Darkness Falls

By NANCY GIBBS

The winds were April cruel in Blacksburg on Monday: too strong for helicopters to evacuate the most badly wounded that morning, too strong for candles that night. The vigils would have to wait; the students grieved in the privacy of their dorms. The stately, sprawling campus of Virginia Tech was littered with broken branches; yellow police tape ribboned through a tree as if the gusts had tied it there, mourning those who would not be coming back. The locals said the winds rose to carry the angels down so they could take the children home.

Hindsight blows just as strong through events like this. It's the nature of tragedy that it comes packaged in irony, sharp little stabs of coincidence that make it hurt even more: there was the Holocaust survivor who died trying to save his students from a mass murder committed on Holocaust Remembrance Day. There was the international-studies student who had seen the carnage at the Pentagon on 9/11 and wanted to be a peacemaker; he died in French class. There was the killer who signed into English class with a question mark, known by the few who knew him at all as one who hardly ever said a word to anyone--until the day he chose to start screaming and ended by shooting himself in the face, a final act of deletion.

What is the the cost of our curiosity and culture? One man was the villain; many of his victims were heroes, yet his is the face that is seen, the story that gets told and all too often the act that gets copied by the next broken loner with a grudge. The day after the shooting, bomb scares and other threats closed schools in seven states. As the news cycle surrendered to round-the-clock coverage, finding meaning in the mayhem was a performance art: Dr. Phil was warning about the dangers of a violent popular culture before anyone knew which culture had produced this particular killer. Bill O'Reilly whacked "America haters" and knee-jerk gun controllers before declaring his support for more "sensible" gun-control laws than those of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which allowed a suicidal kid with a history of mental illness to get multiple weapons without any trouble.

But the urgent search for meaning ran into the real, raw sense of senselessness. "They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time," President George W. Bush said plainly of the students who perished, and parents listening jammed their fists into their eyes and shuddered. There is no sweetness in sorrow, no matter how your child dies--on a battlefield, on a mission or on a Monday morning in German class. But there was something especially awful about meeting these students in the quick cable-news compression of remembrance and mourning. She was a belly dancer, he was a track star; there was also an Air Force cadet, a camp counselor, a songwriter--in every case a portrait of promise and purpose. They had not wandered into one of the nation's top universities by accident; they had engineered and calculated and coaxed their way into this school, and they were going places, until one day they weren't anymore, stopped by the accumulated debris and derangement of another life, another intent long in the making.

Cho Seung-Hui was the mystery hiding in plain sight, a man who wore a hat and sunglasses inside, a student with no Facebook page. Talking to him, said English department head Lucinda Roy, "was like talking to a hole. He wasn't there most of the time." Even students who had lived with him knew virtually nothing about him; the simplest conversations--Where are you from? What's your major?--got a monosyllabic response. A "hello" was a big deal. They never heard him talk about weapons or killing or violence--because he never talked at all. "We just thought he was shy," his suitemate Karan Grewal told TIME. It was not until NBC aired his last words and images the night of April 18 that they and everyone else had a chance to see all the ego, the anger, the desire to get even with the "rich brats" with their trust funds and gold necklaces and Mercedes. "You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your whole lives."

He had come to the U.S. from South Korea with his parents in 1992 when he was 8, first to Detroit and eventually to Centreville, Va., a suburb of Washington, where they owned a dry-cleaning business. The family looked American Dream--y: they lived in a tidy cream row house with a vegetable plot in back where they grew lettuce and tomatoes. The parents were quiet, their English limited, but they worked hard and saw their daughter Sun-Kung head off to Princeton as an economics major, their son to Virginia Tech to major in English.

Teach me how to speak

Teach me how to share

Teach me where to go

Tell me will love be there

Cho once wrote the lyrics of his favorite Collective Soul song, Shine, on the walls of his dorm room. But usually there were no decorations, no posters, no friends, no hobbies beyond the occasional late-night bike ride and hours spent downloading music.

