Virginia Tech pays respects to victims, gunman

Blacksburg (Va), Apr 22: Mourners gathered today for the funerals of many of the 32 victims killed at Virginia Tech as some students extended a note of forgiveness to the gunman responsible for the massacre.

A small tribute to Seung-Hui Cho, who shot his victims then himself on Monday, has been added to a growing memorial of stones in the center of the sprawling university in southwest Virginia where knots of weeping students continue to gather.

''I just wanted you to know that I am not mad at you. I don't hate you,'' read a note among flowers at a stone marker labeled for Cho. ''I am so sorry that you could find no help or comfort.'' The note, one of three expressing sorrow and sympathy for the gunman, a deeply disturbed English major, was signed: ''With all my love, Laura.'' A purple candle burned and a small American flag stood in the ground nearby.

Other memorial stones were decorated with flags from Canada, Peru, and Israel for victims who came from those countries, as well as teddy bears, photos and scribbled notes of grief from friends and family.

Nearly a dozen funerals and services for victims, who included 27 students and five teachers, were planned on Saturday in Blacksburg and across the United States, following the worst shooting spree in modern US history.

In Narrows, a tiny factory town about 50 km from the university, some 800 mourners filled the high school auditorium to overflowing for the funeral of Jarrett Lane, 22, an engineering student who would have graduated in May.

''He had the world by the tail,'' state Sen John Edwards told the packed auditorium, where students in Virginia Tech's orange and maroon mixed with townspeople in black.

After the service, mourners walked together across the school's track, where Lane once raced, to a green cemetery in the crook of Virginia's mountains, and stood quietly beneath a cloudless sky as the boy was buried.

Remembered Equally

At Virginia Tech, graduate student Chris Chabalko, 29, said adding a stone memorial for Cho was fair.

''He was a student. Thirty-three people died,'' said Chabalko. ''There's nothing anyone can do about it now. We've got to remember them equally.'' Cho's family issued a heartbroken apology yesterday for the actions of the 23-year-old, who moved to Virginia with his family from South Korea when he was a child.

''He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare,'' the family said in a statement.

(The order of Cho's name has been changed in line with his family's practice. He had been previously identified by police and university officials as Cho Seung-Hui.) Questions remained about how Cho, who had been investigated after stalking complaints in 2005 and treated for mental illness, was able to buy the two guns he used in the rampage.

Under federal law, Cho should have been barred from buying a gun, but wording differences with a Virginia law allowed him to legally get a weapon, a state law professor said.

''A person who has been found in a commitment proceeding to be a danger to himself and committed to out-patient care ... is disqualified from purchasing a firearm under federal law,'' Richard Bonnie, chairman of the Supreme Court of Virginia's Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, told Reuters.

But under state law, he said, the prohibition only appears to extend to people who have been committed to a hospital, which Cho was not.

As a result, his details would not have been captured by an FBI background check system used by gun sellers.

''It is not a new problem. It has been festering for many years,'' Bonnie said.

The United States remained jittery following several security scares, and a hostage-taking at NASA in Texas yesterday that left two people dead.

Authorities in Minnesota said a US veteran of the Iraq war was hospitalized after two pipe bombs were found in a pickup truck yesterday at a college in New Ulm. The bombs did not appear related to the Virginia Tech shootings, New Ulm police Sergeant Steve Depew said.

Reuters

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