After Virginia Tech

Guns, Safety, and Healing in the Era of Mass Shootings

Thomas P. Kapsidelis

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942230
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long aftermath, including the efforts to effect change in the wake of such tragedies. On April 16, 2007, thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors were murdered. Then the nation's deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman, the tragedy sparked an international debate on gun culture in the United States and safety on college campuses. Experiencing profound grief and trauma, and struggling to heal both physically and emotionally, many of the survivors from Virginia Tech and their supporters put themselves on the front lines to advocate for change. Yet since that April, large-scale gun violence has continued at a horrifying pace.

In After Virginia Tech, award-winning journalist Thomas Kapsidelis examines the decade after the Virginia Tech massacre through the experiences of survivors and community members who have advocated for reforms in gun safety, campus security, trauma recovery, and mental health. Undaunted by the expansion of gun rights, they have continued their national leadership despite an often-hostile political environment and repeated mass violence. Kapsidelis also focuses on the trauma suffered by police who responded to the shootings, and the work by chaplains and a longtime police officer to create an organization dedicated to recovery. The stories Kapsidelis tells here show how people and communities affected by profound loss ultimately persevere long after the initial glare and attention inevitably fade. Reaching beyond policy implications, After Virginia Tech illuminates personal accounts of recovery and resilience that can offer a ray of hope to millions of Americans concerned about the consequences of gun violence.

1

April 16, 2007

The morning of April 16, 2007, began in a rush for Kristina Anderson. Her classmate in French that morning, Colin Goddard, called to say he was on his way to pick her up for the short ride to Virginia Tech from her off-campus apartment. Kristina was running late. The nineteen-year-old sophomore was back from a weekend of socializing at a fraternity get-together at nearby Smith Mountain Lake. The weekend ended on a mellow note—Kristina and some of her friends wound down that Sunday evening back in Blacksburg watching a nature show on television and having a few beers. But by Monday morning it was time for class, and the bag she usually carried on campus was still packed from the weekend. Colin was on his way so she had to make some quick decisions, dumping the bag’s contents and adding the essentials for what promised to be a busy morning—French would be followed by economics and world politics. Her outfit, too, was hastily assembled. She picked jeans and a white, short-sleeved top over which she wore a Tech sweatshirt. While scrambling to get ready, she noticed an unseasonable snow swirling outside the window. Instead of the flip-flops she usually wore even in chilly weather, Kristina slipped into a pair of bright-blue Puma sneakers. In her rush, she considered it a good choice.

With less than twenty minutes before class would start at 9:05 a.m., Kristina and Colin were pulling out of the apartment complex parking lot. They considered skipping French—the morning’s second class was conveniently near an Au Bon Pain, and the prospect of coffee and a bagel was more appealing. Plus they would avoid the awkwardness of strolling in late together. But with the end of the semester approaching, they thought it best to stay on track for class with instructor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak—Madame, to her students. Kristina, who was often late, had a routine: park in a nearby commuter lot, go through the front of Norris Hall, make the left to climb the stairs, and then down the hall to French. But Colin knew a faster way—through a rear entrance to the building. Colin went in first. As they made their way to their seats, Kristina’s friend Ross Alameddine gave her a playful smile for being late.

Madame already had shifted the students around to work on their lesson that morning, so Kristina and Colin remained paired as the work got under way. No one’s mind seemed to be on intermediate French. People talked about the weekend, and someone mentioned a shooting on campus earlier that morning. The details weren’t immediately clear to Kristina. She initially dismissed it. Maybe it was a false alarm, or something that wasn’t as bad as things sometimes initially appear to be. But Henry Lee, sitting in the front of the room, was trying to find out about it online. Kristina, meantime, had started chatting with her friend Leslie Sherman about their study-abroad trip planned for the coming summer in Russia. Kristina was born in Ukraine and lived in Moscow as a child. To her, the trip was a chance to go home again. She was delighted that Leslie was looking forward to it as such an adventure.

The details of the reported shooting remained unknown. But when Rachael Hill arrived nearly halfway through class, Kristina took it as a positive sign. She knew Rachael lived either nearby or in the dorm where the shooting supposedly took place—not all the way across campus but a distance from Norris—and thought everything was probably OK if she had made it to class.

Rachael must have gotten in Norris just before the doors were chained shut.