To some, his remoteness was an irresistible challenge. Shane Moore, a 21-year-old from Woodbridge, Va., once had lunch with him basically on a dare from his roommate, who had known Cho in high school. The goal was to see if they could make him laugh. "I didn't know him," says Moore. "We'd try to talk to him, but he'd barely respond ... so one day my roommate challenged himself to get him to talk to us. We told him a joke." That day, they actually extracted a chuckle. But to other students, to know him was to fear him.

He popped up on the campus police radar screen on Nov. 27, 2005, when a female student reported that Cho had made annoying contact with her through the phone and in person. While she declined to press charges, another student soon complained of his instant messages. After police investigated, an acquaintance alerted them that Cho might be suicidal. When police returned and questioned him further, they asked that he agree to see a counselor.

Police requested a temporary detention order, and Cho was evaluated at a psychiatric facility, Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, Va. Following that evaluation, a judge indicated on a court document that Cho "is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization, and presents an eminent danger to self or others as a result of mental illness, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for self, and is incapable of volunteering or unwilling to volunteer for treatment." The amount of time Cho spent at the hospital remains a mystery.

Cho's teachers, meanwhile, had been trying to take on his suspected mental disorder on their own. Poetry teacher Nikki Giovanni confronted the student she called "a bully." "There was something mean about this boy," she said of the young man who was in her class two years ago. "Troubled kids get drunk and jump off buildings. It was the meanness that bothered me."

Every day, from very early in the semester, she would ask him to remove his sunglasses and hat. "We would have this sort of ritual," she said. "He was very intimidating to my other students." There was trouble when he was caught using his cell phone to take pictures of female classmates under the desks. Eventually some stopped coming to class.

Universities are hierarchical places, tolerant of eccentricity, protective of privacy but alert to risk. Giovanni wrote a letter to department head Roy, in part because she wanted to create a record that could lead to removing Cho from her class. Giovanni said she was prepared to quit over the issue. Roy, for her part, saw the anger as well. "He seemed so sad inside," she said, and she shared her concerns with campus police and counselors. They told her that unless the threats were explicit, there was little they could do. So Roy took him on as a private student, just to keep him away from others. When he was referred to counseling, she offered to walk him there.

So did some classmates in his playwriting class. They had grown alarmed at what they heard when it was his turn to present his plays for peer review. The works were violent, obsessive and often focused on sexual abuse. One especially profane play titled Mr. Brownstone told of a student being repeatedly sodomized by a teacher. Another was about a 13-year-old who accuses his stepfather of abusing him. The protagonist's mother at one point brandishes a chainsaw. The play ends with the stepfather crushing the boy to death.

Classmate Stephanie Derry told the campus paper Collegiate Times, "We had to laugh because it couldn't ever be real or truthful. I mean, who throws chainsaws around? But we always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did." When she learned the identity of the shooter on Tuesday, she burst into tears. "I kept having to tell myself there is no way we could have known this was coming."

The classrooms were open Monday morning at 7, including the three that had been closed off on Friday after university officials received the second bomb threat in as many weeks. They had offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who knew anything and were supposed to meet that morning to discuss security measures. It would be too late before anyone came across a posting on a school online forum, which police now believe was left by Cho: "I'm going to kill people at Vtech today."

Freshman Michael Cunningham lives in Room 4052 of West Ambler Johnston, an immense dorm with nearly 900 students. He heard what he thought might be three doors slamming. "It was so windy on Monday, and many students leave their windows open at night," he said. "So we assumed that it was doors being shut by a wind gust." He went back to sleep.

Detectives and military people have a saying about their line of work: "Assumption is the mother of all f___ ups." When the 911 call came in at 7:15, campus police headed to West AJ, where they found a freshman, Emily Hilscher ("Pixie" on her MySpace page), and her next-door neighbor, residential adviser Ryan Clark, shot to death. Students told police a gunman had been going from room to room, looking for his girlfriend. Assuming they were dealing with a lovers' quarrel, police secured the murder scene and began gathering evidence. The crime was over, the investigation begun, or so they thought.

