Virginia Tech shootings shake the country
By Nicole Haley/Daily News staff
GHS
Tue Apr 17, 2007, 01:04 AM EDT
NO DATA - The news seemed surreal for anyone who turned on the television yesterday. Even anchors on the major news networks reported asking law enforcement officials to repeat themselves, unable to believe what they were being told.
But for Waltham native Marcus Ly, the shootings on Virginia Tech's campus were particularly difficult to comprehend.
"I called a lot of my friends in Blacksburg. They're all OK," said Ly, a Virginia Tech grad student. "But it's just a lot of confusion, they don't really know anything more than we do reading the headlines."
Speaking by phone yesterday from Minneapolis, Ly said he was in shock.
A gunman killed 32 people on the campus and then took his own life, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
A 1995 Waltham High School graduate, Ly finished a graduate school program in industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Tech last winter. He was a representative on the university's Board of Visitors and worked closely with the president and higher levels of administration.
"It's really the equivalent of something like this happening in Weston," said Ly, trying to describe the town of Blacksburg, home to the 2,600-acre Virginia Tech campus. Ly said Blacksburg was on of the safest communities he has ever lived in.
Around 7:15 a.m. yesterday, the first shot rang out in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed dormitory. The gunfire resumed two hours later at Norris Hall, the engineering science and mechanics building, where most of the fatalities occurred, according to Associated Press reports.
"It's more shocking than Columbine," Ly said, referring to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo. Two teenagers killed 12 students and one teacher and wounded 24 more before the shooters committed suicide.
Like many others watching the events unfold from home, Ly saw the video streamed on cnn.com and shown repeatedly on television, recorded by a Virginia Tech student on his cell phone. The shaky camera work shows police approaching one building as gunshot after gunshot rings out in the background.
"I watched it and I knew exactly where it was," said Ly, who had walked that area on any given morning less than a year ago.
Newton resident Theodore Fritz also recognized the buildings photographers captured throughout the day.
"I'm certainly transfixed here," said Fritz, a 1961 Virginia Tech graduate who watched television reports throughout the day.
A Boston University professor, the killings affected Fritz both as a college educator and as a Virginia Tech alumnus.
"I think this probably could have happened anywhere," he said.
Former Boston College baseball coach Pete Hughes, who now coaches at Virginia Tech, returned home with his team from a game at Florida State University about 3 a.m. yesterday. Hughes was rousted from bed by the news and immediately began scrambling to track down his players.
One was "bunkered down" in the basement of Norris Hall and managed to escape, while three others fled the dorm, he said.
Senior Beth Goldberg of Newton said students in lockdown on campus were able to communicate with the outside world by computer.
"They seemed pretty calm," Goldberg said. "We didn't realize how bad it was at the time."
Ly, who today runs an IT consulting company in Minnesota, said Virginia Tech was really the last place he would expect to see such a slaughter. Ly, who has lived in Chicago and Washington, D.C., repeatedly referred to Blacksburg as a "middle of nowhere" location - a quiet, small town where nothing much happens.
"To all the Hokies out there, we're all very touched," Ly said, invoking the school's nickname.
Yesterday was not the first time some of Virginia Tech's 25,000 students evacuated classrooms amidst chaos. On Friday, the school canceled classes in three buildings because of a bomb threat, and students fled Torgersen Hall on April 2 after police received a written bomb threat, according to reports from WDBJ in Roanoke, Va., and The Roanoke Times.
Last August, the first day of classes was cut short as police searched out William Morva, a 24-year-old escaped convict who killed a security guard and sheriff's deputy at a hospital just two miles from the campus. Ly said he recognized Morva in news reports after the incident.
"He was sitting next to me every day in the local coffee shop," Ly recalled. "He would always mumble to himself."
"This is really bad news for the university," Ly said. "People are going to start transferring."
--
Original Source: The Daily News Tribune - Waltham, Ma.
<a href="http://www.dailynewstribune.com/local_news/x1650172714">http://www.dailynewstribune.com/local_news/x1650172714</a>
Licensed under
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported</a>.
Elva Orozco
2007-07-17
Elva Orozco
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
eng
Lodge: Cho's choice: Murder
By Richard Lodge/Daily News staff
GHS
Fri Apr 20, 2007, 12:20 AM EDT
The debate over gun control in the wake of Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech had already reached the presidential campaign trial by midweek, and it's sure to surface many times between now and November 2008.