Kristina heard the first shots about 9:40. Even though it sounded like it must have been down the hall, she could almost feel the percussion from the noise. Everyone stopped. Madame looked into the hallway and slammed the door. “Call 911,” she said, the look on her face one of panic but also uncertainty. Kristina couldn’t tell from her professor’s face what she had seen. As the moments rushed by, Kristina had the fleeting thought that maybe this was some type of psychological experiment, a drill, an exercise to measure your response to an unexpected violent attack. She even thought someone would step in to say, congratulations, you’ve all passed. But that feeling didn’t last much longer than the immediate, hopeful thought.

Kristina remembers Henry and another student near the door, Matthew La Porte, jumping up and trying to push their desks to block the entry, but about the same time Seung-Hui Cho shoved through, firing. Kristina crouched on the floor, her stomach on the seat of the desk and her hands over her head. She saw Cho’s torso, the ammo strapped to his upper body and his hands—but not the guns. The shooting seemingly never stopped, and it sounded orderly as he went along the rows of desks. Kristina knew she would be hit, that her turn was coming. Brace for it, toughen up, she thought. Then she was shot in the back, a searing, burning pain. Before long, Cho left the room.

Smoke filled Room 211. Kristina thought it had a rubbery feel, and her throat was filled with whatever it was. Her classmates moaned. Cell phones were going off. Kristina wondered why the girl next to her was coughing. A classmate said, “Be quiet, be quiet. Don’t move.” Kristina pretended she was dead as Cho returned and began firing again.

At first, Kristina didn’t think she was going to die, didn’t fear for her life. She had braced to take it, and she had. But the second round of shootings was more terrifying—Cho seemed to be looking for people he hadn’t killed earlier, and the firing seemed more intermittent, not in rapid succession like the first attack. She knew now that her life was in danger. Kristina was shot a second time. Her breaths came so fast she could feel her stomach pounding the seat of the desk where she continued to crouch against the onslaught. She tried to hold her breath to see if she had some control, some movement. Then she made a mistake—she jerked her head up to see the path of a bullet Cho had fired high into a wall, sending debris flying. She immediately put her head back down.

The nation’s worst mass shooting ended in Madame’s French class when Cho returned a third time and shot himself just before police burst through the door. “Shooter down,” the police said. Kristina didn’t know for sure that Cho was dead, but she couldn’t stand it anymore, the hunched-over position, her back seemingly destroyed, the pain. She had to move. She pushed back, trying to get up, but fell to the floor next to her wounded friend Colin. He had been shot four times. They held hands while the police assessed the scene. Was there another shooter? Was the attack over?

“We’ve got a lot of blacks in here,” one officer said.

At first, Kristina didn’t understand what he meant.

Despite his own wounds, Colin called out to the officers that Kristina had survived. She’s alive.

A first responder looked at Kristina and categorized her as yellow. But then he quickly changed it to red. She knew that being changed to red wasn’t good. She saw a student slumped over in her chair. She remembered all the coughing. She knew her life was in danger. Green meant you were OK. Yellows needed help getting out. Reds needed help right now. Blacks were deceased.

Kristina was scooped up by an officer who carried her out of the room and through the chaos of police in SWAT gear, survivors, and the dead. A numbing cold had already stretched through her body, from her head to the soles of her feet. She started fading out, but medics urged her to stay awake. Kristina was picked up again and carried out of Norris, this time downstairs and through the front door facing the Drillfield. She thanked a medic for getting her out and was handed off to another emergency responder. Then she was placed facedown on the grass outside Norris, where a female paramedic cut away her clothes to check her wounds before putting her in the ambulance. The snow pelted her exposed skin.

Kristina was shot three times and seriously wounded. Cho had two semi-automatic handguns, and he shot her with both. Kristina lost her gall bladder, two-thirds of a kidney, and parts of her large and small intestines. One bullet ricocheted off a toe that she might have lost if she hadn’t worn sneakers instead of flip-flops because of the cold.

Twelve were killed in Room 211, including instructor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. The students slain were Ross A. Alameddine, Austin Michelle Cloyd, Caitlin Millar Hammaren, Rachael Elizabeth Hill, Matthew Joseph La Porte, Henry J. Lee (Henh Ly), Daniel Alejandro Perez Cueva, Erin Nicole Peterson, Mary Karen Read, Reema Joseph Samaha, and Leslie Geraldine Sherman.

