Virginia Tech shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The Virginia Tech shooting took place on Monday, the 16th of April 2007, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Each year, the university observes a moment of silence at 9:43 a.m. That time is tied to one morning, when a single student carried two pistols through two separate attacks on the campus. It remains the deadliest school shooting in United States history.

  Four questions drive the rest of this documentary. How did the gunman come to own his weapons legally? Why did a warning to the whole campus take as long as it did? Who stood between strangers and danger, and what did they do? And how did one morning change the way a country argued about firearms, privacy, and campus safety?

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• 2. Two Hours Apart

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  At about 6:47 a.m., Seung-Hui Cho was seen near the entrance of West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed residence hall that housed 895 students. Before 10:00 a.m., the building normally opened only to residents holding magnetic key cards. Cho's student mailbox sat in the lobby, so his card worked after 7:30 a.m. How he got in earlier remains unclear.

  Around 7:15 a.m., Cho entered the room that freshman Emily Jane Hilscher shared with another student, Heather Haugh. He shot Hilscher, a 19-year-old from Woodville, Virginia. Ryan C. Clark, a 22-year-old senior and resident assistant from Martinez, Georgia, heard the gunfire and tried to help her. Cho shot and killed him.

  Hilscher lived for three hours after the shooting and then died in Roanoke. Her family heard nothing from the school, from law enforcement, or from the hospital until after her death. Across the hall, a freshman named Molly Donohue saw bloody footprints and tried to enter the room. A body blocking the door kept her out.

  Cho walked back to his own room in Harper Hall, a dormitory just west of West Ambler Johnston. Police and medical units were responding next door when he changed out of his bloodstained clothes. He logged on to his computer, deleted his e-mails and his student university account, and removed the hard drive. About an hour after the attack, he is believed to have been seen near the campus duck pond. Authorities suspected he threw the hard drive and his mobile phone into the water, but a search by divers found nothing.

  A postmark of 9:01 a.m. marks the package that Cho mailed to NBC News from a nearby post office, almost two hours after the first killings. It held writings and video recordings, and authorities judged them to be of little investigative value. Around 9:40 a.m., he would walk into Norris Hall, an academic building on the opposite side of the campus.

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• 3. Chained Doors

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  A backpack carried into Norris Hall around 9:40 a.m. held heavy-duty chains and locks, a hammer, a knife, and two handguns. It also held nineteen magazines of 10 and 15 rounds, along with nearly 400 rounds of ammunition. The pistols were a .22-caliber Walther P22 and a 9 mm Glock 19. Norris Hall housed the Engineering Science and Mechanics program, among others.

  Cho used the chains and locks to shut the three main entrance doors. On one of them he left a note saying that trying to open the door would cause a bomb to explode. Shortly before the shooting began, a faculty member found the note and carried it to the third floor to alert the school's administration. The bomb threat was never called in. The first 9-1-1 call arrived at 9:42 a.m.

  Cho prepared in Room 200, which was empty at the time. Several students said he looked into a number of classrooms, probably to see how many people were inside. Erin Sheehan, who was in Room 207, told reporters that the shooter "peeked in twice" and that "it was strange that someone at this point in the semester would be lost, looking for a class".

  Room 206 held an advanced hydrology engineering class taught by G. V. Loganathan, with thirteen registered students inside. Cho opened fire there at 9:40 a.m. He killed the professor and nine of the thirteen students, and he wounded two others.

  Out in the hall, Jamal Carver of Virginia Beach and Yang Kim were fleeing from Room 204 next door. Cho fired at them, hitting Carver in the arm and missing Kim, and both escaped down the stairwell across the hall. He also fired toward Theresa Walsh of Binghamton, New York, and Haiyan Cheng, a graduate student and substitute professor from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. They had been peering out from Room 205, and neither woman was shot.

  Jamie Bishop was teaching Introductory German in Room 207. Cho shot Bishop and several students near the door, then walked down the aisle shooting more victims. Bishop and four students died, and six other students were wounded. Cho next tried Rooms 211 and 204, but barricades built by instructors and students held him off at first.

