Virginia Tech shooting

The Virginia Tech shooting, also known as the Virginia Tech massacre, occurred on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks (another six people were injured escaping from classroom windows), approximately two hours apart, before committing suicide. The attack is the second deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history (surpassed only by the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting) and one of the deadliest by a single gunman worldwide. The attacks received international media coverage and drew widespread criticism of U.S. gun culture. It sparked intense debate about gun violence, gun laws, gaps in the U.S. system for treating mental health issues, the perpetrator's state of mind, the responsibility of college administrations, privacy laws, journalism ethics, and other issues. Television news organizations that aired portions of the killer's multimedia manifesto were criticized by victims' families, Virginia law enforcement officials, and the American Psychiatric Association. Cho had previously been diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder. 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, Virginia Tech was unaware of Cho's previous diagnosis 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; however, because he was not institutionalized, he was still allowed to purchase guns. The shooting prompted the state of Virginia to close legal loopholes that had previously allowed individuals adjudicated as mentally unsound to purchase handguns without detection by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). It also led to passage of the only 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. The Virginia Tech Review Panel, a state-appointed body assigned to review the incident, criticized Virginia Tech administrators for failing to take action that might have reduced 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 in college untreated. Attacks: The shootings occurred in separate incidents, with the first at West Ambler Johnston Hall, during which Seung-Hui Cho killed two pupils, and the second at Norris Hall, where the other 31 deaths, including that of Cho himself, as well as all the nonlethal injuries, occurred. Cho used two firearms during the attacks: a .22-caliber Walther P22 semi-automatic handgun and a 9 mm semi-automatic Glock 19 handgun. West Ambler Johnston shootings: Cho was seen near the entrance to West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed residence hall that housed 895 students, at about 6:47 a.m. EDT. Normally, the hall was 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. Cho shot his first victims in West Ambler Johnston Hall. At around 7:15 a.m., Cho entered the room which freshman Emily J. Hilscher shared with another student. Hilscher, a 19-year-old from Woodville, Virginia, was fatally wounded. After hearing the gunshots, a male resident assistant, Ryan C. Clark, attempted to aid Hilscher. Cho shot and killed Clark, a 22-year-old senior from Martinez, Georgia. 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-mail, 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 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; the package was postmarked 9:01 a.m. He then walked to Norris Hall. In a backpack, he carried several chains, locks, a hammer, a knife, two handguns with nineteen 10- and 15-round magazines, and nearly 400 rounds of ammunition. Norris Hall shootings: About two hours after the initial shootings, Cho entered Norris Hall, which housed the Engineering Science and Mechanics program among others, and chained the three main entrance doors shut. He placed a note on at least one of the chained doors, claiming that attempts 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 building's 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. According to several students, before the shooting began Cho looked into several classrooms. Erin Sheehan, an eyewitness and survivor 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 about 9:40 a.m, Cho began shooting. Cho's first attack after entering Norris occurred in an advanced hydrology engineering class taught by Professor G. V. Loganathan in room 206. Cho first shot and killed the professor, then continued firing, killing nine of the thirteen students in the room and injuring two others. Next, Cho went across the hall to room 207, in which instructor Jamie Bishop was teaching German. Cho killed Bishop and four students; six students were wounded. Cho then moved on to Norris 211 and 204. In both of these classrooms, Cho was initially prevented from entering due to barricades erected by instructors and students. In room 204, Professor Liviu Librescu, an Israeli Holocaust survivor, forcibly prevented Cho from entering the room. Librescu was able to hold the door closed until most of his students escaped through the windows, but he died after being shot multiple times through the door. One student in his classroom was killed. Instructor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak and student Henry Lee were killed in room 211 as they attempted to barricade the door. According to the Virginia Tech Review Panel's report, eleven students died in room 211 and the six students who survived all suffered gunshot wounds. However, one of the survivors, Clay Violand, has stated that he played dead and escaped without injury. Cho reloaded and revisited several of the classrooms. After Cho's first visit to room 207, several students had barricaded the door and had begun tending the wounded. When Cho returned minutes later, Katelyn Carney and Derek O'Dell were injured while holding the door closed. Cho also returned to