On April 16, 2007, 32 people died after being shot on the Virginia Tech campus by Seung-Hui Cho, a college student who later committed suicide.
Filming for Virginia Tech began around 7.15 a.m., when Cho, a 23-year-old senior and English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Blacksburg State University, shot dead a freshman and resident assistant. in a campus dormitory before running away. building.
The police are soon on the scene; Unaware of the identity of the shooter, they initially pursued the victim’s boyfriend as a suspect in what they believed to be an isolated incident of domestic violence.
However, at around 9:40 a.m. Cho, armed with a 9 millimeter handgun, a 22 caliber handgun and hundreds of rounds, entered a classroom building, chained and locked several main doors. and went from room to room shooting people. . About 10 minutes after the rampage began, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The attack left 32 dead and more than a dozen injured. In all, 27 students and five faculty members died in the massacre.
Two days later, on April 18, NBC News received a packet of documents from Cho with a time stamp indicating that he had mailed it from a post office in Virginia between the first and second gunshot attacks. The package contained photos of Cho wielding a gun, as well as a rambling video rant in which he recited wealthy “kids”, among other topics.
Following the Virginia Tech shooting, authorities found no evidence that Cho, who was born in South Korea and moved to America with his family in 1992, specifically targeted one of his victims. The audience soon learned that Cho, described by students as a loner who rarely spoke to anyone, had a history of mental health issues.
It was also revealed that the violent and angry writings Cho had written for some class work raised concerns among some of his teachers and classmates long before the events of April 16. In 2011, Virginia Tech was fined by the US Department of Education for failing to issue a campus-wide early warning after Cho shot her first two victims.