Why had it been so easy for Cho Seung-Hui to buy a 9mm handgun from a Virginia gun shop, then use it to kill 32 fellow students and professors at Virginia Tech, those within the gun-control faction asked?
If only the Virginia legislature hadn't voted down a bill in late 2006 that would have allowed students and staff at VT to carry guns on campus, Cho would have faced armed resistance before Monday became a massacre, declared the defenders of the Second Amendment.
This tragic slice of life in America is only partly about guns, although that's likely what the debate will boil down to. The Virginia Tech massacre is about mental illness and whether we can learn to recognize it and treat it.
As more comes out about Cho's disturbing behavior, the trail of red flags seems clear. One of his professors, Lucinda Roy, raised the alarm years ago about Cho's disturbing writings and behavior and tried to urge him into counseling. Virginia authorities revealed that in December 2005, a court magistrate ordered Cho to undergo an evaluation at a psychiatric hospital. The magistrate signed the order after an initial evaluation found probable cause that Cho was mentally ill and was a danger to himself or others.
So how could Cho so easily buy a handgun - legally - from a Roanoke gun shop to use in his murderous spree?
Tougher gun laws might have delayed Cho's purchase with a waiting period, but his lack of a criminal record would not have prevented the gun dealer from selling him the weapon. Should psychiatric exams be part of the process to buy a gun? There's not a legislature in the country that would have the backbone to do that. And even if they did, how would such an exam be done without excluding and stigmatizing anyone who has been treated for depression or sought psychiatric help at some point? Unlike a felony record, which is an obvious stop sign in the legal purchase of a gun, mental health records would be open to interpretation, and possibly abuse, by the reviewing authority.
But history shows you don't need to buy a gun legally to commit a massacre. Anyone bent on crime can buy a gun on the black market or steal one.
Closer to home, the tragic fatal stabbing at Lincoln-Sudbury High School earlier this year shows that a weapon as basic as a kitchen carving knife can be the means to a terrible end.
But for wide-scale school violence, the common thread of mental illness and easily obtained guns is clear.
For example:
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers, bought a rifle and two shotguns through a straw purchaser, illegally circumventing the law. Five years after the Columbine massacre and the suicides of Harris and Klebold, the FBI's lead investigator and several psychiatrists labeled Harris a clinical psychopath and Klebold as a "depressive" under Harris's influence.
In 1998, Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, stole seven firearms from the home of Golden's grandfather and used some of them to kill four students and a teacher at a school in Jonesboro, Ark.
In March 2005, Jeffrey Weise killed his grandfather, stole two of his guns, then used those guns and a third one to kill seven people at Red Lake High School in Minnesota.
Even mass murderers who bought guns legally have tended to have mental problems as a common theme.
Charles Whitman, who used the rifle he bought at a hardware store to kill 15 people from his perch in a University of Texas clock tower in 1966, had been prescribed medication for depression.
In 1992, student Wayne Lo used an SKS rifle he bought legally at a store in Pittsfield, Mass., to kill a teacher and student - and wound four others - at Simon's Rock of Bard College in Great Barrington. Experts at his trial disagreed on whether Lo suffered from schizophrenia or simply had a "narcissistic personality disorder."
Time and time again, killers - almost always men - murder innocents. It's impossible to imagine that any of these killers is sane.
The Rev. Paul Papas, a pastoral counselor and president of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Framingham chapter), agreed Wednesday that mental illness is a likely trait among those like Cho.
"It's all about choice, about a person's ability to choose," Papas said.
In Cho's case, evidence now says a professor and several others who knew Cho tried to convince him to seek counseling. Apparently immersed so deeply in his own mental quagmire, Cho rebuffed offers of help and rarely even spoke with other people.
Asked what lesson might come out of this week's tragedy in Virginia, Papas suggested that people paying attention and caring for others might be a good start.
"Anybody who has any kind of relationship with somebody else, hopefully they would see changes in that person and recognize that they might need help, and that they should seek help," Papas said.
But, as we're learning this week, getting through to a person as deeply troubled as Cho might be more than is humanly possible.
Richard Lodge is editor of The Daily News and writes a column published on Friday. His e-mail is rlodge@cnc.com.
--
Original Source: <a href="http://www.dailynewstribune.com/columnists/x232888155">http://www.dailynewstribune.com/columnists/x232888155</a>
Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5</a>.
Richard Lodge/Daily News Tribune Staff
2007-05-31
Brent Jesiek
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5
eng