President comforts Virginia Tech after student kills 32 and himself
MSNBC and NBC News
President Bush joined Virginia’s governor and dozens of other state and national officials Tuesday to bring comfort to the students, faculty and staff of Virginia Tech a day after a 23-year-old student shot 32 people to death Monday before killing himself.
“Laura and I have come to Blacksburg today with hearts full of sorrow,” the president said. “This is a day of sadness for our entire nation.”
The president and Gov. Timothy Kaine, who flew back overnight from a trade mission in Asia, decided to join a convocation for a university and town reeling after the worst mass shooting in American history. So many people showed up for the session in the school’s basketball arena that the overflow was sent to Lane Field, the university’s 50,000-seat football stadium.
“I hope you know that people all over this country are thinking about you and asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected,” Bush said.
Kaine said the world had been inspired by the response of the campus and the surrounding community.
“It’s not just you that needs to maintain that spirit, but the world needs you to,” he said. “The world saw you and saw you respond in a way that builds community. The world needs that example before it.”
Zenobia Hikes, the university’s vice president for student affairs, captured that spirit when she said: “What has happened to these beloved members of our family has brought us closer together in our grief and our shared sense of disbelief.”
She added: “We will eventually recover, but we will never ever forget.”
Police: Bomb threat found
At least 26 people were taken to hospitals, some of them seriously injured. after Monday's shooting. Twelve students remained in hospitals in stable condition Tuesday, and most were expected to be released soon, NBC News’ Michelle Kosinski reported from Montgomery Regional Medical Center.
Police identified the shooter as Cho Seung-Hui (pronounced Choh Suhng-whee), of Centreville, Va., a resident alien who immigrated to the United States from South Korea in 1992, who was a senior in the English Department at Virginia Tech.
Police sought a search warrant for Cho’s room in Harper Residence Hall, saying in a court affidavit that they had found a “bomb threat note ... directed at engineering school department buildings” near his body, The Washington Post reported on its Web site. “The note is connected with the shooting incident,” the affidavit said.
Police said that there had been bomb threats on campus over the past two weeks but that they had not determined a link to the shootings.
After the shootings, all campus entrances were closed, and classes were canceled for the rest of the week. The university set up a spot for families to reunite with their children.
Student alarmed instructors
Instructors, meanwhile, said Cho’s creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service.
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department’s director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as “troubled.”
“There was some concern about him,” Rude told The Associated Press. “Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it’s creative or if they’re describing things, if they’re imagining things or just how real it might be. But we’re all alert to not ignore things ike this.”
She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.
Otherwise, Cho was a young man who apparently left little impression in the Virginia Tech community. Few of his fellow residents of Harper Hall said they knew the gunman, who kept to himself.
“He can’t have been an outgoing kind of person,” Meredith Daly, 19, of Danville, Va., told MSNBC.com’s Bill Dedman.
‘Very quiet, always by himself’
In Centreville, a suburb of Washington where Cho’s family lived in an off-white, two-story townhouse, people who knew Cho concurred that he kept to himself.
“He was very quiet, always by himself,” said Abdul Shash, a neighbor. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.
Rod Wells, a postal worker, said that characterization of Cho did not fit the man’s parents, who, he described as “always polite, always kind to me, very quiet, always smiling. Just sweet, sweet people.”
“I talk to particularly everybody here,” Wells told NBC News. “So I guess nobody had any intimation that he was like that. I don’t think the parents did, because they were quite the opposite.”
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry expressed its condolences, saying that there was no known motive for the shootings and that South Korea hoped the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.”
Ballistics evidence points to student
The bloodbath ended Monday morning with Cho’s suicide, bringing the death toll from two separate shootings — first at the dormitory, then in a classroom building — to 33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy.
Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, Cho opened fire about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coeducational dorm, then stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus. Some of the doors at Norris Hall were found chained from the inside, apparently by the gunman.
Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said it was reasonable to assume that Cho was the shooter in both attacks but that the link was not yet definitive.
“There’s no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we’re exploring the possibility,” he said.
Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been officially announced, said Cho’s fingerprints were found on the two guns used in the shootings. The serial numbers had been filed off, the officials said.
Law enforcement officials told NBC News that Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for the purchase of a Glock 9mm pistol in March.
As a permanent legal resident, Cho was eligible to buy a handgun unless he had been convicted of any felony criminal charges. Immigration officials told NBC affiliate WSLS-TV of Roanoke that they would not have approved renewal of his green card in late 2003 if a criminal record had shown up.
‘He didn’t say a single word’
As the gunman made his way through Norris Hall, students jumped from windows in panic.
Trey Perkins, who was sitting in a German class in Norris Hall, told MSNBC-TV on Monday that the gunman barged into the room about 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and a half, squeezing off 20 to 30 shots.
The gunman first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the students, Perkins said, who added: “He didn’t say a single word the whole time.”
“He didn’t say, ‘Get down.’ He didn’t say anything. He just started shooting,” said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va., a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. “I got on the ground, and I was just thinking, like, there’s no way I’m going to survive this. All I could keep thinking of was my mom.”
Students angry at university’s response
Students said there were no public-address announcements after the first shots. Many said they learned of the first shooting in an e-mail message that arrived shortly before the gunman struck again.
University President Charles Steger defended the university’s conduct, saying authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.
Steger emphasized that the university closed off the dorm after the first attack and decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means to spread the word, but he said that with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out.
“We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it,” Steger said.
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