Virginia Tech shooting
The Virginia Tech shooting was a spree shooting that occurred on Monday, April 16, 2007, comprising two attacks on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate student at the university, killed 32 people and wounded 17 others with two semi-automatic pistols before committing suicide. Six others were injured jumping out of windows to escape Cho.
Cho first shot and killed two people at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory. Two hours later, he perpetrated a school shooting at Norris Hall, a classroom building, where he chained the main entrance doors shut and fired into four classrooms and a stairwell, killing thirty more people. As police stormed Norris Hall, Cho fatally shot himself in the head. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and remained so for nine years until the Pulse nightclub shooting. It remains the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history and the deadliest mass shooting in Virginia history.
The attacks received international media coverage. It sparked debate about gun violence, gun laws, gaps in the U.S. system for treating mental health issues, Cho's state of mind, the responsibility of college administrations, privacy laws, journalism ethics, and other issues. News organizations that aired portions of Cho's multimedia manifesto were criticized by victims' families, Virginia law enforcement officials, and the American Psychiatric Association.
Cho had previously been diagnosed with selective mutism and severe depression. During much of his middle school and high school years, he received therapy and special education support. After graduating from high school, Cho enrolled at Virginia Tech. Because of federal privacy laws, the university was unaware of Cho's previous diagnoses or the accommodations he had been granted at school. In 2005, Cho was accused of stalking two female students. After an investigation, a Virginia special justice declared Cho mentally ill and ordered him to attend treatment. Because he was not institutionalized, he was allowed to purchase guns. The shooting prompted the state of Virginia to close legal loopholes that had allowed individuals adjudicated as mentally unsound to purchase handguns without detection by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. It also led to the passage of the first major federal gun control measure in the U.S. since 1994. The law strengthening the NICS was signed by President George W. Bush on January 5, 2008.
Administrators at Virginia Tech were criticized by the Virginia Tech Review Panel, a state-appointed panel tasked with investigating the incident, for failing to take action that might have decreased the number of casualties. The panel's report also reviewed gun laws and pointed out gaps in mental health care as well as privacy laws that left Cho's deteriorating condition untreated when he was a student at Virginia Tech.
Attacks
The shootings occurred in two separate incidents. The first incident was in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a residence hall where Seung-Hui Cho killed two students. The second incident was in Norris Hall, an academic building on the opposite side of the campus where the other thirty-one deaths occurred, including that of Cho himself, and all the nonlethal injuries occurred. Cho used two semi-automatic pistols during the attacks: a.22-caliber Walther P22 and a 9 mm Glock 19.West Ambler Johnston shootings
Cho was seen near the entrance to West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 students, at about 6:47 a.m. EDT. Normally, the hall is accessible only to its residents via magnetic key cards before 10:00 a.m.; Cho's student mailbox was in the lobby of the building, so he had a pass card allowing access after 7:30 a.m., but it is unclear how he gained earlier entrance to the building.At around 7:15 a.m., Cho entered the room that freshman Emily Jane Hilscher shared with another student, and shot Hilscher, a 19-year-old from Woodville, Virginia. After hearing the gunshots, a resident assistant, 22-year-old senior Ryan C. Clark of Martinez, Georgia, attempted to aid Hilscher. Cho shot and killed Clark. Hilscher remained alive for three hours after being shot, but no one from the school, law enforcement, or hospital notified her family until after she had died.
Cho left the scene and returned to his room in Harper Hall, a dormitory west of West Ambler Johnston Hall. While police and emergency medical services units were responding to the shootings in the dorm next door, Cho changed out of his bloodstained clothes, logged on to his computer to delete his e-mails and his student university account, and then removed the hard drive. About an hour after the attack, Cho is believed to have been seen near the campus duck pond. Although authorities suspected Cho had thrown his hard drive and mobile phone into the water, a search by divers was unsuccessful.
Almost two hours after the first killings, Cho appeared at a nearby post office and mailed a package of writings and video recordings to NBC News; these materials proved to be of little investigative value to authorities. The package was postmarked at 9:01 a.m.
Norris Hall shootings
Around 9:40 a.m., Cho entered Norris Hall, which housed the Engineering Science and Mechanics program among others. In a backpack, he carried heavy duty chains and locks, a hammer, a knife, two handguns with nineteen 10- and 15-round magazines, and nearly 400 rounds of ammunition. With the locks and chains, he chained the three main entrance doors shut and placed a note on one, saying that attempting to open the door would cause a bomb to explode. Shortly before the shooting began, a faculty member found the note and took it to the third floor to notify the school's administration. At about the same time, Cho had begun to shoot students and faculty on the second floor. The bomb threat was never called in. The first call to 9-1-1 was received at 9:42 a.m.Cho geared up in empty Room 200 before the shooting began. According to several students, he looked into several classrooms, likely to see how many people were in each room. Erin Sheehan, an eyewitness who had been in Room 207, told reporters that the shooter "peeked in twice" earlier in the lesson and that "it was strange that someone at this point in the semester would be lost, looking for a class". At 9:40 a.m., Cho began shooting. His first attack after entering Norris occurred in an advanced hydrology engineering class taught by G. V. Loganathan in room 206. Thirteen registered students were inside. Cho shot and killed the professor, then continued firing, killing nine of the thirteen students in the room and injuring two others.