  He did not say a single word during the attack. At times he stopped in the hallways to reload before returning to the classrooms. On the third floor, Kevin Granata had already heard the commotion from below.

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• 4. Barricades and Sacrifice

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  Kevin Granata led twenty students from a third-floor classroom into his office, where the door could be locked. He then went downstairs with a fellow professor, Wally Grant, to investigate. Cho shot both men in the hallway. Grant fled into a bathroom, wounded, and survived. Granata died of his injuries. None of the students in his office was hurt.

  In Room 211, an Intermediate French class, instructor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak saw Cho heading for the doorway. She and a student, Henry Lee, pushed desks against the door while she shouted at everyone to get down and call 9-1-1. Cho forced through the barricade and killed both of them.

  Matthew La Porte, a trained Air Force ROTC member of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, charged at Cho and tried to tackle him. He was shot seven times and died. Of the 22 students enrolled, 18 were present. Along with the professor, eleven students were killed and six were injured. Clay Violand, the only student left uninjured, played dead. He and one wounded woman were the only two people to walk out of the room as soon as police arrived.

  In Room 205, Cheng and a student, Zach Petkewicz, blocked the door, and others dragged a large table against it. Cho shot through the door about seven times but could not get in, and no one inside was hurt. In Room 207, students barricaded the door after his first visit and began tending the wounded. When Cho came back minutes later, Katelyn Carney and Derek O'Dell were injured while holding the door closed, but the remaining students survived.

  Cho returned to Room 206 three times in all. On one return, according to a student eyewitness, the movements of the already wounded Waleed Shaalan drew his attention away from a nearby student. Shaalan was shot a second time and died. Another wounded student, Guillermo Colman, was shielded from worse injury when the body of Partahi Lumbantoruan covered him. Colman's accounts differ on whether he pulled the body over himself or it landed there after Lumbantoruan was first shot.

  Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor from Romania, held the door of Room 204 shut with his body. That gave most of his students time to kick out the window screens and escape. Some hurt their legs landing on the ground two floors below. Others fell onto the shrubbery and ran to arriving ambulances or to the nearest bus stop. Librescu was shot four times through the door. Cho then forced his way in, saw the open windows and almost no students, and fatally shot Librescu and a student named Minal Panchal. He critically injured two others who were taking cover.

  At 9:50 a.m., ten minutes into the second attack, a SWAT team began to enter the building. Police had arrived within three minutes of the 9-1-1 call but needed about five minutes to get in. The chains defeated them, so an officer shot out a deadbolt on a door leading into a laboratory, and the team reached a nearby stairwell.

  Emily Haas, wounded in Room 211, stayed on the phone line and reported that the gunman was in her classroom. Hearing police footsteps, Cho looked into the hallway briefly and then moved to the center of the room near the windows. As officers reached the second floor, he shot himself in the temple with the Glock 19 and died instantly. Students who were injured or playing dead heard the first officer's words: "Gunman down!"

  In all, Cho killed 32 people, five faculty members and 27 students. The Virginia Tech Review Panel reported that his gunfire wounded seventeen others, and six more were hurt jumping from second-story windows. He fired 174 bullets between the two pistols, and twenty-eight of the thirty-two victims were shot in the head. State Police Superintendent William Flaherty told a state panel that police found 203 rounds of ammunition still on Cho. He testified that Cho was well prepared to continue.

  Sydney J. Vail, director of the trauma center at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, said Cho's choice of 9 mm hollow-point ammunition increased the severity of the injuries. High winds from an April 2007 nor'easter kept emergency services from using helicopters to evacuate the injured. Patients were treated at Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg, Carilion New River Valley Medical Center in Radford, Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem, and Holston Valley Hospital in Kingsport, Tennessee. The attack would stand as the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history for nine years, until the Pulse nightclub shooting.

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• 5. The Gunman's Record

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  At 23, Seung-Hui Cho was a senior majoring in English. He held South Korean citizenship and U.S. permanent resident status, having arrived in the country as a third-grader. The Virginia Tech Review Panel's August 2007 report, known as the Massengill Report, devoted more than twenty pages to his history.

