Students tell of campus shootings

University students described today how a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting spree in modern US history.

The gunman cut down his victims in two attacks two hours apart yesterday, before the university could grasp what was happening and get the warning out to students.

The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33 at the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains.

Investigators gave no motive for the attack, the gunman's name was not immediately released, and it was not known if he was a student.

At a news conference early today, Police Chief Wendell Flinchum refused to dismiss the possibility that a co-conspirator or second shooter was involved. He said police had interviewed a "person of interest" in the dorm shooting who knew one of the victims, but refused to give details.

Ballistics tests would help explain what happened, he said.

Virginia Tech president Charles Steger said yesterday: "Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions. The university is shocked and indeed horrified."

But he was also faced difficult questions about the university's handling of the emergency and whether it did enough to warn students and protect them after the first burst of gunfire. Some students complained they got no warning from the university until an email that arrived more than two hours after the first shots rang out.

Wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition, the killer opened fire at about 7.15am (12.15pm Irish time) on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise mixed dormitory, then stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus.

Some of the doors at Norris Hall were found chained from the inside, apparently by the gunman.

Two people died in a dorm room and 31 others were killed in Norris Hall, including the gunman, who shot himself in the head. At least 15 people were hurt, some seriously.

Students jumped from windows in panic as many found themselves trapped behind the chained and padlocked doors

Police commando team members with helmets, flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed over the campus and a student used his mobile phone camera to record the sound of bullets echoing through a stone building.

Trey Perkins, who was in a German class in Norris Hall, told The Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9.50am and opened fire for about a minute and a half, firing 30 shots in all.

The gunman, Perkins said, first shot the professor in the head and then turned on the students. Perkins said the gunman was about 19 and had a "very serious but very calm look on his face".

"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Virginia, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. "And the shots seemed like it lasted forever."

Erin Sheehan, who was also in the German class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of the approximately two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded.

"It seemed so strange," Sheehan said. The gunman "peeked in twice, earlier in the lesson, like he was looking for someone, somebody, before he started shooting. But then we all heard something like drilling in the walls, and someone thought they sounded like bullets. That's when we blockaded the door to stop anyone from coming in".

She said the gunman "was just a normal-looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout-type outfit. He wore a tan button-up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something".

"I saw bullets hit people's body," Sheehan said. "There was blood everywhere." She added, "My professor, Herr Bishop, I'm not sure if he's alive."

Students said that there were no public-address announcements on campus after the first shots. Many said they learned of the first shooting in an email that arrived shortly before the gunman struck again.

"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18.

But Steger defended the university's handling of the tragedy, saying authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

"We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said.

"We can only make decisions based on the information you had at the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it."

Planet Blacksburg, a local, student-run website, quoted Ruiqi Zhang, identified as a computer engineering student, who said he was on the second floor of Norris.

"A student rushed in and told everybody to get down," Zhang said. "We put a table against the door and when the gunman tried to shoulder his way in and when he saw that he couldn't, he put two shots through the door.

"It was the scariest moment of my life."

The website also quoted Gene Cole, a building worker, as saying the shooter wore a hat and carried an automatic weapon. "He loaded his gun at me," Cole said. "I ran down the steps to get out of there."

Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior, said he was in a 9.05am mechanics class when he and classmates heard a thunderous sound from the classroom next door - "what sounded like an enormous hammer".

Screams followed an instant later and the banging continued. When students realised the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks for hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204.

"I must've been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last," said Calhoun, of Waynesboro, Virginia. He landed in a bush and ran.

Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but he believed they had survived.

Just before he climbed out of the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at the professor, who had stayed behind, perhaps to block the door.

He had been killed, he said.

Until yesterday, the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history was in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, when George Hennard ploughed his pick-up truck into a Luby's Cafeteria and shot dead 23 people, then himself.

Yesterday's massacre took place almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High bloodbath near Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

Previously, the deadliest campus shooting in US history was a rampage in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the 28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before he was shot dead by police.

Founded in 1872, Virginia Tech is nestled in south-western Virginia, about 160 miles west of Richmond. With more than 25,000 full-time students, it has the state's largest full-time student population. The school is best known for its engineering school and its powerhouse Hokies football team.