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by Caitlin Sullivan, Time Magazine
Tuesday, Apr. 17, 2007
By Caitlin Sullivan/Blacksburg and Katherine Rooney/Washington
A victim is carried out of Norris Hall at Virginia Tech
in Blacksburg, Va., Monday, April 16, 2007. At least 31 people were
killed in a shooting rampage on the campus
Did the day of terror at the
Virginia Polytechnic and State University in Blacksburg begin with
someone who sneaked into a dormitory or perhaps had been there the night
before? At about 7:15 a.m., a yet unidentified woman and a male resident
adviser were shot and killed by a gunman on the fourth floor of the dorm
building. Kristen Bensley, a freshman who lived below the floor where
the shooting occurred, told TIME, "There were rumors going on about he
was fighting with his girlfriend or something of that nature and there
were rumors going around that he shot his girlfriend and her RA."
Bensley notes, however, that only residents can get into the building
with a specific resident "passport," that is, a card that one has to
swipe in order to open doors before 10 a.m. She believes the gunman
would have had to have gotten into the dorm before it was officially
opened for the day. Did someone let him in earlier?
Other questions remain unanswered.
Were there one or two shooters at Virginia Tech? The two hour gap
between the incident at the dorm and a far more fatal one across the
campus has led to theorizing that more than one gunman may be involved.
While no description is yet available for the shooter at the dormitory,
the gunman who killed at least 30 people at Norris Hall shortly after 9
a.m. was described by some sources as an Asian man. He apparently killed
himself at the end of the rampage, shooting off half of his face and
thus preventing law enforcement officers from making an immediate
identification. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that a 24-year old
student from China is a person of interest in the case. He arrived in
San Francisco in August on a visa issued in Shanghai. According to the
Sun-Times, bomb threats at Virginia Tech last month may have been
attempts to test campus security. Two weapons have reportedly been
recovered, a 22 caliber pistol and a 9 mm one.
When school authorities finally sent
out alerts about the situation, the word spread around campus quickly
and digitally. Jason Piatt, a junior, was at McBride hall right next to
Norris and couldn't get out of the building. "So," he says, "We're
trying to figure out what was going on. One kid had a PDA [personal
digital assistant] and got email and we found out there had been a
shooting on the campus and they were investigating it. Then we got on
our cell phones and we kind of picked it up live as it came to us in
news feeds." Others saw the police activity and were mystified. Dustin
Lynch, a sophomore, was on the drill field. , an open meadow in the
center of the Virginia Tech campus, in front of Norris at about 9:15
when he saw "an unbelievable amount of police force speeding around...
from all different directions. Ambulance and police cars met at Norris
Hall and surrounded it." Then, he says, "after several minutes different
groups of students were running out with their hands raised. About 50
students at a time." And then the police and emergency workers started
bringing the bodies out. Soon, everyone was trying to find out: Who had
been shot? Who had been killed? Why hasn't my friend answered my IM?
It has been a surreal time for the
students. Brandon Stiltner, a senior aerospace engineering student, and
Jonathan Hess, a senior mechanical engineer, were watching TV all day
but by noon they'd had enough. "We decided we needed to do something,"
Stiltner said. "We were worthless sitting around." So they took their
six-foot Virginia Tech sign off the wall and logged into Facebook.
Within the next few hours 100 people replied to their e-mail request for
a vigil.
By 8 p.m. hundreds of students began
filing down the steps of the War Memorial Chapel toward the drill field.
Propped against a tree with a box of unlit candles at its base, the sign
wavered in the wind. Clusters of two and three students stood together
in silence. Slowly they began to line up to sign the board. "You are in
our prayers. We hurt for you. We will remember you forever," one mourner
wrote in silver marker. "I'm still really in disbelief," says Stiltner.
The shock of the day's shootings sank in, Hess said, as he carried the
sign across campus for the vigil. "It hit me," Hess said, "to know that
it was in these buildings." The media crews that swarmed campus were
also surreal to Hess and Stiltner. "We could look out our window and see
exactly what's on TV," Stiltner says. He watched his sign crowded with
initials and prayers, awaiting the names of the victims. He shuddered.
"I hope I don't have any nasty surprises."
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