  At three years old, Cho was described as shy, frail, and wary of physical contact. In eighth grade he was diagnosed with severe depression and selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that kept him from speaking in certain situations or to certain people. Early reports quoted South Korean relatives calling him autistic, but the report called the relationship between selective mutism and autism "unclear". His family sought therapy, and he received help periodically, along with special education support, through middle and high school. He eventually chose to stop therapy.

  Early reports said he was bullied, but the panel could not confirm that. Some anti-bullying advocates felt the panel was whitewashing the authorities. When Cho applied to Virginia Tech, federal privacy laws barred school officials from reporting his speech and anxiety problems or his special education status unless a student requested accommodation. The university therefore never learned of his past diagnoses.

  The Massengill Report described incidents of aberrant behavior beginning in Cho's junior year. Several former professors found his writing and his classroom behavior disturbing and urged him to seek counseling. The university investigated him for stalking and harassing two female students. In 2005, a Virginia special justice declared him mentally ill and ordered outpatient treatment. The report noted that "outpatient" rather than "inpatient" treatment would generally not have required reporting him to Virginia's Central Criminal Records Exchange, the database of people barred from buying or possessing firearms.

  The report faulted officials for misreading federal privacy laws. It also pointed to failures at the university's counseling center, flaws in Virginia's mental health laws, and inadequate state mental health services. Even so, it concluded that "Cho himself was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health" in college. His underlying diagnosis at the time of the shootings remains a matter of speculation.

  On the 18th of April 2007, NBC News received the package Cho had mailed between the two attacks. It held an 1,800-word manifesto, photos, and 27 digitally recorded videos. In them he likened himself to Jesus Christ and expressed hatred of the wealthy. He called Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers, "martyrs". He also said, "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option."

  Media organizations including Newsweek, MSNBC, Reuters, and the Associated Press speculated about a likeness between a hammer-raising pose in one video and promotional posters for the South Korean film Oldboy. Investigators found no evidence that Cho had ever watched it. The professor who first made the connection has since discounted his own theory.

  The Review Panel offered its own reading. It said Cho could not handle stress and feared the "frightening prospect" of being "turned out into the world of work, finances, responsibilities, and a family". In response, it concluded, he chose a fantasy in which "he would be remembered as the savior of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the poor, and the rejected." News organizations that aired portions of the multimedia manifesto drew criticism from victims' families, Virginia law enforcement officials, and the American Psychiatric Association.

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• 6. Warning and Blame

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  At 9:26 a.m., Virginia Tech sent its first e-mail to students about the morning's violence. That was about two hours after the first killings, which had been treated as isolated and domestic in nature. The second attack began fourteen minutes later.

  Governor Tim Kaine returned early from a trade mission to Japan and declared a state of emergency. He then created an eight-member panel, including former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, to review everything from Cho's medical history to the university's delay in warning students. In August 2007 it reported more than twenty major findings and over seventy recommendations. These were addressed to colleges, mental health providers, police, emergency services, and lawmakers.

  The panel found that the Virginia Tech police "did not take sufficient action to deal with what might happen if the initial lead proved erroneous". It agreed that officers erred in "prematurely concluding that their initial lead in the double homicide was a good one". It also criticized the delay of almost two hours in a campus-wide notice. The panel studied a campus lockdown and essentially agreed with police testimony that it was not feasible. It judged that the toll could have been lower if the university had canceled classes at once and sent a stronger, clearer alert. Even so, it held that Cho himself was responsible, and that implying anyone else was accountable "would be wrong".

  After the report, some victims' families asked Kaine to remove university president Charles W. Steger and campus police chief Wendell Flinchum. Kaine refused, reasoning that the officials had "suffered enough".

  Virginia Tech began sending alerts through its website and by text message. The system was first activated in 2008, when an exploded nail gun cartridge made sounds like gunfire near a dormitory. It was used again on the 8th of December 2011, after a police officer was shot and killed on campus by a part-time Radford University student.

  Kenneth Westhues, a sociology professor at the University of Waterloo, criticized both the university and the Massengill Report. He argued that Cho had been the target of a mobbing in the English department. A fuller explanation, he wrote, should focus on "the interplay between who he was and how other people treated him".

