Two people were killed in a shooting at Virginia Tech on Thursday afternoon. One of the victims, a police officer, was shot in a parking lot after a routine traffic stop. According to reports, the shooter fled to another parking lot, where a second body was found. SWAT teams descended on campus while students sought safety in buildings.
The events were certain to evoke nightmares of the infamous massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, where 33 people were killed by a single gunman in what was the worst school shooting in U.S. history.
The Associate Press reported students’ shocked reactions to the news. The story also noted that today was the day the U.S. Department of Education concluded a hearing with Virginia Tech administrators about emergency preparedness during the 2007 shooting:
The shooter was described as a white man wearing gray sweat pants, a gray hat with neon green brim, a maroon hoodie and backpack.
“It’s crazy that someone would go and do something like that with all the stuff that happened in 2007,” said Corey Smith, a 19-year-old sophomore from Mechanicsville, Va., who was headed to a dining hall near the site of one of the shootings.
He told The Associated Press that he stayed inside after seeing the alerts from the school. “It’s just weird to think about why someone would do something like this when the school’s had so many problems,” Smith said.
Harry White, 20, a junior physics major, said he was in line for a sandwich at a restaurant in a campus building when he received the text message alert.
White said he didn’t panic, thinking instead about a false alarm about a possible gunman that locked down the campus in August. White used an indoor walkway to go to a computer lab in an adjacent building, where he checked news reports.
“I decided to just check to see how serious it was. I saw it’s actually someone shooting someone, not something false, something that looks like a gun,” White said.
Campus was quieter than usual because classes ended Wednesday and students were preparing for exams, which were to begin Friday. The school said those tests would be postponed.
The shooting came soon after the conclusion of a hearing where Virginia Tech was appealing a $55,000 fine by the U.S. Education Department in connection with the university’s response to the 2007 rampage.
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