The Virginia Tech shooting was a spree shooting and mass shooting that occurred on Monday, April 16, 2007, comprising two attacks on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old undergraduate student at the university, killed 32 people and wounded 17 others with two semi-automatic pistols before committing suicide. Six others were injured jumping out of windows to escape Cho.
Cho's shooting spree was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and remained so for nine years until the Pulse nightclub shooting, which was surpassed a year later by the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. It remains the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history and the deadliest mass shooting in Virginia history.
Cho first fatally shot two people at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory. Two hours later, he perpetrated a school shooting at Norris Hall, a classroom building, where he chained the main entrance doors shut and fired into four classrooms and a stairwell, killing thirty more people. As police stormed Norris Hall, Cho fatally shot himself in the head.
The attacks received international media coverage. It sparked debate about gun violence, gun laws, gaps in the U.S. system for treating mental health issues, Cho's state of mind, the responsibility of college administrations, privacy laws, journalism ethics, and other issues. News organizations that aired portions of Cho's multimedia manifesto were criticized by victims' families, Virginia law enforcement officials, and the American Psychiatric Association.
Cho had previously been diagnosed with selective mutism and severe depression. During much of his middle school and high school years, he received therapy and special education support. After graduating from high school, Cho enrolled at Virginia Tech. Because of federal privacy laws, the university was unaware of Cho's previous diagnoses or the accommodations he had been granted at school. In 2005, Cho was accused of stalking two female students. After an investigation, a Virginia special justice declared Cho mentally ill and ordered him to attend treatment. Because he was not institutionalized, he was allowed to purchase guns. The shooting prompted the state of Virginia to close legal loopholes that had allowed individuals determined mentally unsound to purchase handguns without detection by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). It also led to the passage of the first major federal gun control measure in the U.S. since 1994. The law strengthening the NICS was signed by President George W. Bush on January 5, 2008.
Administrators at Virginia Tech were criticized by the Virginia Tech Review Panel, a state-appointed panel tasked with investigating the incident, for failing to take action that might have decreased the number of casualties. The panel's report also reviewed gun laws and pointed out gaps in mental health care as well as privacy laws that left Cho's deteriorating condition untreated when he was a student at Virginia Tech.
Attacks
The shootings occurred in two separate incidents. The first incident was in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a residence hall where Seung-Hui Cho killed two students. The second incident was in Norris Hall, an academic building on the opposite side of the campus where the other thirty-one deaths occurred, including that of Cho himself, and all the nonlethal injuries occurred. Cho used two semi-automatic pistols during the attacks: a .22-caliber Walther P22 and a 9mm Glock 19.
West Ambler Johnston shootings Cho was seen near the entrance to West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 students, at about 6:47 a.m. EDT. Normally, the hall is accessible only to its residents via magnetic key cards before 10:00 a.m.; Cho's student mailbox was in the lobby of the building, so he had a pass card allowing access after 7:30 a.m., but it is unclear how he gained earlier entrance to the building.
At around 7:15 a.m., Cho entered the room that freshman Emily Jane Hilscher shared with another student, Heather Haugh, and shot Hilscher, a 19-year-old from Woodville, Virginia. After hearing the gunshots, a resident assistant, 22-year-old senior Ryan C. Clark of Martinez, Georgia, attempted to aid Hilscher. Cho shot and killed Clark. Hilscher remained alive for three hours after being shot, but no one from the school, law enforcement, or hospital notified her family until after she had died. Hilscher died in Roanoke, Virginia. Hilscher and Haugh were out of campus the night before, and Hilscher's boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, dropped her off at around 7:02 am.
Cho left the scene and another freshman, Molly Donohue, who lived across from Hilscher and Haugh, tried entering the room after seeing bloodied footprints, but couldn't enter as a body was blocking the door. The female RA soon after forced her way and told Donohue, her roommate, and two other women to call for help.
Cho returned to his room in Harper Hall, a dormitory west of West Ambler Johnston Hall. While police and emergency medical services units were responding to the shootings in the dorm next door, Cho changed out of his bloodstained clothes, logged on to his computer to delete his e-mails and his student university account, and then removed the hard drive. About an hour after the attack, Cho is believed to have been seen near the campus duck pond. Although authorities suspected Cho had thrown his hard drive and mobile phone into the water, a search by divers was unsuccessful.
Almost two hours after the first killings, Cho appeared at a nearby post office and mailed a package of writings and video recordings to NBC News; these materials proved to be of little investigative value to authorities. The package was postmarked at 9:01 a.m.
