TRAGEDY AT VIRGINIA TECH Graphic: What happened in Norris Hall | Timeline | Cell video | Danger of semi-automatics Massacre: Deadliest campus shooting leaves 33 dead Victims: Lives full of promise, wisdom cut short Who was Cho?: Va. Tech panel gets Cho's mental records | Past provided reasons for concern | Family feels 'hopeless' | Mailed video Gun control: Law would focus on buyers' history | How could Cho get guns? Schools react: Text alerts mulled | Stalking 'definitely a problem' | High schools mum on 'troubled' kids More  Seung Hui Cho Virginia State Police  GLOCK 9MM HANDGUN  MAJOR UNIVERSITY SHOOTINGS Aug. 1, 1966: Rifle sniper fire from the University of Texas tower in Austin killed 16 people and wounded 31. Gunman Charles J. Whitman, 25, was shot dead. May 4, 1970: Four Kent State students were killed and nine injured by Ohio National Guardsmen who opened fire during an anti-war protest. Dec. 6, 1989: Gunman Marc Lepine, 25, killed 14 female engineering students at the University of Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique Engineering School in Montreal, Quebec. He then turned the hunting rifle on himself. Nov. 1, 1991: Five people were killed and one seriously wounded by University of Iowa graduate student Gang Lu, who then killed himself. Jan. 26, 1995: North Carolina lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt and Chapel Hill resident Ralph Walker were killed in a shooting spree near campus. Law student Wendell Williamson was found not guilty by reason of insanity and is confined to state mental hospitals. Aug. 16, 1996: Three San Diego State University professors were killed when graduate engineering student Frederick Martin Davidson opened fire with a handgun while defending his thesis. Jan. 16, 2002: A dean, professor and student were killed and three wounded by recently dismissed student Peter Odighizuwa, 43, at Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va. Oct. 28, 2002: Failing University of Arizona Nursing College student and Gulf War veteran Robert Flores, 40, walked into an instructor's office and fatally shot her. Minute later, armed with five guns, he entered one of his nursing classrooms and killed two more of his instructors before fatally shooting himself. Sept. 2, 2006: Douglas Pennington, 49, killed himself and his two sons, Logan Pennington, 26, and Benjamin Pennington, 24, during a visit to the campus of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W. Va. Sources: USA TODAY research; Associated Press

"The idea is to do this after any significant incident," Kaine said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. Virginia Tech police and administrators have come under criticism for their decision to keep classes in session after the first of two campus shootings Monday, in which two people died in a dormitory. That shooting was followed two hours later by a rampage in a campus building, in which 31 people died, including Cho Seung Hui, the student believed responsible for the deaths. Cho committed suicide, police said.

Kaine's decision was one of many developments the day after the most deadly shooting rampage in American history. Tuesday morning, police identified Cho as the person responsible for the clasroom shooting, and said one of the two guns he owned also was used in the dormitory shooting. Cho was a senior English major from Centreville, Va., and a permanent resident from South Korea, police said.

Also Tuesday, the Virginia Tech community assembled at an on-campus sports arena to mourn the deaths of the victims. President Bush told the mourners that it was "impossible to make sense" of the massacre, but added, "I hope you know that people all over this country are thinking about you and asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected."

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hinker said Cho, who lived in a dorm on campus, "was a loner and we are having difficulty finding any information about him."

The Associated Press reported Cho's creative writing for his English classes was so disturbing that he was referred to the school's counseling service.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, told the AP she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude told the AP. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She told the AP that Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity- and violence-laced screenplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of," former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL website. He said he and other students "were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter."

"We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did," said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. "But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling."

Immigration records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security show that Cho was born in South Korea on Jan. 18, 1984 and entered the United States through Detroit on Sept. 2, 1992. He had last renewed his green card on Oct. 27, 2003.

The South Korean native was believed to have calmly killed 30 people in a rampage at Norris Hall, an engineering building, around 9:50 a.m. and was linked to the deaths of two people at West Ambler Johnston, a coed dorm, around 7:15 a.m. the same morning.

Witnesses said that Cho, wearing a cap, a jacket and a dark vest that was apparently laden with ammunition, strode into several classrooms and opened fire on students and faculty, reloaded and fired again. He also shot at, and missed, a custodian who came upon a victim in the hallway.

