A series of gunshots was fired at the Polytechnic University in Blacksburg, Virginia, at 7:15 a.m. today. The first shots rang out on the fourth floor of the Ambler Johnston dormitory, home to 895 people.
Two hours later, the shooting continued on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus, the Norris Hall Engineering Corps.
Thirty-two people were killed and 21 others were injured in the shooting.
The gunman killed himself. Witnesses describe him as a man of Asian appearance in his early 20s. The man was heavily armed.
Students in their rooms were ordered to close and not to approach the windows. Many people, in search of information about what is happening on campus, went online.
Due to strong winds, a helicopter was unable to land to evacuate the injured, so all the injured were taken to hospital in ambulances.
Today and tomorrow classes at Virginia Tech University are canceled.
This is the second time in less than a year that firearms have been used on campus.
Today’s case was the bloodiest in U.S. history. The last time the most mass murder in an American school was a shooting at the University of Texas in 1966, when Charles Whitman killed 16 people.
On April 2 and 13 this year, the university canceled classes because of anonymous reports of explosive devices planted in the buildings of the university.
Monday’s shooting at Virginia Polytechnic University was the bloodiest in U.S. history. An armed man killed 32 people before killing himself, bringing the death toll to 33.
According to the students, they received a warning about the danger from the university administration only two hours after the first shooting, which sounded in the dormitory of the campus. Here, a criminal killed two people. Police arrived at the scene and believed the shots were the result of a domestic scandal and mistakenly concluded that the gunman had left campus.
However, the university’s president, Charles Steger, stated that the area had been closed immediately after the first incident and that electronic messages had been immediately sent to students. However, some of the students – about 11,000 people – were on the way to the school, so they could not be warned in a timely manner.
When the carnage resumed at the other end of campus in the school building, students began to panic. Some of them jumped out of the windows to escape the bullets. Thirty students were killed in cold blood in the classroom. The 31st victim was the gunman himself, who killed himself.
One law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the gunman had two handguns and multiple officers.
Twenty-eight wounded people were taken to hospitals. Two of them are still in critical condition. Doctors fear that the death toll could rise.
Police are still investigating, trying to establish the identity of the killer, his motives and other details of the shooting.
U.S. President George W. Bush expressed his regret about the incident. He met with Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine and University President Charles Stager.
