Sun coverage: Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Massacre in Blacksburg

Thirty-three people were killed and at least 15 injured at the Virginia Tech campus yesterday in the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history - a massacre that left the stricken campus in mourning and overwhelmed with questions about who the gunman was and how the shooting could have happened.

Mothers, fathers in Md. scramble to reach their kids on campus

Timothy Fowler answered the phone in his Mount Airy home early yesterday to hear his son Ryan, 19, saying he was safe.

A campus subdued by chill of shock, fear

The flip-flops and backpacks were gone, replaced by black boots and assault rifles. The lone figures crossing the Drillfield in the center of Virginia Tech's campus, which is usually alive on a late-semester Monday, mostly shuffled past with quick glances at the police cars and trucks, all of them flickering blue and red.

Md. schools respond to Va. tragedy

Amid the reports of the Virginia Tech shooting rampage yesterday, administrators at Maryland universities and colleges began fine-tuning their emergency plans and re-examining security provisions.

Eyewitness testimonies and footage dominate news

The pictures were jumpy and the words occasionally jumbled, but the most immediate and compelling descriptions of yesterday's massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., came not from seasoned reporters - but from citizen journalists, most of whom have yet to graduate from college.

Friends, family flood Va. hospital

Caught between hope and dread, friends and relatives of the injured descended yesterday on a small community hospital in Blacksburg that had never seen anything like yesterday's flood of patients.

Death toll is highest of recent such shooting rampages

With 33 people dead, the shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Tech in southwest Virginia yesterday became the worst such incident in recent U.S. history.

Virginia Tech shootings

AD: 'Athletes are OK'

Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer arrived at his office yesterday morning expecting to spend the day planning his team's afternoon spring practice session.

Cho shunned friendliness, roommate from Md. says

He was a quiet English major - a loner who avoided eye contact and conversation and whose creative writing so disturbed one professor that she sought intervention for him.

Eerily quiet, killer stalked halls, firing like a machine

The first shots came soon after sunrise.

Tears, Hokie spirit fill memorial service

The victims of Monday's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech ranged from a professor who had survived the Holocaust to the most typical of undergraduates. But the apparent killer, students learned yesterday, was anything but typical - a senior who instructors and classmates believed was disturbed.

Response to shootings scrutinized

Locking down the Virginia Tech campus would be akin to shutting down a small city - and even then, there's no guarantee that a student concealing weapons couldn't find a way in, campus security experts said.

Law didn't hamper suspect's gun buy

Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old student identified as the shooter in a deadly rampage at Virginia Tech University, apparently broke no laws in acquiring at least one of the weapons that left 33 people dead.

Gunman was legal resident in U.S.

Like millions before him, Cho Seung-Hui arrived in the United States as a child with parents who were granted permanent residency status.

Va. tragedy likely to put gun control in spotlight

Ten years ago, when a man armed with a pistol shot seven tourists on the observation deck at the Empire State Building, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani responded with an unequivocal call for more federal gun control.

A need to find help, solace

As students and parents struggled to grasp the enormity of what happened on the Blacksburg, Va., campus a day earlier, an expert warned yesterday that suppressing one's emotions could lead to deeper problems in months or years to come.

Strangers pour out their sadness online

So many people logged onto VTTragedy.com yesterday that Vy Le couldn't keep up with the traffic, and the site crashed.

Media

Alternative sources overrun TV news

As the rituals of national mourning began yesterday at Virginia Tech with a convocation featuring President Bush, network television arrived in full at the Blacksburg campus.

In memoriam: Victims remembered

Gunman's last words

Aiming two black handguns at the camera and muttering rambling accusations, the college student who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus Monday before killing himself made sure that his voice would be heard after the worst mass shooting in the nation's history.

For NBC, an exclusive ethical challenge

Obtaining exclusive material related to the nation's biggest news story is a network executive's dream. But when NBC received a package yesterday of video, photos and texts made by gunman Cho Seung-Hui, it also faced serious ethical concerns.

'We are brave enough'

If the word "unspeakable" has any meaning, surely it applies to the acts of a South Korean loner whose shooting rampage at Virginia Tech left 33 dead this week. Perhaps only a poet could find the language to inspire at such a moment.

Dan Rodricks: Sadly, mass killings are no longer shocking

President Bush declared Americans shocked. Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth was shocked. Former Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Vick expressed shock. According to press reports, world leaders from South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Canada said they were shocked, and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing sent a telegram to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressing shock. Officials of Micron Inc., the semiconductor company that has donated generously to the engineering department at Virginia Tech, said they were shocked, too.

Timeline: Shooting chronology

7:15 a.m.

Va. Tech builds a new 'normal'

Brittany Rytter strolled across the sun-splashed Virginia Tech campus yesterday with a bouquet of mums and daisies, ignoring the pickup soccer reverberating in the distance as she approached one of 32 small stone monuments commemorating the April shooting massacre that catapulted this rural campus to international prominence.