In Room 206, where Cho attacked first, ten were killed in the advanced hydrology class: Professor G. V. Loganathan, Brian R. Bluhm, Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, Jeremy Michael Herbstritt, Jarrett Lee Lane, Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, Daniel Patrick O’Neil, Juan Ramón Ortiz-Ortiz, Julia Kathleen Pryde, and Waleed Mohamed Shaalan.

In Room 207, elementary German, the five killed were instructor Christopher James Bishop, Lauren Ashley McCain, Michael Steven Pohle Jr., Maxine Shelly Turner, and Nicole Regina White.

Professor Kevin P. Granata, whose office was on the third floor, was shot fatally in a second-floor hallway.

In Room 204, Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, was killed blocking the door so his students in the solid mechanics class could jump from windows to safety. Minal Hiralal Panchal, a graduate student who refused to leave until others were safe, was fatally shot.

Cho began his deadly attacks at West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory, where he fired on Emily Jane Hilscher and resident assistant Ryan Christopher Clark, who came to help.

Kristina underwent four hours of surgery at a hospital near campus and awoke to find her parents in the room. She asked how they knew to find her. Doctors, nurses, and technicians were coming and going, and to Kristina it seemed like the door was slamming constantly, and it scared her. In the time immediately after surgery, Kristina caught a glimpse of the coverage on television and saw the picture of herself being carried from Norris Hall. She knew it was her because she recognized her bright-blue sneakers. The TV was quickly turned off.

2

“Tragedy of Monumental Proportions”

Gary Ford knew all the hills and hollows of Rappahannock County, Virginia, from two decades as a FedEx driver. So it startled him when his cell phone rang in a low-lying spot where he never had reception. It was a routine call from another driver, except for what he said at the end: Did you hear about the shootings?

Ford quickly tuned into the developing details from Blacksburg as he continued on his route, which at that moment was taking him toward the home of Eric and Elizabeth Hilscher.

“A half mile from the house, I thought, ‘Emily.’ ”

Ford sometimes made up to three deliveries a week to the Hilschers, who worked out of their home. Ford had seen Emily and her older sister, Erica, grow up. One year at Christmastime the girls made him an ornament of a snowman wearing a Santa hat and carrying a FedEx package.

But as he thought about what he had just heard, Ford drove just past the Hilschers’ house without stopping. He recalled the previous August, when he checked on the family after learning of the search for a suspected killer near campus on the first day of classes. Beth said Emily, who had just started at Tech, had called and was fine. She was touched that Ford had stopped by. Maybe he didn’t need to stop this time.

“I’m not saying I literally heard a voice, but in my heart I heard, ‘Well, you stopped before when it was really nothing. Why wouldn’t you stop now?’ ”

So Ford turned back and drove down the Hilschers’ driveway. When he saw Beth, he knew it wasn’t anything like last August.

“Somebody shot my baby.”

Soon the Hilschers were on their way to a hospital in Roanoke, with Ford behind the wheel of their station wagon, his FedEx truck left in the driveway.

Emily Hilscher was one of the first two people Seung-Hui Cho shot that morning.

It was about a two-minute walk for Cho from his room at Harper Hall dormitory to West Ambler Johnston Hall, where he was seen by another student about 6:45 a.m. Cho’s student mailbox was there, but his swipe card allowed him access only after 7:30 a.m. Somehow he was able to get in—maybe by a student coming out or following someone going in.

Hilscher had just returned to her dorm from a weekend away. She’d been dropped off by her boyfriend, a student at nearby Radford University, who saw her go in about 7:00 a.m. before driving away. Her room was on the fourth floor, next door to the student resident adviser, Ryan Clark, who is believed to have rushed over when he heard loud noises about 7:15 a.m. Cho shot Hilscher and fired on Clark.

The sound of the gunfire would be mistaken by some for a student falling out of a loft bed, but Virginia Tech police were called at 7:20 a.m. and within five minutes were at the dormitory. Cho had left a trail of bloody footprints but was otherwise unnoticed fleeing the building. Hilscher and Clark had been gravely wounded.