  Lucinda Roy, a novelist and former chair of the English department, worked with Cho one-on-one in a poetry tutorial. In her book No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy of Virginia Tech, she describes feeling that he did not get the help he needed. She says she was told repeatedly that no one could intervene unless a student sought counseling voluntarily.

  On the 17th of June 2008, Judge Theodore J. Markow approved an $11 million settlement in a suit against the state of Virginia brought by twenty-four of the thirty-two victims' families. The settlement also covered eighteen injured people, including their lifelong health care needs.

  On the 29th of March 2011, the Department of Education fined Virginia Tech $55,000 under the Clery Act for waiting too long to notify students. That was the highest amount it could levy. On the 30th of March 2012, a judge overturned the fine. Then, on the 1st of September 2012, Education Secretary Arne Duncan reinstated half of it, $27,500. He wrote that the police "had not located the suspect, had not found the weapon, and was confronted with the distinct possibility that the gunman was armed and still at large." An additional $5,000 fine followed in January 2014. Virginia Tech paid a total of $32,500 in February 2014 without admitting wrongdoing, and announced it on the 16th of April 2014. It said it was closing "this chapter on the tragedy of the 16th of April 2007,".

  On the 14th of March 2012, a jury found Virginia Tech negligent for delaying a campus warning. The verdict came in a wrongful death suit by the parents of Erin Nicole Peterson and Julia Kathleen Pryde, who had not joined the earlier settlement. On the 31st of October 2013, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed it. The court said that even with a special relationship between the state and its students, there was no duty to warn them about possible criminal acts by third parties.

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• 7. Guns and Privacy

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  Among Cho's belongings, investigators found a purchase receipt for one of the guns used in the attacks. He waited one month after buying the Walther P22 before he bought the Glock 19. The serial numbers had been filed off, but the ATF National Laboratory revealed them and traced the weapons. Cho also used eBay to buy two 10-round magazines for one of the guns. On the 30th of July 2007, the site banned sales of firearms magazines, firearms parts, and ammunition.

  Virginia law limits sales by licensed dealers to residents who pass a background check, and legal permanent residents may buy firearms. At the time, the state also limited handgun purchases to one every thirty days. That limit was repealed on the 3rd of April 2013 and brought back on the 1st of July 2020. Federally, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act requires a criminal background check for purchases from licensed dealers. The Gun Control Act of 1968 bars anyone "adjudicated as a mental defective".

  That exclusion applied to Cho after a Virginia court declared him a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment. But gaps between federal and Virginia law meant the state never reported his status to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Governor Kaine issued an executive order on the 30th of April 2007 to close those reporting gaps. The Massengill Report later called for a permanent change to the Code of Virginia.

  Congress passed the first major federal gun control law since 1994. It required better state reporting to NICS, so that criminals and people declared mentally ill could be stopped from buying guns, and authorized up to $1.3 billion in federal grants. Both the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the National Rifle Association supported it. The House passed it by voice vote on the 13th of June 2007, and the Senate followed on the 19th of December 2007. President George W. Bush signed it on the 5th of January 2008. On the 24th of March 2008, the Department of Education proposed changes to its student-records privacy rules to clarify the balance between privacy and public safety.

  In April 2005, a student with a state permit to carry concealed handguns was found with a concealed firearm in class. Virginia Tech has a general ban on firearms on campus, even for permit holders, and it enforced the policy without criminal charges. In January 2006, legislator Todd Gilbert introduced HB 1572, which would have stopped public universities from barring lawful concealed carry. Virginia Tech opposed the bill, and it quickly died in subcommittee. University spokesman Larry Hincker praised the outcome as something that would help people feel safe on campus.

  The shooting energized the opposite side. A new group, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, claimed 16,000 members at 500 campuses. Gilbert's second attempt to allow concealed weapons for students and faculty failed in March 2008. The Massengill Report recommended letting each college regulate firearms on its campus. It also urged background checks on all private sales, including at gun shows. Kaine made that a priority for the 2008 General Assembly, but the Senate Courts of Justice Committee defeated the bill.