room 206. According to a student eyewitness, the movements of a wounded Waleed Shaalan distracted Cho from a nearby student after the shooter had returned to the room. Shaalan was shot a second time and died. Also in room 206, Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan may have shielded fellow student Guillermo Colman from more serious injury. Colman's various accounts make it unclear whether this act was intentional or the involuntary result of Lumbantoruan being shot. Students barricaded the door of room 205 with a large table after substitute professor Haiyan Cheng (Chinese: 程海燕; pinyin: Chéng Hǎiyàn) and a student saw Cho heading toward them. Cho shot through the door several times but failed to force his way in. No one in that classroom was wounded or killed. Hearing the commotion on the floor below, Professor Kevin Granata took twenty students from a third-floor classroom into his office where the door could be locked. He then went downstairs to investigate and was shot and killed by Cho. None of the students locked in Granata's office were harmed. Approximately ten to twelve minutes after the second attack began, Cho shot himself in his right temple with the Glock 19. He died in Jocelyne Couture-Nowak's Intermediate French class, room 211. During this second assault, he had fired at least 174 rounds, killing thirty people and wounding seventeen more. All of the victims were shot at least three times each; of the thirty killed, twenty-eight were shot in the head. During the investigation, State Police Superintendent William Flaherty told a state panel that police found 203 live rounds in Norris Hall. "He was well prepared to continue on," Flaherty testified. During the two attacks, Cho killed five faculty members and twenty-seven students before committing suicide by shooting himself. The Virginia Tech Review Panel reported that Cho's gunshots wounded seventeen other people; six more were injured when they jumped from second-story windows to escape. 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. Perpetrator: The shooter was identified as a senior at Virginia Tech, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean citizen with U.S. permanent resident status majoring in English. The Virginia Tech Review Panel's August 2007 report (Massengill Report) devoted more than 20 pages to Cho's troubled history. At three years of age, Cho was described as shy, frail, and wary of physical contact. In eighth grade, Cho was diagnosed with severe depression as well as selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that inhibited him from speaking. While early media reports carried reports by South Korean relatives that Cho had autism, the Massengill Report stated that the relationship between selective mutism and autism was "unclear". Cho's family sought therapy for him, and he received help periodically throughout middle school and high school. Early reports also indicated Cho was bullied for speech difficulties in middle school, but the Virginia Tech Review Panel was unable to confirm this, or other reports that he was ostracized and mercilessly bullied for class-, height-, and race-related reasons in high school, causing some anti-bullying advocates to feel that the Review Panel was engaging in an authority-absolving whitewash. Supposedly, high school officials had worked with his parents and mental health counselors to support Cho throughout his sophomore and junior years. Cho eventually chose to discontinue therapy. When he applied and was admitted to Virginia Tech, school officials did not report his speech and anxiety-related problems or special education status because of federal privacy laws that prohibit such disclosure unless a student requests special accommodation. The Massengill Report detailed numerous incidents of aberrant behavior beginning in Cho's junior year of college that illustrated his deteriorating mental condition. Several former professors of Cho reported that his writing as well as his classroom behavior was disturbing, and he was encouraged to seek counseling. He was also investigated by the university for stalking and harassing two female students. In 2005, Cho had been declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice and ordered to seek outpatient treatment. The Virginia Tech Review Panel Report (Massengill Report) faulted university officials for failing to share information that would have shed light on the seriousness of Cho's problems, citing misinterpretations of federal privacy laws. The report also pointed to failures by Virginia Tech's counseling center, flaws in Virginia's mental health laws, and inadequate state mental health services, but concluded that "Cho himself was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health" in college. The report also stated that the classification detail that Cho was to seek "outpatient" rather than "inpatient" treatment would generally have been legally interpreted at the time as not requiring that Cho be reported to Virginia's Central Criminal Records Exchange (CCRE) and entered into the CCRE database of people prohibited from purchasing or possessing a firearm. Cho's underlying psychological diagnosis at the time of the shootings remains a matter of speculation. One professor tried to get him to seek counseling, but he would not go. Early reports suggested that the killings resulted from a romantic dispute between Cho and Emily Hilscher, one of his first two victims. However, Hilscher's friends said she had no prior relationship with Cho and there is no evidence that he ever met or talked with her before the murders. In the ensuing investigation, police found a suicide note in Cho's dorm room that included