horror that visited his German class. He had seen the worst that man can do to man, and now he was in a daze. It actually helped him to talk, to respond to questions, to go over the details in rote fashion, because when he spoke aloud they seemed somewhat removed. When he was alone and silent, something deeper washed over him that made him shudder. It was a simple image that looped again and again in his mind's eye. The first moment, the classroom door opening, the gunman coming in.

About the Narrative

This narrative is based on scores of interviews with shooting victims, witnesses and other participants in the events at Virginia Tech on Monday. All thoughts expressed by people in the narrative are taken directly from the interviews.

Reporting from Blacksburg were staff writers Michelle Boorstein, Chris L. Jenkins, Susan Levine, Jerry Markon, Nick Miroff, David Montgomery, Candace Rondeaux, Ian Shapira, Michael D. Shear and Sandhya Somashekhar. Reporting from Washington were staff writers Keith L. Alexander, Sari Horwitz, Carol D. Leonnig, Michael E. Ruane, Katherine Shaver, Jose Antonio Vargas and William Wan. Staff researchers Alice Crites, Meg Smith and Julie Tate also contributed to this narrative.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

"Within minutes of reports of a gunman on the Virginia Tech campus, the print and online staffs began pulling together our coverage plan. Within an hour, we had our first file indicating that a gunman was on the campus. With each substantive update, we changed our home page presentation to reflect what we knew and the depth of our coverage."

© 2007 The Washington Post Company