Massacre at Virginia Tech

Cho Seung-hui, a 23 year old English major from South Korea, has been identified as the gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday.

Cho, here in America on a student visa, is believed to have purchased his two pistols sometime in the past week in Virginia.

On Monday at 7:15, the first shooting occurred at the West Ambler Johnston dormitory, killing two people, female student Emily J. Hilscher and RA Ryan Christopher “Stack” Clark.

While campus police investigated the initial double homicide, Cho was apparently readying for further carnage across campus at Norris Hall, where the majority of the killings took place. As the shootings began, students in classrooms either barricaded themselves in to prevent Cho from entering or jumped out of classroom windows, sometimes as high as four stories up.

According to a statement by a doctor treating the injured, Cho was especially brutal in his methods.

“There wasn’t a shooting victim that didn’t have less than three bullet wounds in them,” said Dr. Joseph Cacioppo of Montgomery Regional Hospital.

Cho took his own life at the end of his killing spree that killed 32 and injured 15 others. At least two Virginia Tech professors are among the dead.

While the university struggled with sending out warning emails, students were identifying the dead and injured themselves through social networking sites like Facebook.

Not everyone was using the inter net for good however. Wanus Maximus, a user of Live Journal edited his blog profile to pose as the killer.

As the identity of the killer was not immediately known, and all that was known was that it was an Asian male who apparently argued with his girlfriend, Wanus created a profile of a depressed gun nut. He was convincing enough to have Warren Ellis and through him Wired to point him out as possibly the real deal. He was eventually debunked, and continues to update his journal with each site that comes out to prove him false.

Our hearts go out to the victims and their families and our thoughts are with them in their time of grief.