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How Virginia Tech massacre unfolded
The investigators scoured Cho's room for evidence. The room looked like any college kid's, strewed with papers, food wrappers, cereal boxes. This is what they took away, according to a search warrant filed later by Virginia State Police special agent M.D. Austin:
Chain from top left closet shelf.
Folding knife and combination padlock.
Compaq computer Serial # CND33100IL on desk.
Assorted documents, notepads, writings from desk.
Combination lock.
Tool box.
Nine books, two notebooks, envelopes from top shelf.
Assorted books and pads from lower shelf.
Compact discs from desk.
Items from desktop drawer, mail, three notebooks, check credit card.
Items from second drawer -- Kodak digital camera, keys, Citibank statement.
Two cases of compact discs from dresser top.
Six sheets of green graph paper.
Other officers walked the halls of Harper with a photograph of Cho, asking students if they knew him. They were all rattled. Most did not recognize him; a few said they thought they had walked by him now and then. How lucky they were, thought Tom Duscheid, a management student from Pittsburgh. This is the residence hall where Cho lived, not Ambler Johnston, What if he had rampaged through here with his guns?
There were still so many unanswered questions. Why did Cho go to Ambler Johnston West? Why did he choose Norris Hall for his rampage? Whom was he looking for? What did he do between the two incidents? How did he move around the campus unnoticed? Police questions, questions of detail. They went to work on some of the little stuff, tracing Cho's movements. They found out that on Feb. 9 he had stepped into a pawnshop directly across the street from the Tech campus, right on Main Street, JND Pawn Brokers, to make the first purchase of the guns he would use later. It was a Walther .22-caliber pistol, relatively inexpensive, commonly used for target shooting. From then until days before the shooting, he traveled to nearby stores to buy ammunition. Some at the Wal-Mart Supercenter, some at Dick's Sporting Goods over in Christianburg. On March 16, exactly a month before his killing rampage, he went to Roanoke Firearms, a full-service gun dealership with more than 350 guns on display. He showed his driver's license, a checkbook with a matching address and an immigration card. A surveillance camera captured him making the $571 purchase of a Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartridges.
Days later, a larger clue would come from NBC News and Cho himself. At 9:01 Monday morning, before going to Norris Hall, Cho sent an Express Mail package to NBC in New York that included photographs, video and a note including these chilling words: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today."
Little sleep for the living
When Ross Berger got home from the hospital Monday night, assured that his friend Kristina Heeger would survive, there was no more storage space for messages on his cellphone, and his computer was flooded with e-mails. Everyone was talking. Names were coming in. He knew four of the dead students. He turned on the television for the first time. Fox News was showing the shaky video footage taken by Jamal Albarghouti outside Norris Hall. A running count of gunshots was displayed alongside the shaky pictures. "And like that was the first thing I saw, and I went into my bathroom and puked," Berger said.
But he came back and watched some more, inevitably, and the more he saw and heard, the more unsettled he became. So many conflicting feelings were banging around in his head. The country seemed to be harping on the police and the university administration and how they had handled, or mishandled, the unfolding tragedy. Berger and all his classmates, except one, were innocent, yet he felt as though they, too, were being tainted by the obsessive focus and the natural human desire to fix blame. The guy to blame was dead, he thought. People didn't understand that 99.9 percent of the time this was a wonderful little place to be, that nothing really goes on. The cops here, what did they know about mass murder? They were used to dealing with some drunk kid, not a psycho. How can you stop something like that? Everyone felt horrible, Berger and all his friends were still bawling, but they also still felt a deep pride in Virginia Tech. He thought about it all night, the killings, the conflict, and never found sleep.
Few who had endured the day could sleep that night. At his off-campus apartment on Patrick Henry Drive, Trey Perkins stayed up in the comfortable embrace of his parents. Don and Sheree Perkins had begun the four-hour car trip from Yorktown that afternoon as soon as Sheree could slip free from an elementary school field trip she had been leading.
Trey had been one of the primary student voices all day, talking coolly and calmly about the horror that visited his German class. He had seen the worst that man can do to man, and now he was in a daze. It actually helped him to talk, to respond to questions, to go over the details in rote fashion, because when he spoke aloud they seemed somewhat removed. When he was alone and silent, something deeper washed over him that made him shudder. It was a simple image that looped again and again in his mind's eye. The first moment, the classroom door opening, the gunman coming in.
This narrative is based on scores of interviews with shooting victims, witnesses and other participants in the events at Virginia Tech on Monday. All thoughts expressed by people in the narrative are taken directly from the interviews. Reporting from Blacksburg were staff writers Michelle Boorstein, Chris L. Jenkins, Susan Levine, Jerry Markon, Nick Miroff, David Montgomery, Candace Rondeaux, Ian Shapira, Michael D. Shear and Sandhya Somashekhar. Reporting from Washington were staff writers Keith L. Alexander, Sari Horwitz, Carol D. Leonnig, Michael E. Ruane, Katherine Shaver, Jose Antonio Vargas and William Wan. Staff researchers Alice Crites, Meg Smith and Julie Tate also contributed to this narrative.
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