By 8:25 a.m. top university officials, including the president, the executive vice president and provost, were meeting to discuss what had happened and figure out how to proceed. An hour later, a campuswide e-mail went out telling of a shooting, urging caution and requesting that students contact the campus police "if you observe anything suspicious."

But no one was observing Cho at that point. He appears to have gone back to his room in Harper Hall, a smaller dorm just across from West AJ, reloaded his weapon and tucked two knives into his backpack. He had clearly been preparing his NBC exhibit for days, with its 27 QuickTime videos, self-portraits of Cho as normal kid, Cho as jihadi."I didn't have to do this," he said into the camera. "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," Cho says on one of the videos. "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option ... Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off." He sent the package express mail to NBC in New York City; if he hadn't had the address wrong, it might have gotten there sooner. Then he headed back out the door and across the campus to Norris Hall, home of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. And suddenly this was not over.

Introductory German was meeting in Room 207, a couple dozen students in their first class of the day, when Cho peered in, as though he was looking for someone. One student thought he looked like a Boy Scout. He was wearing the school color--a maroon cap--and a vest with pockets for his ammunition. When he went back into the classroom, he was quiet and purposeful. First he shot instructor Jamie Bishop, 35, in the head. Then he went methodically around the room. Derek O'Dell was hit in the arm; when Cho finally left for the next room, O'Dell and two other students moved to block the classroom door in case he returned--which he did, firing into the door several times before moving on.

Elsewhere students mistook the sounds for construction work going on nearby. Liviu Librescu, 77, the Holocaust survivor, was teaching solid mechanics on the same hall when the class heard the shots. He braced his body in front of the door, yelling to his students to head for the window. They pushed out the screens, jumped or dropped into bushes below to escape. "I must've been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last," said Alec Calhoun, who landed in a bush and ran. The two students behind him were shot, he said, and as he climbed out the window, he turned and looked at his teacher, who had stayed behind. Librescu was shot to death through the door.

When the students in French class heard the noises, teacher Jocelyn Couture-Nowak stiffened: "That's not what I think it is, is it?" Clay Violand, 20, a junior in international studies, pointed at the teacher and said, "Put that desk in front of the door. Now!" She did, but the door still nudged open, and a gun came into view, then a man. Violand dove under a desk as Cho began systematically shooting people, almost in rhythm, taking his time. "After every shot I thought, 'O.K., the next one is me,'" Violand said, so he made himself lie perfectly still, lifeless. "Sometimes after a shot I would hear a quick moan, or a slow one, or a grunt, or a quiet, reserved yell from one of the girls. After some time--I couldn't tell you if it was five minutes or an hour--he left. The room was silent except for the haunting sound of moans, some quiet crying and someone muttering, 'It's O.K. It's going to be O.K. They will be here soon.'"

But it was not the police who came. It was Cho, back for another round, reloading his gun and firing another shot into the dead and wounded. He thinks he heard Cho reload three times, and at every shot he braced himself, thinking, "This one is for me." His mind wandered; he wondered what a gunshot wound feels like, how much it would hurt. He wondered if he would die slow or fast, and then he thought of his family. "I was terrified that my parents weren't going to be able to go on after I was gone." There was a student in front of him, also under a desk. He didn't know her name, but they kept eye contact. "She was brave. I don't think she cried. We just stared at each other under the desks." When the police finally arrived, says Violand, it was "just me and that one girl next to me who got up."

Gene Cole, a janitor, heard shots, went around a corner on the second floor and saw a body. Then he saw Cho loading his gun. Cole turned and fled down the stairs. The doors to Norris were chained shut from the inside, the better to slow down police; one report said there were also notes on the doors saying they had been booby-trapped. Outside Norris and elsewhere around campus, police yelled at students to stay inside, grabbed and hauled them indoors. About 9:55 a.m., a second campuswide e-mail went out. It said, "A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows."