Norris Hall shootings
Around 9:40 a.m., Cho entered Norris Hall, which housed the Engineering Science and Mechanics program among others. In a backpack, he carried heavy duty chains and locks, a hammer, a knife, two handguns with nineteen 10- and 15-round magazines, and nearly 400 rounds of ammunition. With the locks and chains, he chained the three main entrance doors shut and placed a note on one, saying that attempting to open the door would cause a bomb to explode. Shortly before the shooting began, a faculty member found the note and took it to the third floor to notify the school's administration. At about the same time, Cho had begun to shoot students and faculty on the second floor. The bomb threat was never called in. The first call to 9-1-1 was received at 9:42 a.m.
Cho prepared his gear for the shooting in empty Room 200 before it began. According to several students, he looked into several classrooms, likely to see how many people were in each room. Erin Sheehan, an eyewitness who had been in Room 207, told reporters that the shooter "peeked in twice" earlier in the lesson and that "it was strange that someone at this point in the semester would be lost, looking for a class". At 9:40 a.m., Cho began shooting. His first attack after entering Norris occurred in an advanced hydrology engineering class taught by G. V. Loganathan in room 206. Thirteen registered students were inside. Cho shot and killed the professor, then continued firing, killing nine of the thirteen students in the room and injuring two others.
After exiting the classroom, Cho fired down the hall at two students, Jamal Carver of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Yang Kim, who were fleeing from Room 204 next door. Carver was shot in the arm while Kim survived uninjured. They managed to escape down the stairwell across the hall. He also fired at another student, Theresa Walsh of Binghamton, New York, and grad student and substitute professor Haiyan Cheng () of Hohhot, Inner Mongolia from Room 205 who were peering out from the door. Neither woman was shot. Another student in Room 205, Zach Petkewicz, helped Cheng barricade the doors. He went into Room 207, where instructor Jamie Bishop was teaching Introductory German. Cho shot Bishop and some students near the door, then walked down the aisle shooting more victims. Bishop and four students were killed; six other students were shot and wounded. Cho then moved on to Norris 211 and 204, where he was initially prevented from entering due to barricades erected by instructors and students.
Hearing the commotion from below, Kevin Granata guided twenty students from a classroom on the third floor into his office where the door could be locked and went downstairs to investigate along with another professor, Wally Grant, where they were both shot by Cho in the hallway. Grant, who quickly fled into a bathroom, was wounded and survived, but Granata died of his injuries. None of the students locked in Granata's office were hurt or killed.
In Room 211 of Intermediate French, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak saw Cho heading towards the doorway. She and student Henry Lee barricaded the door with a few desks while she yelled at students to get down on the floor and under their desks and call 9-1-1. Cho pushed through the barricade and entered the room, killing Nowak and Lee who fell behind the door. A student named Matthew La Porte, who was a trained Air Force ROTC member of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, charged towards Cho and attempted to tackle him, but died after being shot seven times during his attempt to save his class. Of the 22 students enrolled in the class, 18 were present at the time of the shooting. In addition to the professor, a total of eleven students were killed and another six were injured. The sole uninjured survivor, Clay Violand, played dead and was (alongside a wounded female student) one of only two people to walk out of the room as soon as police arrived. As in Room 207, Cho fired into Room 211 from the doorway, and then walked up and down the aisles methodically targeting potential survivors as they tried to hide. He did not say a single word throughout the shooting and occasionally reloaded his weapon in the hallways, before re-entering classrooms to resume shooting.
Retracing his path, Cho returned to Room 206. According to a student eyewitness, the movements of a student named Waleed Shaalan, who was already wounded, distracted the aggressor from a nearby student after he had returned to the room. Shaalan was shot a second time and died. Also in the same room, another wounded student named Guillermo Colman was shielded from more serious injury by having the body of student Partahi Lumbantoruan placed on top of him, but Colman's various accounts make it unclear whether he pulled Lumbantoruan's body over himself or Lumbantoruan initially landed on Colman after being shot the first time. Two other students who were also in the room made it out alive. (Cho had entered Room 206 three times.)
After his first entry to Room 207, several students had barricaded the door and had begun tending to the wounded. When Cho returned minutes later, Katelyn Carney and spokesperson Derek O'Dell were injured while holding the door closed, but the remaining students survived. In room 205, students had already barricaded the door with a large table after graduate assistant Cheng and Petkewicz blocked the door. Cho shot through the door about seven times, but failed to force his way in. No one in the classroom was wounded or killed.