  NRA board member Ted Nugent went on CNN to call for an end to gun-free zones. Texas Governor Rick Perry proposed letting licensed gun owners carry their weapons anywhere in Texas. The Brady Campaign said it was too easy to obtain powerful weapons. From abroad, Australian Prime Minister John Howard credited tough legislation after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre with preventing a problematic gun culture in his country. Kaine, for his part, told those who wanted to turn the event into a crusade: "take this elsewhere."

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• 8. Memorials and Mourning

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  Thirty-two pieces of Hokie Stone, each labeled with a victim's name, were set in a semicircle in front of the Drillfield viewing stand by Hokies United, an alliance of student organizations formed to respond to the shooting. The arrangement grew from the makeshift tributes where people left flowers at the base of the observation podium in front of Burruss Hall. In the lasting version, engraved markers sit in crushed gravel with a brick walkway, ground lighting, and two benches honoring the survivors.

  On the 17th of April 2007, a memorial event at Cassell Coliseum included a speech by President Bush. The space reached capacity, and overflow seating was set up at nearby Lane Stadium. Within a day of the shootings, the university created the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. In early June, $3.2 million was moved into 32 separately named endowment funds, one for each person killed. Donations by then had reached about $7 million. Kenneth R. Feinberg, who had run the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, was named in July to administer distributions. In October 2007, families and surviving victims received payments ranging from $11,500 to $208,000.

  Norris Hall's southwest wing, where the shootings took place, was closed in 2008 and renovated in 2008 and 2009. The building no longer holds classrooms and now houses the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, among other programs. West Ambler Johnston was renovated too. Its east wing became the Honors Residential College in fall 2011, and the west wing reopened in fall 2012.

  Several thousand artifacts and messages of condolence reached the campus from over eighty countries and every U.S. state, including artwork, cards, poetry, and original music. Pope Benedict XVI and the presidents of South Korea, Chile, France, Mexico, and Peru offered sympathy. A State Department spokesman said, "We haven't seen this kind of sympathy and support since Hurricane Katrina and 9/11."

  In South Korea, news of Cho's citizenship brought shock and a sense of public shame, and the government convened an emergency meeting. A candlelight vigil was held outside the U.S. embassy in Seoul. South Korea's ambassador and several Korean-American religious leaders called for a thirty-two day fast, one day for each victim. Some South Koreans criticized the idea for drawing attention to Cho's ethnicity. The Korea Tourism Organization pulled its "Sparkling Korea" television advertisements as inappropriate to air between news reports. On the 20th of April, Cho's sister, Sun-Kyung Cho, issued a statement for the family. It began: "He has made the world weep."

  On the 3rd of May 2007, Queen Elizabeth II addressed the Virginia General Assembly and extended her sympathy on behalf of the United Kingdom. She met privately with faculty and survivors, including Katelyn Carney, who had been shot in the hand. Carney gave her a bracelet of thirty-two jewels in maroon and orange. The Queen's main purpose in Virginia was the 400th anniversary of Jamestown.

  NASCAR put Virginia Tech decals on all its cars for three weeks. East Carolina University gave $100,000 and was the opponent when Virginia Tech played its first home football game at Lane Stadium on the 1st of September 2007. More than 60,000 people attended, and thirty-two orange balloons were released before kickoff. Fans of the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University united on shirts reading "Orange and Maroon support Orange and Maroon".

  Beginning with the first anniversary, the Queens' Guard of the College of William & Mary has posted an honor guard at the head of the college's Sunken Garden for the victims. Alumni chapters hold yearly blood drives, and the DC Hokies sponsor a 3.2-mile run called "3.2 for 32". Virginia Tech's Day of Remembrance includes a candle lighting ceremony and a wreath laying. A Cadet Guard stands at the memorial for thirty-two minutes. In November 2008, a northern Virginia chapter of the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization took the name Liviu Librescu AZA.

  On the 4th of September 2009, the Marching Virginians made a 140-mile side trip on their way to the season opener against the University of Alabama in Atlanta. The 350-member band, twenty cheerleaders, and Corps of Cadets color guard performed at Lakeside High School, alma mater of Ryan C. Clark. The event raised money for a scholarship in his name.

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