 |
On April 16, 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a senior English major at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the mountain town of Blacksburg, Va., killed 32 people in separate shootings two hours apart. It was the worst mass shooting in American history. Nothing that happened that morning made sense: not the sight of students leaping from windows; not the silent, methodical march of the madman; not, most of all, the unbearable number: 32, excluding the killer, who turned his gun on himself. Fifteen more were shot and wounded.
It started early. Around 7:15 a.m. University police took a 911 call about a shooting at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dorm building on the 2,600-acre campus. Inside they found two students, a man and a woman, dead. Investigators believed the killings were an isolated event, leading university officials to make a fateful decision not to lock down the rest of the campus despite the killer still being on the loose.
