He started with his former girlfriend, gunning her down in a dormitory in a jealous rage. Less than 2½ hours later, the 23-year-old gunman had killed a further 31 students, staff and himself at the Virginia Tech campus, the worst massacre in America's bloody firearms history.
At least 28 others were in hospital with gunshot wounds and injuries sustained from jumping out of windows in desperate attempts to escape.
Police believe the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, a Korean student of English at the university and dormitory resident, first opened fire at 7.15am in West Ambler Johnston Hall, killing Emily Jane Hilscher, 18. He is said to have been infatuated with her. "The girlfriend cheated on him and he decided to go on a rampage," Karina Porushkevich, 18, told the Herald. In the aftermath, Ms Porushkevich saw a girl being wheeled out of the dorm with "blood all over her".
"They had a big quarrel and he shot her … then the RA [resident assistant, Ryan Clark, 22] came, and he shot the RA," another student, Chen Chia-hao, told Taiwanese television.
But for the next two hours, no alarm was raised as the gunman hid out in the sprawling campus, where many of its 28,000 students were allowed to start classes.
Students who lived in the dorm said they received knocks on the door and were told to stay in their rooms, but nothing else. It was not until 9.26am that the university sent an email to all students: "A shooting incident occurred at West Ambler Johnston [dorm] earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating. The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case."
No more than four minutes after that email, the massacre started in earnest. A gun used in the first two killings was also used in the killings that were about to happen. Police said they had no reason to believe there was an accomplice, but they would investigate that possibility.
At 9.30am, students in the engineering building at the centre of the campus, Norris Hall, called police to say shots had been fired.
The German class in room 207 of Norris Hall had been going for about half an hour when the gunman poked his head in a couple of times. About 180 centimetres tall, he wore jeans and a maroon hat. He also carried a nine-millimetre semiautomatic handgun and a .22-calibre handgun. He walked a metre and a half into the room and began firing. When he was finished, only four of 25 people in that classroom would be able to walk out. The rest were dead or too badly injured.
From this early reporting, which was well done in foreign papers, things got very ugly with the victimization of NBC and the airing of the material the killer sent them. I still firmly believe the airing of the material was best handled by a major media organization rather than a 'leaked' version on some website once the material was handed over to police. Everyone knows it would have happened that way.
