As accustomed as he was to dealing with morbidity, Stoeckle felt himself thinking the scene was unreal. He had never encountered such a volume of patients, more gunshot victims in a few hours than the hospital had treated in nearly five years. As they worked, Stoeckle and Wheeling heard stories of bravery from the wounded: students pushing others into closets to protect them from the barrage of bullets and helping one another with makeshift tourniquets and bandages. In one case, Stoeckle concluded that a student's quick medical action might have saved his own life. Bleeding significantly from his right leg, this student found an electrical cord in a classroom and wrapped it tightly around his wound, which kept him from bleeding to death until the rescue squad arrived and placed a tourniquet above the bleeding artery.

While the doctors began taking the wounded into surgery, the hospital filled with friends and relatives of students who were believed to be there. Some were, some were elsewhere, some, as it turned out, were already dead. The waiting parties were taken to a large, empty room in the back of the building, just drywall and concrete and folding chairs. They sat around in circles, talking, waiting for news. Food and water were brought in. There were no televisions there, so the only updates they could get were from new groups coming in.

Ross Berger arrived at noon and was there all day with more than 20 friends and relatives of Kristina Heeger, who had been shot in the French class. By mid-afternoon there were nearly 200 people, he estimated, all doing the same thing. "We had people running out crying, running in crying. A group of people who got there an hour after I did sat around for two hours, and finally someone came in and read off the names of patients there, and their name was not on it, so they got up and asked, 'Where is he?' and were told, 'We have no idea.' " The news for Kristina was better: she was there, and she was stable, recovering from wounds to her lower abdomen.

The Inn at Virginia Tech was another assembly place for the concerned. Guards at the front door tried to limit admission to friends and families. As the day wore on, names of the dead and wounded trickled out. Parents cried out and clung to each other in grief. In the context of the horror, it was often a relief to hear that a loved one was at the hospital. It could have been worse. At 5:45 p.m., a woman in a long gray coat burst from an inner room, pushing her way past a grief counselor. "My baby!" she said, sobbing, cupping her face in her hands as she collapsed into the arms of a friend.

Here, as elsewhere, one of the rivers of conversation was about whether the university handled the day properly or should have shut down the entire campus after the first shootings at West Ambler Johnston. "I think they should have closed the whole thing. It's not worth it," said Hoda Bizri of Princeton, W.Va., who was visiting her daughter, Siwar, a graduate student. The Bizris, like many others, were waiting for word about a friend who had been inside Norris and could not be reached.

Nearby, Kristen Wickham was looking for news about her friend Caitlin Hammaren, a fellow New Yorker. Everyone was trying to reach Caitlin, with no luck. She should have called by now, Wickham thought, not knowing that her friend was among the dead. Hammaren's parents were trying to reach Blacksburg and couldn't get a plane, so they were making the long drive from Upstate New York. Parents were making similar pilgrimages by car and plane from every corner of the country.

Back to a killer’s room
One of the early flights from the West Coast brought Nikki Giovanni, the renowned poet and Virginia Tech professor. At the end of her red-eye flight, she had heard about the shootings and the early reports that generally described the gunman. "When I heard the suspect was an Asian student, I had no doubt in my mind who did it," she said later. Cho had been in one of her classes, and his writing was so violent, so focused on death, that he had scared other students to the point where Giovanni had felt compelled to remove him from the class, sending him to a colleague for tutoring.

It was not until 9:06 that night -- when Virginia State Police investigators knocked on the door at Suite 2121 in Harper Hall -- that Karan Grewal realized that the roommate he had last seen in boxers and T-shirt 16 hours earlier was the cause of all the horror. The investigators interviewed Grewal and the four other roommates. No, they had not seen guns around the suite, but Cho was a strange guy. Wouldn't talk. Played the same songs over and over on his laptop. Didn't like to turn the light off in his room. Had a bike that he rode around campus late at night. Would not go out with them, except one rare time when they got him drinking at a party and he said he had an imaginary girlfriend who called him Spanky. Never saw him with a girl, though, or any friends whatsoever. Before spring break, he had seemed to get obsessed with a few women. Had been stalking them on his computer, and sometimes in person. The cops were called twice. Once he was sent to counseling and said he might as well kill himself. He started shaving his head down to a fuzz cut. Wore contact lenses. Used something for his acne. Was working out at the campus gym. Had been getting up really early recently.

CONTINUED : Search for evidence

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