WASHINGTON – A gunman killed a police officer and another person yesterday at Virginia Tech University, the site of one of the worst shooting rampages in US history, school officials said.
The gunman fled on foot, and police – some in full combat gear – swarmed the campus in southern Virginia in a massive manhunt. Students and faculty members were ordered to hunker down inside university buildings and dormitories.
The campus police officer was shot dead during a routine traffic stop in what news reports said was an exchange of gunfire. A second victim was found in a nearby parking lot, Virginia Tech said. Details were sketchy.
It was the first shooting at Virginia Tech since April 2007 when student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 others before killing himself on the school’s rural campus in the Shenandoah Valley. The massacre was the deadliest attack by a single gunman in US history.
“Everyone has been directed to stay indoors, lock all exterior doors and stay away from the windows,” school spokesman Dana Cruikshank said as the parents of students frantically tried to locate their children by mobile phone and through social networking sites. “Right now it’s kind of scary and hectic around here that this is happening again,” said freshman Matthew Spencer.
US House of Representatives Republican leader Eric Cantor of Virginia was among the first members of Congress to respond to the new shootings. “Such violence is never easy to explain, and cuts to our core – especially on a campus that has experienced such grief in the past,” he said.
The campus was locked down yesterday as the search for the gunman continued. Final exams set to begin today were postponed.
The 2007 massacre renewed a chorus of calls for tougher gun control laws. But the calls did not get far because Republican lawmakers have traditionally opposed gun control and Democrats, having been burned on the issue politically, did not push it. – (Reuters)