Erin Sheehan, who was in the German class at Norris Hall, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of about two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.

She said the gunman "was just a normal-looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout-type outfit. He wore a tan button-up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something."

The gunman's family lived in an off-white, two-story town house in Centreville, Va., in the suburbs of Washington. "He was very quiet, always by himself," neighbor Abdul Shash said of the gunman. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball, and wouldn't respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.

But police were careful not to definitively declare Cho as the shooter in both killings, which occurred two hours and a half-mile apart.

"The evidence does not conclusively identify Cho Seung Hui as the gunman at both locations," said Col. W. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police.

He said only that Cho was found with two handguns — a 22-caliber and a 9 mm — and that one of them was also used in the dorm slayings.

"With this newfound ballistics evidence, we are now able to proceed to the next level of this complex investigation," Flaherty said.

One law enforcement official told the AP that Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol. And two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, told the AP that Cho's fingerprints were found on the two guns used in the rampage. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said.

Shortly after the dorm killings, police said, they detained a "person of interest" who had been an acquaintance of the female victim there. He was stopped in his vehicle off campus, police said. While he was being questioned, they said, the second shootings occurred at Norris Hall.

Chief Wendell Flinchum, of the Virginia Tech police department, said authorities were "still looking to him for information" as the investigation continues.

So far, only a handful of the 32 victims have been identified. Authorities said the process could take several days.

"Personal effects were thrown about the entire second floor of Norris Hall, which made it much more difficult to identify victims," said Flaherty. He referred to the classrooms as a "horrific crime scene."

At least 15 people were injured in the second attack, some seriously. At least 12 remained hospitalized Tuesday, with three in critical condition.

Among the dead were professors Liviu Librescu and Kevin Granata, said Ishwar K. Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department.

Librescu, an Israeli, was born in Romania and was known internationally for his research in aeronautical engineering, Puri wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.

Granata and his students researched muscle and reflex response and robotics. Puri called him one of the top five biomechanics researchers in the country working on movement dynamics in cerebral palsy.

Also killed was Ryan Clark, a student from Martinez, Ga., said Vernon Collins, coroner in Columbia County, Ga.

His friend Gregory Walton, a 25-year-old who graduated last year, said he feared the nightmare had just begun.

"I knew when the number was so large that I would know at least one person on that list," said Walton, a banquet manager. "I don't want to look at that list. I don't want to.

"It's just, it's going to be horrible, and it's going to get worse before it gets better," he said.

As relatives and friends grieved, this university of some 23,000 students began the painful process of trying to cope with the tragedy.

Thousands gathered for a memorial service Tuesday afternoon, with President Bush, and first lady Laura Bush in attendance. Kaine cut short a trade mission to Asia to be at the convocation.

As Bush spoke, some students in the packed auditorium wiped away tears or embraced each other.

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said the university community had "come together to mourn and to grieve, all the while hoping that we will be waking from what is a horrible nightmare."

"There are no real words to express the depth of sadness that we feel," Steger said. "Words are very weak symbols of our true emotions at times like this."

Classes at the university have been canceled for the rest of the week and Norris hall, site of most of the killings, will be closed for the rest of the semester.

Some students bitterly complained they got no warning from the university until an e-mail that arrived more than two hours after the first shots.

"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the seventh floor of the dorm.

Steger said authorities believed the shooting at the dorm 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.

Steger noted that only 9,000 of the university's approximately 25,000 students live on campus, meaning that many of the rest — along with about 8,000 teachers and employees — were en route to the university Monday when the first shootings occurred.

"We warned the students we thought were immediately impacted," he said on CNN, noting campus police closed off the area around the dormitory immediately after the shooting.

When pressed on CNN about whether Virginia Tech police "blew it," Steger responded, "I don't think it's fair at all" to characterize the situation that way.

Contributing: Gary Strauss and Donna Leinwand in Blacksburg, Va.; David Jackson in Washington; Douglas Stanglin and Randy Lilleston in McLean, Va.; the Associated Press.

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Enlarge By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY Virginia Tech students create a shrine of flowers and candles Tuesday night in memory of the victims of Monday's campus shootings.