Within the next half hour, Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum arrived at West Ambler Johnston and called a Tech vice president’s office. By 8:10 a.m., Flinchum was on the phone to university president Charles Steger. Shortly afterward, police interviewed Hilscher’s roommate. She’d also just returned from a weekend away and told police that Hilscher had been visiting her boyfriend. Under questioning, she said that though she knew of no troubles, the boyfriend owned a gun that he used for target practice. The interview with Hilscher’s roommate went on for about thirty minutes; afterward, she got in touch with the boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, and her own boyfriend, who also contacted Thornhill. He skipped his 9:00 a.m. class at Radford to return to Tech but was stopped by police just off campus at 9:24 a.m. Officers questioned him and administered a field test for residue but left abruptly—ordered within minutes to return to Tech. Thornhill, shocked and scared, was left by the side of the road.

Ryan Clark, the senior resident adviser who came to Hilscher’s aid, was a triple academic major, played the baritone in the Marching Virginians, and had a record of achievement in his years at Tech after growing up in Martinez, Georgia. He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival at Montgomery Regional Hospital. Emily Hilscher was an animal and poultry sciences major, a horsewoman who recently competed in her first event for the Tech equestrian team and was scheduled to appear soon in her second. She died after being transferred to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Hilscher’s parents learned their daughter had been shot from the mother of her boyfriend, but they didn’t know to which hospital she had been taken. Frantic calls to the hospitals were answered by employees who wouldn’t release any information over the phone, until her father finally reached someone at Carilion Roanoke who checked with a supervisor and then called back. In the three hours between the time Hilscher was shot and when she was pronounced dead, Tech never contacted her parents.

As details about the dorm shootings unfolded, the Tech administration’s Policy Group gathered at 8:25 a.m. to oversee the university’s response. They met in a conference room near Steger’s office in Burruss Hall—next door to Norris Hall. One unit of Tech, the Center for Professional and Continuing Education, had already decided as of 8:00 a.m. to lock down on its own. About the same time, two other Tech officials discussed the shootings in phone calls with family members. (A clarification to the governor’s panel report, Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech, Addendum to the Report of the Review Panel to Governor Timothy M. Kaine, would specify, however, that the dormitory killings were not the primary objective of the phone calls and that they shouldn’t be regarded as a “special early warning.”)

The decision to send an alert, though, and what it would say, rested with the Policy Group, which included the president and other high-ranking officials responsible for guiding the university in a time of crisis. Everyone would recall what happened on the academic year’s first day, August 21, 2006, when the university shut down and canceled classes because of the search for a killer.

William Morva, known to many as an odd but nonthreatening hippie who hung around Blacksburg, was being held on a robbery charge when he was taken to Montgomery Regional Hospital for treatment of minor injuries on August 20. He escaped after beating a Montgomery County deputy in the face with a metal toilet paper dispenser and taking the officer’s weapon. Morva then fatally shot hospital security officer Derrick McFarland. The next day he killed Deputy Eric Sutphin, who was part of the manhunt on a trail near Tech. (Morva was convicted of capital murder in March 2008 and sentenced to death. His lawyers argued that his life should be spared because he suffered a chronic psychotic disorder, but appeals failed and he was executed by injection in July 2017.)

Some Tech officials had qualms about the way that episode had been handled. After the alert was issued, what turned out to be a false report of people being held hostage in the Squires Student Center was met by a large police response. Tech’s critics would later discount the level of anxiety said to have been caused by the episode. The Policy Group didn’t meet in person to supervise that incident, but Tech’s president was kept informed by telephone.

As reports came in to the Policy Group on the West Ambler Johnston shootings, no alerts were immediately issued, even after the group was updated by 8:45 on Hilscher and Clark. One Policy Group member, however, would email a colleague in Richmond, “gunman on the loose,” but w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 April 16, 2007
• 2 “Tragedy of Monumental Proportions”
• 3 First Steps
• 4 “A Deeper Sense”
• 5 When Police Call for Help
• 6 Accountability
• 7 From a Lifetime of Silence
• 8 “Back to Day One”
• 9 “Fire Hose of Suffering”
• 10 Tower Shadows
• 11 “I Will Work This Fight”
• 12 The Governor
• 13 Texas Half Century
• 14 Quiet Carry
• 15 Generations of Advocacy
• 16 The Roads Ahead
• 17 April 16, 2017
• Epilogue
• In Memoriam
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index