US News
VT Tragedy: Mourning, Wanting Answers
CBNNews.com
April 18, 2007
CBNNews.com - Thousands of lit candles were lifted against the evening sky Tuesday during special memorial services held in remembrance of 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty slain in a sensless shooting massacre.
Students and staff were grief stricken over what is now considered the most deadly shooting in U.S. history.
The gun has been identified along with many of the victims.
Among the victims - three professors, world-renowned in their fields, and respected by their students. Some of the student victims identified were seniors and leaders on the campus as well as freshmen just settling into college life.
Learn more about all the victims that have been identifed on CBNNews.com special page "Remembering the Victims."
Police identified the shooter as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, a university student, native of South Korea and permanent legal resident of the United States.
Cho is believed to have massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech Monday before killing himself at the university's Norris Hall.
Click on the link to the left to go to our special page for all the stories from CBN News since Monday, including television and video reports, web exclusives interviews, links and much more not able to include in our regular news programming.
New details emerged Tuesday about Cho. According to the Associated Press, Cho was an English major whose creative writings were so unsettling that he had been given a referral to the school's counseling center.
"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," wrote AOL employee and former classmate Ian MacFarlene wrote in an AOL blog. "The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of."
Reports have surfaced that Cho might have been taking anti-depression medicine and that he had become violent. A note found in his dorm room talked about "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" at the school.
Investigation Still Underway
The superintendent of the Virginia State Police, Col. Steve Flaherty, said it can reasonably be assumed that Cho was responsible for both attacks, although such a link is not yet definitive.
"There's no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we're exploring the possibility," Flaherty said.
Cho's backpack carried a receipt reflecting the March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol. The attacks occurred two hours apart, in two different locations on the 2,600-acre campus, before university officials and police could grasp the situation and warn students.
President Joins Students in Mourning
President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush joined VT students, faculty and staff in a special assembly to mourn the loss of the students and professors dear to them.
Bush told them that people they don't even know are praying for them. 
Watch the entire service here.
Tough Questions and Decisions
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger defended the handling of the attacks. He said that authorities believed that the first shooting was a domestic dispute.
"We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said.
In interviews following the massacre many students backed up the university saying the knew leaders acted on what they knew at the time. Even those who didn't agree on the security concerns, agreed now was a time to come together to mourn as the Virginia Tech family.
Steger said that with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out. He said that before the e-mail went out, the university began telephoning resident advisers in the dorms and sent people to knock on doors to spread the word. Students were warned to stay inside and away from the windows.
"We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it," Steger said. He also noted that thousands of nonresident students were arriving for morning classes, making a total lockdown impractical.
"Where do you lock them down?" Steger asked.
Students Tell What Happened
Students who actually jumped from windows to get away from the gunman tell of their ordeal and the sacrifice of others like Professor Liviu Librescu who confronted the gunman and held him off while students attempted to escape.
Trey Perkins, who was sitting in a German class in Norris Hall, told The Washington Post , "..the shots seemed like it lasted forever."
He went on to tell the Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9:50 a.m. and opened fire for about a minute and a half, squeezing off 30 shots in all.
The gunman, Perkins said, first shot the professor in the head and then fired on the students.
"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering.
Ruiqi Zhang, a computer engineering student who said he was on Norris's second floor, was quoted on "Planet Blacksburg," a local, student-run Web site.
"A student rushed in and told everybody to get down," said Zhang. "We put a table against the door and when the gunman tried to shoulder his way in and when he saw that he couldn't, he put two shots through the door. It was the scariest moment of my life."
Erin Sheehan, who was also in the German class, told the student newspaper the
Collegiate Times that she was one of only four to walk out of class alive. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.
"It seemed so strange," Sheehan said. The gunman "peeked in twice, earlier in the lesson, like he was looking for someone, somebody, before he started shooting. But then we all heard something like drilling in the walls, and someone thought they sounded like bullets. That's when we blockaded the door to stop anyone from coming in."
"I saw bullets hit people's bodies," Sheehan said. "There was blood everywhere."
Founded in 1872, Virginia Tech is nestled in southwestern Virginia, about 160 miles west of Richmond.
With more than 25,000 full-time students, it has the state's largest full-time student population.
Source: Associated Press, ABCNews.com, Virginia Tech advisory
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