'That Was the Desk I Chose to Die Under'

Here, as elsewhere, one of the rivers of conversation was about whether the university handled the day properly or should have shut down the entire campus after the first shootings at West Ambler Johnston. "I think they should have closed the whole thing. It's not worth it," said Hoda Bizri of Princeton, W.Va., who was visiting her daughter, Siwar, a graduate student. The Bizris, like many others, were waiting for word about a friend who had been inside Norris and could not be reached.

Nearby, Kristen Wickham was looking for news about her friend Caitlin Hammaren, a fellow New Yorker. Everyone was trying to reach Caitlin, with no luck. She should have called by now, Wickham thought, not knowing that her friend was among the dead. Hammaren's parents were trying to reach Blacksburg and couldn't get a plane, so they were making the long drive from Upstate New York. Parents were making similar pilgrimages by car and plane from every corner of the country.

One of the early flights from the West Coast brought Nikki Giovanni, the renowned poet and Virginia Tech professor. At the end of her red-eye flight, she had heard about the shootings and the early reports that generally described the gunman. "When I heard the suspect was an Asian student, I had no doubt in my mind who did it," she said later. Cho had been in one of her classes, and his writing was so violent, so focused on death, that he had scared other students to the point where Giovanni had felt compelled to remove him from the class, sending him to a colleague for tutoring.

Back to Harper And a Killer's Room

It was not until 9:06 that night -- when Virginia State Police investigators knocked on the door at Suite 2121 in Harper Hall -- that Karan Grewal realized that the roommate he had last seen in boxers and T-shirt 16 hours earlier was the cause of all the horror. The investigators interviewed Grewal and the four other roommates. No, they had not seen guns around the suite, but Cho was a strange guy. Wouldn't talk. Played the same songs over and over on his laptop. Didn't like to turn the light off in his room. Had a bike that he rode around campus late at night. Would not go out with them, except one rare time when they got him drinking at a party and he said he had an imaginary girlfriend who called him Spanky. Never saw him with a girl, though, or any friends whatsoever. Before spring break, he had seemed to get obsessed with a few women. Had been stalking them on his computer, and sometimes in person. The cops were called twice. Once he was sent to counseling and said he might as well kill himself. He started shaving his head down to a fuzz cut. Wore contact lenses. Used something for his acne. Was working out at the campus gym. Had been getting up really early recently.

The investigators scoured Cho's room for evidence. The room looked like any college kid's, strewed with papers, food wrappers, cereal boxes. This is what they took away, according to a search warrant filed later by Virginia State Police special agent M.D. Austin:

Chain from top left closet shelf.

Folding knife and combination padlock.

Compaq computer Serial # CND33100IL on desk.

Assorted documents, notepads, writings from desk.

Combination lock.

Tool box.

Nine books, two notebooks, envelopes from top shelf.

Assorted books and pads from lower shelf.

Compact discs from desk.

Items from desktop drawer, mail, three notebooks, check credit card.

Items from second drawer -- Kodak digital camera, keys, Citibank statement.

Two cases of compact discs from dresser top.

Six sheets of green graph paper.

Other officers walked the halls of Harper with a photograph of Cho, asking students if they knew him. They were all rattled. Most did not recognize him; a few said they thought they had walked by him now and then. How lucky they were, thought Tom Duscheid, a management student from Pittsburgh. This is the residence hall where Cho lived, not Ambler Johnston, What if he had rampaged through here with his guns?

There were still so many unanswered questions. Why did Cho go to West Ambler Johnston? Why did he choose Norris Hall for his rampage? Whom was he looking for? What did he do between the two incidents? How did he move around the campus unnoticed? Police questions, questions of detail. They went to work on some of the little stuff, tracing Cho's movements. They found out that on Feb. 9 he had stepped into a pawnshop directly across the street from the Tech campus, right on Main Street, JND Pawn Brokers, to make the first purchase of the guns he would use later. It was a Walther .22-caliber pistol, relatively inexpensive, commonly used for target shooting. From then until days before the shooting, he traveled to nearby stores to buy ammunition. Some at the Wal-Mart Supercenter, some at Dick's Sporting Goods over in Christianburg. On March 16, exactly a month before his killing rampage, he went to Roanoke Firearms, a full-service gun dealership with more than 350 guns on display. He showed his driver's license, a checkbook with a matching address and an immigration card. A surveillance camera captured him making the $571 purchase of a Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartridges.

Days later, a larger clue would come from NBC News and Cho himself. At 9:01 Monday morning, before going to Norris Hall, Cho sent an Express Mail package to NBC in New York that included photographs, video and a note including these chilling words: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today."

Little Sleep For the Living

When Ross Berger got home from the hospital Monday night, assured that his friend Kristina Heeger would survive, there was no more storage space for messages on his cellphone, and his computer was flooded with e-mails. Everyone was talking. Names were coming in. He knew four of the dead students. He turned on the television for the first time. Fox News was showing the shaky video footage taken by Jamal Albarghouti outside Norris Hall. A running count of gunshots was displayed alongside the shaky pictures. "And like that was the first thing I saw, and I went into my bathroom and puked," Berger said.

But he came back and watched some more, inevitably, and the more he saw and heard, the more unsettled he became. So many conflicting feelings were banging around in his head. The country seemed to be harping on the police and the university administration and how they had handled, or mishandled, the unfolding tragedy. Berger and all his classmates, except one, were innocent, yet he felt as though they, too, were being tainted by the obsessive focus and the natural human desire to fix blame. The guy to blame was dead, he thought. People didn't understand that 99.9 percent of the time this was a wonderful little place to be, that nothing really goes on. The cops here, what did they know about mass murder? They were used to dealing with some drunk kid, not a psycho. How can you stop something like that? Everyone felt horrible, Berger and all his friends were still bawling, but they also still felt a deep pride in Virginia Tech. He thought about it all night, the killings, the conflict, and never found sleep.

Few who had endured the day could sleep that night. At his off-campus apartment on Patrick Henry Drive, Trey Perkins stayed up in the comfortable embrace of his parents. Don and Sheree Perkins had begun the four-hour car trip from Yorkville that afternoon as soon as Sheree could slip free from an elementary school field trip she had been leading.

Trey had been one of the primary student voices all day, talking coolly and calmly about the horror that visited his German class. He had seen the worst that man can do to man, and now he was in a daze. It actually helped him to talk, to respond to questions, to go over the details in rote fashion, because when he spoke aloud they seemed somewhat removed. When he was alone and silent, something deeper washed over him that made him shudder. It was a simple image that looped again and again in his mind's eye. The first moment, the classroom door opening, the gunman coming in.

About the Narrative

This narrative is based on scores of interviews with shooting victims, witnesses and other participants in the events at Virginia Tech on Monday. All thoughts expressed by people in the narrative are taken directly from the interviews.

Reporting from Blacksburg were staff writers Michelle Boorstein, Chris L. Jenkins, Susan Levine, Jerry Markon, Nick Miroff, David Montgomery, Candace Rondeaux, Ian Shapira, Michael D. Shear and Sandhya Somashekhar. Reporting from Washington were staff writers Keith L. Alexander, Sari Horwitz, Carol D. Leonnig, Michael E. Ruane, Katherine Shaver, Jose Antonio Vargas and William Wan. Staff researchers Alice Crites, Meg Smith and Julie Tate also contributed to this narrative.