After exiting the classroom, Cho fired down the hall at two students who were fleeing from Room 204 next door. The fleeing students managed to escape down the stairwell across the hall. He also fired at another student and substitute professor from Room 205 who were peering out from the door, but they survived. He went into Room 207, where instructor Jamie Bishop was teaching Introductory German. Cho shot Bishop and some students near the door, then walked down the aisle shooting more victims. Bishop and four students were killed; six other students were shot and wounded. Cho then moved on to Norris 211 and 204, where he was initially prevented from entering due to barricades erected by instructors and students.
Hearing the commotion from below, Kevin Granata guided twenty students from a classroom on the third floor into his office where the door could be locked and went downstairs to investigate along with another professor, Wally Grant, where they were both shot by Cho in the hallway. Grant, who quickly fled into a bathroom, was wounded and survived, but Granata died of his injuries. None of the students locked in Granata's office were hurt or killed.
In Room 211 of Intermediate French, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak saw Cho heading towards the doorway. She and student Henry Lee barricaded the door with a few desks while she yelled at students to get down on the floor and under their desks and call 9-1-1. Cho pushed through the barricade and entered the room, killing Nowak and Lee who fell behind the door. A student named Matthew La Porte, who was a trained Air Force ROTC member of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, charged towards Cho and attempted to tackle him, but died after being shot seven times during his attempt to save his class. Of the 22 students enrolled in the class, 18 were present at the time of the shooting. In addition to the professor, a total of eleven students were killed and another six were injured. The sole uninjured survivor, Clay Violand, played dead and was one of only two people to walk out of the room as soon as police arrived. As in Room 207, Cho fired into Room 211 from the doorway, and then walked up and down the aisles methodically targeting potential survivors as they tried to hide. He did not say a single word throughout the shooting and occasionally reloaded his weapon in the hallways, before re-entering classrooms to resume shooting.
Retracing his path, Cho returned to Room 206. According to a student eyewitness, the movements of a student named Waleed Shaalan, who was already wounded, distracted the aggressor from a nearby student after he had returned to the room. Shaalan was shot a second time and died. Also in the same room, another wounded student named Guillermo Colman was shielded from more serious injury by having the body of student Partahi Lumbantoruan placed on top of him, but Colman's various accounts make it unclear whether he pulled Lumbantoruan's body over himself or Lumbantoruan initially landed on Colman after being shot the first time. Two other students who were also in the room made it out alive.
After his first entry to Room 207, several students had barricaded the door and had begun tending to the wounded. When Cho returned minutes later, Katelyn Carney and spokesperson Derek O'Dell were injured while holding the door closed, but the remaining students survived. In room 205, students had already barricaded the door with a large table after graduate assistant Haiyan Cheng, who was substituting for the professor, and a student saw Cho heading toward them. Cho shot through the door about seven times, but failed to force his way in. No one in the classroom was wounded or killed.
Across the hall in Room 204, Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor from Romania, forcibly prevented the gunman from entering the room by holding the door closed with his body until most of his students escaped through the windows. After kicking open the window screens, the students successfully escaped. Some suffered leg injuries while landing on the ground two floors below, others survived after landing on the shrubbery just below the window and then ran either to some ambulances pulling up or to the nearest bus stop. Librescu was shot through the door four times. Two others who were lying in a corner near the windows were injured, but survived and described that, after most of their classmates escaped through the windows and after the armed aggressor shot four times through the door, he finally forced his way in. Upon seeing the open windows and hardly any students in the room, Cho confronted Professor Librescu and student Minal Panchal who was lying on the ground next to the door and fatally shot both in the temple. He then turned to two other students who were taking cover and critically injured them before leaving and re-entering room 206 the third time.
At 9:50 am, 10 minutes after the second shooting began, a SWAT team started to enter the building. They were not able to shoot their way through the chain locked entrances, but managed entry via a separate entrance. They went up to the third floor, but heard from student Emily Haas, who was wounded and survived in room 211, saying that the gunman was in her classroom as she stayed on the line. As police started to descend the stairwell, Cho had already begun to hear the footsteps. He looked out into the hallway briefly, before going back into the center of room 211 towards the windows and, just as police reached the second floor, shot himself in the temple with the Glock 19 and died instantly. When police arrived at room 211, they saw Cho lying on the ground with his guns beside him, and some students, who were either injured or playing dead, heard the officer's first words: "Gunman down!". During the investigation, State Police Superintendent William Flaherty told a state panel that police found 203 remaining rounds of ammunition in Norris Hall on Cho and later testified that the armed aggressor was well prepared to continue on.
During the two attacks, Cho killed a total of 32 people 5 faculty members and 27 students before he died by suicide. The Virginia Tech Review Panel reported that Cho's gunshots wounded seventeen others; six more were injured when they jumped from second-story windows to escape from Librescu's classroom. Sydney J. Vail, the director of the trauma center at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, said that Cho's choice of 9 mm hollow-point ammunition increased the severity of the injuries. Between the two pistols, a total of 174 bullets were fired by the assailant during the attacks. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two victims were shot in the head.