Even before the ambulances swarmed, students were carrying the wounded away from the scene; some were using their balled-up clothes to stanch the bleeding. An emergency-room doctor said there weren't any victims with fewer than three bullets in them. Dr. David Stoeckle told of treating a student with a gunshot through his femoral artery. The student was an Eagle Scout, he said. "He wrapped an electrical cord tight around his leg because he knew he was bleeding to death."

Norris Hall immediately became a 72,000-sq.-ft. crime scene; federal agents called it the most horrifying they had ever encountered. There were bodies in four different classrooms and in the stairwell. A federal source said it appeared that as many as "a couple of hundred" rounds had been discharged. They didn't see a wild rampage, a maniac who suddenly snapped: they saw calculation. The gunman's extraordinary effectiveness and, according to witnesses, well-planned, coldly methodical killing suggested someone who had trained himself in "execution style" killing, according to the federal source.

You can buy only one gun a month in Virginia, but that's the main obstacle. Virginia is for gun lovers--no licenses, no waiting periods, no training required. Investigators found a receipt for a 9-mm Glock 19 in Cho's backpack, bought last month from Roanoke Firearms, where four homicides have reportedly been tied to 16,000 weapons sold there in the last eight years. Cho's purchases had been legal; he had been under a court-ordered "temporary detainment order," a psychiatric evaluation, which is not the same as an involuntary commitment. Thus nothing showed up on the instant background check at the store. He just presented three forms of ID, including a Virginia driver's license, and paid $571 for the gun and a box of 50 9-mm rounds. Employees viewed Cho as "about as clean-cut a kid as you'd ever want to see," says proprietor John Markell. "It was a very unremarkable sale." Cho had obtained the other gun, a Walther P22, in February from a pawn shop near campus. Both are high-quality, accurate guns, easy to load, quick to fire if you know what you're doing.

There was bound to be anger and accusations in the aftermath, and these too went ricocheting through the campus. Wednesday morning even brought a death threat against university president Charles Steger. Why hadn't more been done when it became clear to students and faculty that there there was a very troubled young man in their midst, and why hadn't the school been locked down immediately after the first shootings were reported? "I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said freshman Billy Bason, 18, who lived in West AJ.

Certainly Cho's behavior--between the stalking complaint, the taking of pictures under his desk--will now force colleges around the country to draw a firmer line between what is acceptable behavior in a creative setting and what is dangerous. Even Facebook ramblings, not to mention poetry-class offerings, may soon trigger an automatic response by schools to pick up the lost souls that dot every campus and keep them at safe distance from their peers. But that tension between preserving the free spirit and openness of an academic community and protecting students from real dangers may take years to sort out.

Meanwhile it looked like moving day at Virginia Tech, with students rolling duffels everywhere, parents not leaving without their kids because, as one mother said, she wanted to be able to hug her son anytime she felt like it. Yes, this was not Columbine or an Amish schoolhouse or any of the instantly iconic places where we have seen our children die, for these were not children. They were young adults who had come to learn how to live as full adults, on their own. Yet it still felt protected, different somehow from the fast-food restaurants or office buildings or factory floors where grownups do their random killing. Every student said it: the place was special.

Those who remained, 10,000 strong, gathered one more time on Tuesday night, when the winds at last had faded and the candles could burn, turning the entire drill field a glowing Hokie orange. When the commemoration was over, students stayed. Many just weren't ready to go home yet, or be by themselves.

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY, Elaine Shannon, Tracy Samantha Schmidt, Michael Lindenberger, Annie Johnson, Caitlin Sullivan, Massimo Calabresi / Blacksburg, Adam Zagorin / Centreville, Katherine Rooney / Washington, Jeremy Caplan / New York