April 17, 2007
By SHAILA DEWAN
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 16 — The gunshots were so slow and steady that some students thought they came from a nearby construction site, until they saw the police officers with rifles pointed at Norris Hall, the engineering building at Virginia Tech.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
They went on and on, for what seemed like 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, an eternity with punctuation.
Bang. Bang. On the third floor of Norris Hall, Scott L. Hendricks, a professor, looked out the window of his office and saw students crawling away from the building.
Bang. Tiffany Otey’s accounting class crammed into an office and locked themselves in, crying in fright.
Every so often, the shots paused for a minute or so. That was the gunman, who was in the midst of the worst shooting rampage in American history, stopping to reload. When it was over, 33 people, including the gunman, were dead and at least 15 more were injured.
“I was terrified,” said Ms. Otey, a junior whose class met in the room above the one where much of the shooting took place.
One student finished the day’s assignment and tried to leave, but returned to tell the others that the hall was full of smoke and that there were police officers everywhere. The class decided to go into a room with a lock. Dr. Hendricks, an engineering and mechanics professor on the same floor, barricaded himself in his office, pushing a bookcase in front of the door. Some students on campus took refuge in the library, searching the Web to find out what was happening. No one knew.
“I was crying,” Ms. Otey said. “I was worried that the guy with the gun was going to come upstairs too.”
The violence began early in the morning in the west wing of Ambler Johnston, the largest dormitory at Virginia Tech, where two people were killed, officials said. But when the first class started two hours later, at 9:05 a.m., many on campus remained unaware of any danger.
“I woke up and I didn’t know anything was wrong,” said Sarah Ulmer, a freshman who lives in the east wing of the dorm. “I went to my first class and my teacher was talking about how some people weren’t coming because there was a gun threat at West A. J. and they were blocking it off. It was like, ‘Oh.’ ”
The school did not notify students by e-mail of the first shootings until 9:26 a.m., said Matt Dixon, who lives in the dorm. Mr. Dixon did not receive the e-mail message until he returned from his 9:05 class. When he left for that class, he said, a resident adviser told him not to use the central stairs, so he left another way.
On dry erase boards, advisers had written, “Stay in your rooms,” Mr. Dixon said.
Other students and faculty members said they had only a vague notion that there had been a shooting at the dorm. Several faculty members said they had reached campus during or just after the Norris Hall shooting and had gone unimpeded to their buildings.
Many were bewildered or angry that the campus had not been locked down earlier, after the first shooting.
“I am outraged at what happened today on the Virginia Tech campus,” wrote Huy That Ton, a member of the chemical engineering faculty, in an e-mail message. “Countless lives could have been saved if they had informed the student body of the first shooting. What was the security department thinking?!”
Campus officials said they believed the first incident was confined to a single building and was essentially a domestic dispute, and had no idea that the violence would spread elsewhere.
The police said they still did not know if the two shootings were the work of the same gunman.
The gunman in Norris Hall was described as a young Asian man with two pistols who calmly entered classrooms and shot professors and students. He peeked into the German class in Room 207, witnesses said, then pushed his way in.
Gene Cole, who works in Virginia Tech’s housekeeping services, told The Roanoke Times that he was on the second floor of Norris Hall on Monday morning and saw a person lying on a hallway floor. As Mr. Cole went up to the body, a man wearing a hat and holding a gun stepped into the hallway. “Someone stepped out of a classroom and started shooting at me,” he said. Mr. Cole fled down the corridor, then down a flight of steps to safety. “All I saw was blood in the hallways,” Mr. Cole said.
The gunman was described as methodical, squeezing the trigger almost rhythmically. “Sometimes there would be like a minute or so break in between them,” Ms. Otey said of the shots, “but for the most part it was one right after another.”
Elaine Goss of Waynesboro, Va., said she first spoke to her son, Alec Calhoun, a student, about 9:30 a.m., after he had leapt from a second-story classroom window as the gunman entered. “I couldn’t understand him. It was like gibberish,” Ms. Goss said. “It took a while to figure out shootings, lots of shootings, and that his whole class had jumped out the window.” He landed on his back, and “we made him go to the emergency room,” she said.
Two of his fellow engineering students were at the hospital with gunshot wounds, Ms. Goss said. “I think they were just wounded,” she said. “He’s counting on them being just wounded.”
As word spread of the shootings, there were first reports of one dead, then 20, then more than 30.
“Every time we turned our heads, the total just kept going up,” said Stuart Crowder, 22, a building and construction major, adding that the tension level on campus was still running high.
“Right now, I’m actually at a house where I can see the edge of campus, which is very close to the place where the incident actually happened,” Mr. Crowder said. “Probably every about 25 yards, there is an officer or some sort of guard right now with a large gun.”
Students, parents and professors jammed phone lines trying to check on loved ones and friends. There were frantic e-mail and text messages, clogged voice mails and busy signals. Kathryn Beard, an education professor at Virginia Tech whose daughter is a student there, said she became frantic when she was barred from entering. “The teacher in me was panicking, and the mother in me was panicking,” she said. “I can’t imagine something like this happening on my campus.”
Students theorized about how an outsider — many assumed it was an outsider — could have committed such violence on their campus.
“All we’ve seen is that patch of blood,” said Matthew Hall, a senior, indicating a red patch on the sidewalk in front of the building.
“It’s weird because this is like the safest place,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s the middle of nowhere,” added his roommate, Ryan Gatterdam.
Jessica Abraham, walking nearby, said anyone could pass for a student here by wearing a maroon cap. Maroon and orange are the school colors. “You always see the police here. It seems so safe,” Ms. Abraham said.
After the shots and fleeing, the SWAT teams and ambulances, the campus returned to a preternatural quiet, with students talking in small groups or consoling each other. Classes were canceled, and some students had their parents pick them up and take them home.
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