Updated at 12:58 a.m., Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Grief, anger over what wasn't done
By Gary Strauss, Blake Morrison and Monica Hortobagyi
USA Today
|
More than two hours had passed since two people had been killed in a dormitory, but it wasn't until 9:26 a.m. — minutes before a gunman entered O'Dell's German class in Norris Hall and began shooting — that an e-mail was sent to students telling of the first shootings and warning them to "be cautious."
The warning came too late. Virginia Tech became the scene of the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, with 33 people dead, at least 15 injured and people questioning whether school officials could have done more to stop the carnage.
Some said administrators should have canceled classes after the 7:15 a.m. shooting that left two people dead. Others wondered why officials didn't move more quickly to warn students about the potential danger, at least until authorities caught the shooter.
"I'm still in a state of disbelief about this," said Justin Shaw, 20, a business major. "We have a strong sense of pride in this school. We all thought it was a safe place. ... But why didn't they cancel classes right after the first shooting?"
Instead, campus police locked down the West Ambler Johnston dorm, where a gunman killed two people on the fourth floor.
Campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said police believed the slayings were a "domestic incident" and that authorities thought the gunman had left campus, perhaps even the state.
By last night, Flinchum — under a barrage of questions from reporters — said police had identified a "person of interest" in the first shooting. But the man did not turn out to be the gunman who killed himself after slaying 30 others in Norris Hall.
Flinchum also acknowledged another possibility: that the same gunman had struck both buildings, and that authorities simply had been pursuing the wrong man after the first shooting.
The confusion over the shootings and the reaction of Virginia Tech officials fueled tension on campus throughout the day that university President Charles Steger sought to ease during a news conference last night.
WARNING CAME TOO LATE
Steger said many of Virginia Tech's more than 25,000 students already were headed to campus or to classes when the first shootings occurred, and that notifying them immediately about the incident would have been difficult and impractical.
"We did as well as we could," Steger said. After the first shootings, "we had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur."
For O'Dell, 20, and other students trapped in Norris Hall two hours after the first shooting, that assumption proved tragic.
When the gunman stopped at the class, he said nothing, O'Dell recalled in an interview. He described the gunman as Asian, about 6 feet tall, wearing a maroon cap and a black jacket.
The shooter, carrying a handgun, emptied two cartridges in the class, shooting several students before moving on to another classroom in Norris Hall, O'Dell said. That's when a wounded O'Dell hurried to shut the wooden door, pushing his foot against it.
He recalled peeling off his brown leather belt and wrapping it around his right arm to stanch the bleeding. Then, O'Dell recalled, he pulled it tight with his mouth and called 911 on his cell phone.
"I just wanted to get out of there," O'Dell recalled. "I was worried about him coming back and killing the rest of us."
Many faulted the university's response.
"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the seventh floor of the dormitory where the first shooting happened.
DIFFICULT TO PROTECT
But Edmund Henneke, an associate dean of engineering who was in Norris Hall when the second round of shootings occurred, said criticism of the school's handling of the incidents was unfair.
"We have a huge campus," he said. "You have to close down a small town, and you can't close down every way in or out."
Warren Cook, head of Warren F. Cook and Associates, a criminal justice consulting firm in Portland, Ore., said that "it's hard to second-guess these things. ... If they have an isolated incident in one of the dormitories like they thought they did in the morning, I don't know that it would be appropriate to throw the whole campus in a lockdown situation."
Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, said lockdowns of any sort, even at elementary schools, are "challenging."
"When you talk about a college or university that sprawls across multiple acres with dozens of buildings ... it is extremely difficult to envision how anyone could successfully lock down an entire campus," he said.
At last night's news conference, police chief Flinchum said that officials "acted on the best information we had at the time. ... A lockdown or shutdown doesn't happen in seconds."
But students and teachers, some in Norris Hall and others who arrived on campus around the time of the second shooting, said they wished authorities had erred on the side of caution.
The first campuswide e-mail notifying students of the initial shooting was sent at 9:26 a.m.
It said that a shooting had occurred at the seven-story West Ambler Johnston dorm, which houses about 900 students. It told them to "be cautious" and to contact campus police if they saw anything suspicious.
Then, at 9:50 a.m. — after the assault on Norris Hall — there was another e-mail from Virginia Tech's administration, this one more urgent.
"Please stay put," it read. "A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from windows."
Matt Meroney, a junior studying civil engineering, hadn't seen the e-mails and said he was driving toward campus about 10 a.m. when strangers stopped him. He said they told him of the shootings and warned him to turn back. Meroney parked his car and called the school's information line.
"I say to them, 'I hear everybody's getting shot, is class canceled?' And the lady tells me, 'All I can say is proceed cautiously.' Proceed cautiously? Meaning what? Avoid 9 mm bullets?"
Meroney said he kept walking toward class and saw "a dude with a bloody abdomen. Then I see a police SUV flying down the road toward him and before the car has screeched to a halt, the cops grab him and throw him in the back and peel away, I guess toward the hospital.
"Virginia Tech did a terrible job of dealing with this."
Inside Norris Hall, the situation was more confusing. Janis Terpenny, an associate professor of engineering, said she was in the dean's office on the third floor when they heard gunshots.
On one door, she said, she saw a note "that said there was a bomb and not to open the doors."
She said the note was on white notebook paper, and the writing was so "scratchy" that it was either intentionally disguised or written by someone with very poor handwriting.
"Having gone through two bomb scares" on campus recently, she did not take the note seriously and opened the door.
DOOR CHAINED
Then she saw another door that was chained from the inside. She said they went back to the dean's office and waited until a SWAT unit came and took them downstairs. Then they left the building through an outside door and ran to nearby Randolph Hall, where she said police locked them inside.
David Jenkins, a junior mechanical engineering major at Virginia Tech, was 40 minutes into his mechanical design class when he heard screams in the first-floor hallway of Randolph.
"When I went into the hall and some guy had just been shot in the arm" and had run into Randolph, he said. "That's when it went through my mind that this is real, and that there really is a shooter on campus. It was just kind of crazy to see someone actually shot. I was confused and didn't know what was going on. Then I was scared."
Andrew Rogers, a freshman from Scarborough, Mass., said he also was in class in Randolph Hall when the shots were fired.
"We heard police officers shouting" for the students to barricade themselves inside their classroom.
At 10:52, students received another e-mail from school administrators. This one told them of a second shooting "with multiple victims."
"All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until further notice," the e-mail read. "All entrances to campus are closed."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
