Massacre on campus: 32 students shot dead at American college

A gunman rampaged across the campus of a large technical college in rural Virginia yesterday, killing at least 32 people in two separate locations before shooting himself in what criminologists said was the worst mass killing of its kind in American history.

The man, who was not immediately identified, began shooting at a dormitory in the early hours of the morning in what authorities at first assumed was a limited domestic dispute. Two hours later, he opened fire again, in a building housing Virginia Tech's engineering school, and this time he created carnage.

"All I saw was blood in the hallways," said Gene Cole, a cleaner at the building who saw a man with a hat on and holding a gun before fleeing along a corridor and down a flight of stairs.
Eyewitness reports suggested the gunman went from room to room, opening fire, seemingly at random. Several students and staff members jumped out of windows to escape. At least two faculty members were shot, one seriously, along with several dozen students. The number of injured is in double figures.

Some students suggested the gunman was a jilted boyfriend who tracked down and killed his former girlfriend first before rounding up his other victims. Many were outraged that they were not properly warned after the first incident. The university administration sent an email at around 9.30am, more than two hours after the incident in the dormitory and around the time of the second, more sustained shooting spree.

Both Virginia Tech's president, Charles Steger, and the head of the campus police, Wendell Flinchum, said they believed the first incident was a one-off crime and that the perpetrator had left campus. "You can second-guess all day," Chief Flinchum told a news conference. We acted on the best information we had."

Mr Steger said his university was experiencing a tragedy of "monumental proportions". Virginia's governor, Tim Kaine, declared a state of emergency, and politicians from President George Bush down expressed shock and offered the condolences.

According to media reports, citing law enforcement officials, the gunman was armed with two 9mm handguns. Chief Flinchum confirmed that the man shot himself at the end of the rampage, but gave no details on his identity or any possible motives. Rumours flying around campus suggested that he was a student of Asian origin, but it was not possible to corroborate this.
Officials said the gunman acted alone. But at one point three people were seen being escorted away from Norris Hall, the teaching building where most of the shootings took place, in handcuffs. That raised at least the possibility of a wider criminal conspiracy.

The university email system buzzed with eyewitness accounts and scrappy footage shot on mobile phone cameras. Amie Steele, editor of the campus newspaper, described the scene as "mass chaos", with students running around in panic and police trying to keep them calm.
Campus police sealed off the 26,000-acre facility, and squad cars jammed streets and car parks. Virginia state police and at least two federal agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, were on the scene.

The violence broke out at about 7.15am on the fourth floor of the West Ambler Johnston dormitory building. At least two people were shot there, according to first reports. Two students, probably fearing for their lives, jumped out of a window and were seen groaning on the ground below. "One kid broke his ankle and the other girl was not in good shape, just lying on the ground," an eyewitness, Matt Waldron, told CNN. "It was kind of scary."

It took a couple of hours for most people to realise what had happened. Residents at West Ambler Johnston, which houses 895 students, heard university officials knocking on their doors and urging them to stay put. " We were all locked in our dorms surfing the internet trying to figure out what was going on," one student, Aimee Kanode, told reporters.

However, nobody at that stage was prevented from entering campus or going to labs and classrooms. At 9.30, a student, Hector Takahashi, was in class in a building near Norris Hall where the conversation was all about the dormitory shootings. "Then, all of a sudden, we were like, 'whoa, were those shots?'"

He heard two quick bangs, then a pause, then a fusillade of at least 30 more shots, he said. Police later estimated that the gunman had killed at least 20 people in Norris Hall.

Not everyone was alerted to the danger at the same speed. "It was a little nerve-racking," said David Harris, a worker at the campus's Center for Applied Behavioral Systems. He couldn't hear the mayhem unfolding in Norris, but received first one email and then another announcing a shooting on campus and urging everyone to stay away from windows.

Then the security operation went into high gear. "Swat teams were yelling for everyone to clear the area. I ran across the drillfield," a student, Erin Burdick, wrote by email. Over the university loudspeaker system a voice began to intone, over and over: "This is an emergency, seek shelter indoors immediately."

It took campus police another three hours to give the all clear.
Even without a final death toll, this was easily the deadliest attack on an American university campus, surpassing the events of August 1966 at the University of Texas in Austin, where a deranged man shot his wife and mother, then climbed a tower and opened fire on students milling below. The toll was 15 ­ the same number as died at Columbine High School in April 1999 in what remains America's most lethal mass school shooting.

Experts agreed that the toll at Virginia Tech is a grim milestone. " There is no national precedent for this," said Catherine Bath of Security on Campus Inc, a non-profit group that tracks shootings at schools and colleges.

Blacksburg, the town which hosts Virginia Tech and its 26,000 students, is in a remote part of Virginia sandwiched between the borders with West Virginia to the north and west and North Carolina to the south. This is not, however, the first time it has come face to face with violence, or the prospect of violence. As recently as last Friday, a bomb threat prompted the closure of three campus buildings. A similar, written bomb threat arrived at the university at the beginning of the month. It is not yet known if the shootings and bomb threats are related.

The President's response
Once the scale of the massacre became clear, George Bush issued a statement. He said: "Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and learning. When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American class and in every American community. Today our nation grieves with those who have lost loved ones at Virginia Tech. We hold the victims in our hearts. We lift them up in our prayers and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering today."

He said the federal government would "do everything possible" to assist the investigation. "We would stand ready to help local law enforcement and the local community in any way we can," he said.
Sadie Gray

An idyllic campus
Virginia Tech is one of the better-known US universities, with an excellent reputation for engineering. It ranks ninth in the US in that subject in university league tables, 34th overall. Former alumni include the Home Office minister Tony McNulty and Charlie Byrd, the jazz guitarist. Its 28,470 students enjoy an idyllic location on a campus that sprawls across 2,600 acres of land in the town of Blacksburg in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Founded in 1872, it is one of only two civilian universities in the US with a corps of cadets who undergo military training on campus. Until 1966 it was a requirement for all male students to have received military training.