April 16th tragedy examined: Part 3 - Virginia Tech’s warning was too late

Part 1 - More sites locked down before Tech alert

Part 2 - No Tech follow-up on Cho incidents

 

Just more than an hour after Virginia Tech senior Seung-Hui Cho’s first murders on April 16, 2007—and 25 minutes after one Tech office already had locked itself in—top university officials gathered in Burruss Hall to manage the crisis.

It was 8:25 a.m. Two students had been shot in the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory. Ryan Clark, a resident assistant, was dead, and freshman Emily Hilscher was dying. No weapon had been found at the scene, so a gunman was presumed to be on the loose.

Nothing like it had happened before at Tech.

An archive of Tech records from that day is to be opened to the public this month, including some of the documents the Richmond Times-Dispatch has examined during the past seven months to discover gaps and errors in the official account of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

The archive and other material amassed as part of the state’s settlement with Tech victims’ families and survivors provides still more insights into the workings of Tech’s Policy Group, made up of top university leaders including President Charles W. Steger. They gathered the morning the Cho assault unfolded and tried to decide what to tell the campus—and when.

The meeting “was as much an assembly place as a meeting,“ Tech spokesman Larry Hincker, a group member, said months later. “Calls were coming in on cells and to office phones. Sometimes people got called to another phone. People were coming and going.“

. . .

Though top university officials knew as early as 7:30 that a student was dead, Steger wanted more information before issuing notice.

As the officials met, group member Ralph Byers, Tech’s government relations executive director, e-mailed a school official based in Richmond to say: “This not releasable yet, one student dead, [one] wounded, gunman on loose.“

The time was 8:45, Tech e-mail records show. “Just try to be sure it doesn’t get out until we have more information,“ Byers reminded her in another e-mail at 8:49.

At 8:52, he e-mailed an administrative assistant in the president’s office: “Lock the doors!“

About a half-hour earlier, the bursar’s office relayed word from the Tech police that all pickups of bank-deposit bags were suspended. There was no explanation, e-mail records show.

Two members of the group managed to tell their children of the West Ambler Johnston shootings well before any campuswide notice went out—though neither advised their children to change any plans. One even told her son to go to his class at Tech that morning.

A set of meeting notes from one of those two officials makes clear the Policy Group knew one student was dead and the other was in critical condition, before adding: “Nothing to be released to media yet.“ Her note goes on to say West Ambler Johnston was in lockdown.

But Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum later told victims and families that his officers were informing students leaving the dorm that there had been a shooting.

Freshman Henry J. Lee left the dorm in time for his 9 a.m. French class.

Freshman Rachael E. Hill, after calling her mother in Richmond to let her know that there had been a shooting but that she was OK, was reading her Bible when roommate Maria Gillian, a classmate from Grove Avenue Christian School, left for a chemistry lab.

“Good luck on your presentation,“ Hill called out to her best friend.

And, soon after, Hill gathered her own books and headed to the French class that she and Lee took in Norris Hall.

. . .

Several Policy Group members’ notes show a 9:25 or 9:30 briefing by Tech Police Capt. Joey Albert in which he said he did not believe a lockdown was necessary.

At about the same time, Virginia State Police investigator Chuck Eaton, who later would be the officer in charge of the agency’s investigation, was telling Flinchum that shooters usually are long gone from scenes like West Ambler Johnston by the time police arrive.

By that time, the doors to the veterinary college had been locked for at least 10 minutes.

One Policy Group member noted from Albert’s briefing that police were “still searching for shooter . . . don’t know whether was on foot or vehicle”—that is, whether the shooter had gone far from campus.

Yet another jotted: “Is there a manhunt on campus.“

And one Policy Group member noted from Albert’s briefing: “One good lead.“

In fact, police just moments before had detained that “good lead”—Hilscher’s boyfriend, a student at Radford University. He was headed back to Tech from Radford to check on Hilscher after her roommate called to say she had been shot. Police stopped him at 9:24 on Prices Fork Road, just off campus.

Two minutes later, the Policy Group issued a campuswide e-mail saying there had been a shooting. It did not say anyone was dead. It did not say anything about a gunman.

By that time, Steger’s office, the professional and continuing education center, the veterinary college, and the office of environmental health and safety were locked down.

Hincker could not say whether any other university offices had locked up.

. . .

Cho, meanwhile, had made it to the Blacksburg post office to mail a packet of videotapes and writings to NBC News in New York City. The overnight envelope was stamped at 9:01.

As Cho left the post office, making his way down South Main Street, past the students milling around Squires Student Center and the Newman Library onto campus, the word went out to stop trash collection south of the Drillfield, the part of campus where West Ambler Johnston is located.

Also at that time, an e-mail that Cho never would read landed in his mailbox. It was from a professor, telling Cho he was about to fail a religion class.

In a class assignment in which he was asked to imagine himself as St. Paul, Cho wrote: “You [expletive] need to admit your sins, admit you are sacrilegious [expletive] & ask God for forgiveness. I will personally go over to your house & kick the living hell out of you. I mean it. I’m not kidding.“

. . .

