Phone call reveals Virginia Tech shooting horror

A 19-year-old woman’s 911 emergency call from the scene of the Virginia Tech shootings was published today.

Emily Haas crouched under a desk and desperately called for help as her friends and classmates were shot and killed around her.

Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a dormitory and a classroom building at the university when he opened fire on April 16. The 23-year-old shot himself as officers closed in.

Details of the call, in which Miss Haas spoke in a hushed voice so as not to be heard by the killer, were published in The Washington Post today.

“We’ve been hurt,” she whispered.

On the other end of the line, Virginia Tech Police Lieutenant Debbi Morgan could hear gunfire that was so loud it sounded as if someone was shooting right into the receiver.

“Where are you?” the officer asked.

“Two-Eleven Norris Hall,” Miss Haas said.

“I can’t talk,”

“Keep yourself safe,” Lt Morgan said.

“We’re sending people.”

“Please hurry,” the voice whispered.

Miss Haas, a French major from Richmond, was lying against a wall, partially behind a desk, in the back of her classroom when Cho returned to the room at 9.48am.

“He’s in here,” her voice whispered.

“I just got hit,” she said.

The 911 call was made at 9.43am on April 16, just as Cho’s Norris Hall shootings began, and Miss Haas stayed on the phone until Virginia Tech and Blacksburg police officers rushed into her classroom and found Cho dead.

Interviews with Miss Haas and more than three dozen police officers, emergency responders and federal agents provide for the first time an inside look at the enormous rescue and investigative effort that followed the shootings, the Washington Post said.

The paper reported that on the morning of the shootings, Cho poked his head into several classrooms before the attack.

He moved from room to room along a second-floor hallway and shot anyone who moved with his two handguns.

When he was done in each room, he closed the door behind him. Then he went back to rooms where he had already been, found students who were still alive and executed them at point-blank range.

Of the 30 people who died at Norris Hall, 28 of them were shot in the head.

Within eight minutes of Miss Haas’s call, Blacksburg and Virginia Tech police broke into Norris Hall and SWAT teams moved through the building to confirm that Cho had acted alone.

In the critical first 20 minutes, when ambulances could not pull close to the hall because they had not been given the all-clear by SWAT teams, Blacksburg Captain Bruce Bradbery placed wounded students, including Miss Haas, in his sport-utility vehicle and ferried them over pavements and lawns to get to the ambulances, parked blocks away.

She was taken to the Lewis-Gale Medical Centre in Salem for treatment. The bullets had grazed, but not entered, her skull.

She said she did not want to listen to the recording of her 911 call, the Washington Post said.