comments about "rich kids", "debauchery", and "deceitful charlatans". On April 18, 2007, NBC News received a package from Cho time-stamped between the first and second shooting episodes. It contained an 1,800-word manifesto, photos, and 27 digitally-recorded videos in which Cho likened himself to Jesus Christ and expressed his hatred of the wealthy. He stated, among other things, "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. ... You just loved to crucify me. You loved inducing cancer in my head, terror in my heart and ripping my soul all this time". Media organizations, including Newsweek, MSNBC, Reuters, and the Associated Press, raised questions about and speculated on the similarity between a stance in one of Cho's videos which showed him holding and raising a hammer, and a pose from promotional posters for the South Korean movie Oldboy. Investigators found no evidence that Cho had ever watched Oldboy, and the professor who made the initial connection to Oldboy has since discounted his theory that Cho was influenced by the movie. The Virginia Tech Review Panel concluded that because of Cho's inability to handle stress and the "frightening prospect" of being "turned out into the world of work, finances, responsibilities, and a family," Cho chose to engage in a fantasy in which "he would be remembered as the savior of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the poor, and the rejected." The panel went further, stating that, "His thought processes were so distorted that he began arguing to himself that his evil plan was actually doing good. His destructive fantasy was now becoming an obsession." Responses to the incidents- Emergency services response: Police arrived within three minutes of receiving an emergency call but took about five minutes to enter the barricaded building. When they could not break the chains, an officer shot out a deadbolt lock leading into a laboratory; they then moved to a nearby stairwell. As police reached the second floor, they heard Cho fire his final shot; Cho's body was discovered in Jocelyne Couture-Nowak's classroom, room 211. In the aftermath, high winds related to the April 2007 nor'easter prevented emergency medical services from using helicopters for evacuation of the injured. Victims injured in the shooting were treated at Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg, Carilion New River Valley Medical Center in Radford, Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Holston Valley Hospital in Kingsport, Tennessee, and Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem. University response: The university first informed students via e-mail at 9:26 a.m., about two hours after the first shooting, which was thought at the time to be isolated and domestic in nature. After the full extent of the shooting became evident, Virginia Tech canceled classes for the rest of the week and held an assembly and candlelight vigil on April 17. Norris Hall was closed for the remainder of the semester. The university offered counseling for students and faculty, and the American Red Cross dispatched several dozen crisis counselors to Blacksburg to help students. University officials also allowed students, if they chose, to abbreviate their semester coursework and still receive a grade. Within a day after the shootings, Virginia Tech, whose supporters call themselves "Hokies", formed the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund (HSMF) to help remember and honor the victims. The fund was used to cover expenses including, but not limited to: assistance to victims and their families, grief counseling, memorials, communications expenses, and comfort expenses. Early in June 2007, the Virginia Tech Foundation announced that $3.2 million was moved from the HSMF into 32 separately-named endowment funds, each created in honor of a victim killed in the shooting. This transfer brought each fund to the level of full endowment, allowing them to operate in perpetuity. The naming and determination of how each fund would be directed was being developed with the victims' families. By early June 2007, donations to the HSMF had reached approximately $7 million. In July 2007, Kenneth R. Feinberg, who served as Special Master of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001, was named to administer the fund's distributions. In October 2007, the families and surviving victims received payments ranging from $11,500 to $208,000 from the fund. Also early in June 2007, the university announced it would begin reoccupying Norris Hall within a matter of weeks. The building is used for offices and laboratories for the Engineering Science and Mechanics and Civil and Environmental Engineering departments, its primary occupants before the shootings. Plans were to completely renovate the building and for it to no longer contain classrooms. The southwest wing of Norris Hall, where the shootings took place, was closed in 2008 and completely renovated in 2008 and 2009. The building now houses the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, the Biomechanics Cluster Research Center, and the Global Technology Center, as well as other programs. Ambler Johnston Hall was also closed and renovated. The east wing now houses the Honors Residential College, which opened in fall 2011; in fall 2012, the west wing reopened as the Residential College at West Ambler Johnston. After the release of the Massengill Report, some parents of those killed called for Virginia's governor to relieve the university president, Charles Steger, and campus police chief, Wendell Flinchum, of their positions. However, Governor Tim Kaine refused to do so, saying that the school officials had "suffered enough".