Sun coverage: Tragedy at Virginia Tech -- baltimoresun.com

Va. Tech students return to campus

As pastor of Blacksburg Baptist Church, Tommy McDearis was called on to tell more than 20 families a loved one had fallen victim to Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho. Yesterday, he urged his congregation and the university to put the pain of the rampage behind them by returning to classes today. More

Virginia Tech shootings

Shattered campus aims for normality

Eric Del Valle was stretched out in the campus library poring over a self-help book about overcoming stress. It was not for any class that he was reading it, he explained, but to help escape the sadness around him, to "try to return to normalcy." Students and administrators at Virginia Tech agree that expecting anything normal when classes resume tomorrow, a week after the shootings that left 33 people dead and shattered the final weeks of the spring semester, is unrealistic. The campus is still speckled with makeshift memorials and grieving students, and Norris Hall, in the northern corner of the grassy drillfield, remains riddled with damage and sealed off with yellow tape. More

Gunman

Cho bought gun clips on eBay last month

The Virginia Tech killer went to the Internet less than a month before the massacre to get ammunition clips that fit one of the two handguns he used in the rampage, an eBay spokesman said yesterday. Seung-Hui Cho also used the account to sell items such as Hokies football tickets and horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes. More

Wounded student from Catonsville expected to be released from hospital soon

The family of a 2004 Catonsville High School graduate injured in Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech said he is expected to be released from the hospital "shortly," according to a statement. More

Virginia Tech shootings

Gunman's family is 'deeply sorry'

The family of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho spoke out yesterday for the first time since the shootings, saying in a statement that they felt "hopeless, helpless and lost,"' and were left heartbroken by the "terrible, senseless tragedy" Cho inflicted on fellow students and teachers. "I feel like I don't know this person," Cho's older sister, Sun-kyung Cho, said in the statement issued through a North Carolina attorney. "We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence." More

Korean-American groups express sorrow, avoid guilt

For Korean-Americans, the realization of a shared ethnicity with Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho has left many trying to untangle a complex web of emotions. Shock that someone could commit such a horrific act of violence. Anguish for the victims. And the unfounded fear - common among virtually any ethnic minority - that the actions of one might taint the whole, says Gie Kim, president of the Washington chapter of the Korean American Coalition. More

Wounded Va. Tech student improving

The family of Justin Klein, a 2004 Catonsville High School graduate injured in Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech, said he is expected to be released from the hospital "shortly," according to a statement released yesterday. More

Drawing a line between danger and creativity

At Goucher College in Towson, author Madison Smartt Bell has been teaching creative writing for nearly 20 years. That's a lot of short stories - which often are long on drama and depressing themes. More

Cho's link to violent movie is discounted

The self-portrait of Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui wielding a hammer, contained in a multimedia package that he mailed to NBC, fueled Internet speculation yesterday that he was inspired by the 2003 South Korean revenge thriller Oldboy. More

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. More

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. More

'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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

Eerily quiet, killer stalked halls, firing like a machine

The first shots came soon after sunrise. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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. More

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