No Filipino Casualties in today's Campus shoot-out! 30 men killed!

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Hey guys. This is a very terrible news! --- Campus massacre By Jose Katigbak STAR Washington bureau The Philippine Star 04/18/2007 WASHINGTON – A gunman alleged to be of Asian origin killed 33 people including himself and injured up to 50 others at a Virginia university in the deadliest school shooting in US history, school officials and police said yesterday. The bloodbath was apparently sparked by a quarrel between the gunman, believed to be a student himself, and a girlfriend, according to some witnesses. More than 100 students of Filipino parentage are enrolled in any given year at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg about 260 miles west of Washington, but members of the Filipino-American Student Association said as far as they knew none of their compatriots was among the casualties. In two separate shootings about two-and-a-half hours apart on Monday, the gunman initially killed two people on the fourth floor of a dormitory and then stormed the Norris Hall engineering building a few hundred yards away, shooting students and faculty members in their classes before turning the gun on himself as SWAT units closed in on him. Students said there were no public-address announcements or other warnings on campus until an e-mail more than two hours after the first shooting of two people. By then, the gunman had struck again, killing 30 others, then himself. Virginia Tech president Charles Steger said authorities at first believed that the shooting at the dormitory was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus. "We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur," he said. He defended the university’s handling of the tragedy, saying, "We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it." Earlier in the day, the Virginia Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum said he believed there was only one gunman, but at an evening news conference, he and the university president said they were still investigating whether the shootings were related. The shootings spread panic and confusion on campus, with witnesses reporting students jumping out classroom windows to escape the gunfire. Students and faculty members carried out some of the wounded themselves, without waiting for ambulances to arrive. A police commando unit with flak jackets and assault rifles swarmed the campus. Police said some doors in the classroom building had been chained shut from the inside. Doctors said many of those injured suffered cuts, bruises and scrapes as they scrambled for safety. Some students reportedly jumped from windows because the gunman chained the doors of Norris Hall shut. VTech, as the school is more commonly known, has a student population of about 26,000 and is set in a 2,600-acre campus. It is a highly rated business and engineering school with more than 100 buildings. Some TV news reports said the gunman was an Asian but police have so far not released his identity or the motive for the shootings. Police said the gunman carried no identity papers and it was difficult to identify him as he had shot himself in the face. The Chicago Sun-Times in its website said police were investigating whether the gunman was a 24-year-old Chinese who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa. President George W. Bush described the massacre as a terrible tragedy. "Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and learning. When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community," he said in a statement issued by the White House. "Today, our nation grieves with those who have lost loved ones at Virginia Tech. We hold the victims in our hearts, we lift them up in our prayers, and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering today." Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth II was "shocked and saddened" after hearing of the shootings. She had planned to visit Virginia in May to mark the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement. The gunman was armed with a semiautomatic 9 mm pistol with a magazine capacity of 15 rounds and a .22 caliber handgun, according to some eyewitnesses. They said they saw him reload several times. Fil-Am students unharmed Jennel Baltazar, a Filipino American civil engineering senior, said she was attending a class at 9 a.m. at a building adjacent to Norris Hall when she heard ambulance and police sirens and saw heavily armed police running across the campus. "One of the officers kept shouting to his men ‘run faster, hustle, hustle, hurry up,’" she said. She said a dean came to the class and ordered everyone —about 15 to 20 of them —to quickly move to another room. It was then she said when she knew it was serious, so she called her parents —dad Joe is from Cagayan and mom Marinet is from Cavite —and told them she was safe. "I didn’t want them to worry in case they heard the news on TV," she said. She said from the window she saw two people bleeding being led away to safety. But it was only after she returned home to her apartment when the gravity of the situation hit her. "When I saw the TV replaying what had happened I felt limp and started crying uncontrollably. I could easily have been one of the victims as I usually have classes at Norris Hall," she said. Adrian Santo Domingo, 20, a junior taking up computer engineering, said when he got to his 10 a.m. class three buildings away from Norris Hall he thought it strange that there were only about 20 students present when more than 100 normally attended the lecture. He said as he left the building to get to his car he heard the emergency PA system announcing a lockdown. Baltazar and Santo Domingo said the shooting at Virginia Tech was all the more chilling because in their years at Blacksburg they always felt safe. Terribly wrong Tough questions swiftly surfaced as to how effectively Virginia Tech authorities responded to Monday’s horrific massacre. Why were campus police so sure the threat was contained in one dormitory, when most of the killings occurred two hours later in a classroom building? Why did they think the assailant might have left the campus after those initial shootings that killed two? Why was there a lag of more than two hours after the first shootings before an alarm was e-mailed campuswide - around the time another, more deadly burst of carnage occurred? And more generally, some security experts wondered, was the school’s crisis planning and emergency communications system up to the task? Clearly, something went terribly wrong. Asked why he did not order a lockdown of the entire campus, Steger said authorities believed the shooting at the West Ambler Johnston dorm, first reported about 7:15 a.m., was an isolated case. The dormitory was locked down immediately after the shooting, Steger said, and a phone bank was activated to alert the resident advisers there so they could go door-to-door warning the 900 students in the dorm. Security guards deployed at the dorm, he said, and others began a sweep across campus. Steger noted that thousands of nonresident students were arriving for 8 a.m. [1300 GMT] classes, fanning out across the sprawling campus from their parking spots. "Where do you lock them down?" Steger asked. He said security on campus will be tightened now, but offered no details. "We obviously can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year," he said. Security experts not connected with Virginia Tech said their immediate questions focused on whether the university had adopted and practiced a plan to handle such dire crises, and whether its system of emergency communications was state-of-the-art. "It is critical for them to have solid emergency plans in place to deal with crisis situations," said Kenneth Trump of National School and Safety Services in Cleveland. "The key is to have a solid communications component in place to deal with notifying students, parents, faculty, staff and the media what’s going on." Michael Dorn of Safe Havens International in Macon, Georgia, which has advised many universities on security measures, said campus emergency plans can be ineffective unless staff and students are trained on how to cooperate. "They can make the difference between one or two people being victimized and larger numbers," Dorn said. Students shocked, angry Some students bitterly questioned why the gunman was able to strike a second time. "What happened today, this was ridiculous," student Jason Piatt told CNN. "While they sent out that e-mail, 20 more people got killed." Students and Laura Wedin, a student programs manager at Virginia Tech, said the first notification they got of the shootings came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. [1326 GMT], more than two hours after the first shooting. The e-mail had few details. It said: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating." The message warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious. "We were kept in the dark a lot about exactly what was going on," said Andrew Capers Thompson, a 22-year-old graduate student. At least 26 people were being treated at three area hospitals for gunshot wounds and other injuries, authorities said. Their exact conditions were not disclosed, but at least one was sent to a trauma center and six were in surgery, authorities said. Edmund Henneke, associate dean of engineering, said he had just read the e-mail advisory regarding the first shooting when he heard gunfire. Moments later, police commando members rushed him and others downstairs "but the doors were chained and padlocked from the inside." They left the building through a construction area that had not been locked. Henneke said it is unfair to criticize the sc