In private briefings to victims and families last fall, police said they believed Cho entered Norris sometime between 9:15 and 9:30, first chaining shut the second-floor door that connected to neighboring Holden Hall.

He taped a note to the door: “Bomb will go off if you open the door.“

He then chained shut the first-floor door that faces Burruss Hall, where the top officials were meeting, and the other first-floor door that opens to a walkway leading to the Drillfield.

Then, he walked upstairs to the second floor. He paced the hall, just as the character “Bud” had done in a violent story he had written for an English class a year earlier. Just like Bud, Cho was carrying a 9 mm handgun, as well as a .22.

At 9:40, he stepped through the door of Room 206.

G.V. Loganathan was teaching his advanced hydrology class—the science of how water moves—to 13 senior and graduate students. Loganathan patiently taught some of the toughest courses in the engineering school, and several of the students in his class were taking it even though they didn’t need to do so.

Cho didn’t say a word.

He was wearing a tan ammo vest, stuffed with clips of bullets for his guns, squatted into a shooter’s stance, and began methodically firing his 9 mm at the front row of students, moving from his left to right, emptying one 15-round clip, ejecting it and inserting another.

Then he left.

Elsewhere in Norris Hall, it took a minute or so for students and teachers to realize they were hearing gunshots. Some thought they heard construction noises. Others thought the sounds came from a chemistry lab downstairs.

The first 911 call reached the Blacksburg police at 9:41. It took about a minute for them to realize the call was from Tech and route it to campus police, by which point that force also had received a 911 call from Norris Hall.

In Room 211, French instructor Jocelyn Couture-Nowak asked student Colin Goddard to call 911, while others tried to wrestle her table to barricade the door.

As more people in Norris realized they were hearing gunfire, terror spread.

Some tried jumping from windows. Professor Kevin P. Granata came down from his third-floor office to investigate. Cho shot and killed him in the hallway.

On the third floor, a student who earlier that morning had called his father to reassure him the campus was being locked down after the West Ambler Johnston shootings, heard the shots and got a phone call saying students were under attack below. He and others in an academic office locked themselves inside. And waited.

Cho, meanwhile, had stepped across the hall from Lognathan’s class to Jamie Bishop’s German class. He shot Bishop and several students by the door and then started down the aisle, shooting others.

Then, he returned to Room 211, the French class.

The table wasn’t enough to keep Cho out. Pushing through, he shot Couture-Nowak and again began his deadly march down the aisle between desks.

Goddard, who had called 911, was one of the first shot; his phone slid from his hand, and Richmonder Emily Haas picked it up. She kept the phone hidden under her hair.

Colin, are you shot? she asks, according to a 911 tape played for victims and families that police have refused to release. Families provided notes from the tape to The Times-Dispatch.

Is the door locked? a dispatcher asked.

It doesn’t lock, Haas replied.

How many are injured? Are the shots getting closer or farther?

Farther. They are getting farther. . . . they are getting closer.

Then, a scream.

I just got hit, Haas said.

Officers are in the building, the dispatcher tells her. They’ll have guns, they know you are there.

The police arrived outside Norris about 9:44. They were close because they’d been staging at the nearby police headquarters in case they were needed to arrest Hilscher’s boyfriend.

People in here are hurt, Haas said.

There are people hurt, the dispatcher repeats.

I think I might hear them. Please hurry, people are hurt.

Haas was shot a second time.

She closed her eyes and played dead. Among the 12 who died in Room 211 were classmates Henry Lee and Rachael Hill, residents of West Ambler Johnston.

Students in Room 205’s computing class managed to block their door, lying down and pushing against it with their feet, so they weren’t hit when Cho fired through the door, as he did several times.

Cho tried forcing his way into Liviu Librescu’s solid mechanics course, but the 76-year-old professor, who as a boy in Romania was imprisoned in a Nazi camp, pushed himself against the door and yelled to his students to jump through the window.

They pushed out the screens and leapt to the bushes and grass below. Ten escaped. Cho shot Librescu through the door and killed him. One student died, and three were injured.

In the German class, four students—two of them injured—also braced themselves against the door, keeping low. Cho beat on the door, managing at one point to open it about an inch, snapping off five shots into the room before moving on.

He went back into the hydrology class, back to the French class, continuing to shoot.

Outside, police raced from one chained door to the other, unable to shoot off the padlocks. Hearing the different sounds of Cho’s 9 mm and .22, they figured there was more than one shooter.

Finally, they found a maintenance-shop door that, while locked, was not chained. They blew it open with a shotgun, and six officers—a Tech police lieutenant and five Blacksburg officers—swarmed in, followed within seconds by a team of six Tech officers and one from Blacksburg.

The first five arrived on the second floor as the shooting stopped.

It was 9:51.

Cho just had shot himself.

At 9:50, the Policy Group issued an e-mail:

“A gunman is loose on the campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows.“