By Inés Guérin
On Monday the United States experienced the worst gun rampage in its history. Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major at Virginia Tech, killed 32 people on campus before taking his own life.
"My first reaction to this event was feeling shocked," UP sophomore Shani O'Brien said. "I read all the news and watched all the videos, and it was heart-breaking."
The tragic attack drew words of sympathy from across the country, and President Bush ordered flags to be flown at half-staff over federal and public buildings, saying he and Mrs. Bush had their "hearts full of sorrow."
"This is a day of mourning for the Virginia Tech community, and it is a day of sadness for our entire nation," Bush said.
Following the Monday attack, more details about the assault and a possible motive became available.
The violence began at 7:15 a.m. with a shooting that took the lives of two students in a dormitory. Many students on campus were unaware of the danger until they saw the police officers arriving later.
At 9:25 a.m. Virginia Tech officials sent out an official e-mail advising students about the early morning shooting and urging them to use caution on campus and to report anything suspicious.
Twenty minutes later a second shooting was reported in a classroom building. Thirty-one students, including the gunman, were killed and many were injured.
In a written note and series of videos mailed to NBC news, Cho criticized the wealthy and said, "You forced me into a corner."
The two weapons used in this massacre were a 9-millimeter handgun and a 22-caliber handgun. Investigators traced the guns and confirmed that Cho legally purchased them in accordance with Virginia law, according to Virginia Tech's Web site, www.vt.edu.
O'Brien said she cannot understand Virginia's gun laws.
"If this person wasn't allowed to buy these guns, the end of this story would have been different," she said.
Apparently the troubled Cho exhibited signs of anger while a student at Virginia Tech.
A year and a half before the deadly shooting, a teacher was so concerned about Cho's anger that she took him out of another professor's creative writing class and taught him personally, CNN reported.
Lucinda Roy, the former chairwoman of the English department at Virginia Tech, told CNN that the anger Cho expressed was palpable if not explicit. Cho never wrote about guns or killing people, Roy said. However, the student's writing was disturbing enough that she went to police and other university officials to seek help.
Stephanie Derry, a senior English major at Virginia Tech, was in a class with Cho this semester. She said "all the clues had been there, but I could never imagine his bizarre behavior would ever materialize into these recent destructive events," the Virginia Tech student newspaper reported.
"Cho was really, really quiet," Derry said. "I can't even remember one word he said the entire semester."
O'Brien said she her "empathetic" nature led her to thoughts about the psychological reasons behind Cho's decision.
Graduate student Arianna Molloy is concerned with how Virginia Tech handled the situation.
"It was stupid that the campus knew about it and they thought it was a case of domestic violence; it's absolutely tragic," Molloy said. "On my way to class I was praying for the people that were there."
UP's emergency plan
Graduate student Jaime Flemming said she hasn't thought much about what would happen if a similar incident occurred at UP.
"I tend to think that I'm invisible and this will never happen to me. I don't know if that's good or not," Flemming said.
However, some UP students say they feel more vulnerable to violence on campus.
"When I heard about this news I immediately thought, 'This is like the college Columbine, why is this happening again?'" graduate student Cynthia Santoso said.
Graduate student Ismet Ozer had similar concerns.
"This is sick! Now I'm afraid because I know I'm not safe anymore at any place," he said.
In a campus-wide e-mail sent Tuesday, the Rev. William Beauchamp, C.S.C., the University of Portland president, said UP "has an extensive Emergency Action Plan [that] is continuously evaluated and updated."
"The plan we have in place is extremely thorough and accounts for many extraordinary emergencies. We will continue to evaluate and update our plans to make this campus as safe as possible," Beauchamp said in the same e-mail.
Beauchamp also invited all UP members to pray for those affected by the shootings.
If an incident like the Virginia Tech shooting were to happen at UP, students should leave the campus as quickly as possible, Laurie Kelley, director of marketing and communications at UP, said. The administration would send a campus-wide e-mail and go around to "get the word out."
Kelley said the University has an extended emergency plan for many urgent situations that could happen on campus. This plan is not made public, however, to prevent potential aggressors from finding out about it, Kelley said.
The University does not have a central communication system with speakers in every building on campus, but Public Safety is working on a text message system that would be used to send everyone on campus an alert in case of an emergency, according to Kelley.
"We need to have everyone's cell phone [numbers], and that's information Public Safety does not have yet," Kelley said.
The University is constantly aware of safety on campus and there won't be a drastic change of policy after the Virginia Tech shooting, Kelley said.
"I think we will have a better ability to raise awareness among staff and students in case a shooting happens," Kelley said.
