SHOCKER! With Killer On Loose, Classes Stayed In Session, Alert Came 2 Hours After Initial SlayingsWith a killer on loose, classes stayed in session
Pastor Dale Morgan
Added: Apr 17th, 2007 7:17 AM
*
SHOCKER! With Killer On Loose, Classes Stayed In Session, Alert Came 2
Hours After Initial SlayingsWith a killer on loose, classes stayed in
session*
Alert came 2 hours after initial slayings
By Gary Strauss, Blake Morrison and Monica Hortobagyi
USA TODAY
BLACKSBURG, Va. — By the time most Virginia Tech students first learned
of an early morning shooting in a campus dorm Monday, Derek O'Dell was
crouching beneath his desk, bleeding from his arm and watching his
classmates fall to the floor in a barrage of bullets.
More than two hours had passed since two people had been killed in the
West Ambler Johnston dorm, but it wasn't until 9:26 a.m. — about the
time a gunman entered O'Dell's German class in Norris Hall and began
shooting — that students were told via e-mail of the first shootings and
warned to "be cautious."
For dozens of students — including O'Dell, the school's intramural chess
champ — the warning came too late. Virginia Tech became the scene of the
deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, prompting some shaken
students to question 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, and I think we still do. … But why didn't
they cancel classes right after the first shooting?"
Instead, campus police simply locked down the West Ambler Johnston dorm,
where a gunman killed two people on the fourth floor.
Campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said later that police believed the
slayings were a "domestic incident" and that authorities thought the
gunman had left campus, perhaps even the state.
By Monday evening, Flinchum — under a barrage of questions from
reporters about officials' actions after the first shooting — 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.
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 O'Dell's classroom, he said nothing, O'Dell
recalled in an interview with USA TODAY. O'Dell described the gunman as
Asian, about 6 feet tall, wearing a maroon cap and a black jacket.
The shooter, carrying a handgun, emptied two clips in O'Dell's class,
shooting several students before moving on to another classroom in
Norris, 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 cellphone.
Police arrived moments later, O'Dell said, but not before the gunman had
fired five or six more shots into the door after returning and being
unable to push it open.
"I just wanted to get out of there," O'Dell recalled. "I was worried
about him coming back and killing the rest of us."
Not everyone faulted the university's response.
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."
And 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,"
Trump said.
At Monday 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. They describe a campus in
chaos and a university that responded only after the fact.
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 to students 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 9mm 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," Meroney said.
Inside Norris Hall, the situation was even 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, Terpenny 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 said, she
did not take the note seriously and opened the door.
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." It said
police and EMS are on the scene.
"All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until
further notice," the e-mail read. "All entrances to campus are closed."
Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.