BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Investigators believe the gunman who killed a Virginia Tech policeman acted alone and that he changed clothes after fleeing the scene, then killed himself with his handgun when another officer spotted him, state police said Friday.
Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators have not found anything connecting the gunman and the slain officer, Deriek W. Crouse, who was shot in his car Thursday in a campus parking lot after pulling over a driver for a traffic stop. The motive remains a mystery, she said.
“That’s very much the fundamental part of the investigation right now,” Geller said at a news conference.
The gunman was not a student at Virginia Tech, the scene of the deadliest gun rampage in modern U.S. history in 2007. Geller said investigators were confidant they know the gunman’s identity but she declined to say anything more about his name, age or hometown until the medical examiner confirms his identity and next of kin are notified.
The campus shooting prompted officials to lock down the university for hours while police and SWAT teams searched the school.
[Several Washington and Lee engineering students were on campus at the time, but they were not close to the shooting and knew nothing of it until W&L junior Tate Young said he began receiving texts from his friends who attend Tech.
“Slowly but surely, we got more information about an officer that had been shot and that a student had been killed … that SWAT teams had rolled in, put the campus on lock down,” he said.
The W&L students left the Virginia Tech campus Thursday and headed back to Lexington.]
Authorities have in-car video from Crouse’s cruiser that shows a man with a handgun at the officer’s car at the time of the shooting.
Geller laid out the most detailed account thus far of the shooting. She said Crouse had pulled over a car driven by a student and was stopped on a campus parking lot with the car in front of his cruiser. She said the driver, who she didn’t name, had no connection to the shooting and has been very helpful to investigators.
Crouse was sitting in his cruiser when the gunman walked up and shot him. Geller declined to say if the officer was wearing body armor or where exactly he was shot. He was not able to return fire, she said.
The gunman fled on foot and went to nearby greenhouses, where investigators say he changed out of a pullover wool cap and left them there with his backpack.
Geller said a deputy sheriff on patrol then noticed a man at the back of a parking lot about half a mile from the shooting. The man was by himself and acting “a little suspicious.” The officer drove around to approach him, lost sight of the man and then found him on the ground. The man appeared to have a self-inflicted gunshot wound and a handgun was nearby.
The events unfolded on the same day Virginia Tech officials were in Washington, fighting a federal government fine over their handling of the 2007 massacre where 33 people were killed. The shooting brought back painful memories. About 150 students gathered silently for a candlelight vigil on a field facing the stone plaza memorial for the 2007 victims. An official vigil is planned for Friday night.
Crouse was an Army veteran and married father of five children and stepchildren who joined the campus police force in October 2007. He previously worked at a jail and for the Montgomery County sheriff’s department.
Crouse was one of about 50 officers on the campus force, which also has 20 full- and part-time security guards. Crouse received an award in 2008 for his commitment to the department’s drunken driving efforts. He was trained as a crisis intervention officer and as a general, firearms and defensive tactics instructor.
The university also said its counseling center would be open all day Friday for students.
“A lot of people, especially toward the beginning were scared,” said Jared Brumfield, a 19-year-old freshman from Culpeper, Va., who was locked in the Squires Student Center since around 1:30 p.m. “A lot of people are loosening up now. I guess we’re just waiting it out, waiting for it to be over.”
The university sent updates about every 30 minutes, regardless of whether they had any new information, school spokesman Mark Owczarski said.
“It’s crazy that someone would go and do something like that with all the stuff that happened in 2007,” said Corey Smith, a 19-year-old sophomore from Mechanicsville, Va., who was headed to a dining hall near the site of one of the shootings.
He told The Associated Press that he stayed inside after seeing the alerts from the school. “It’s just weird to think about why someone would do something like this when the school’s had so many problems,” Smith said.
Harry White, 20, a junior physics major, said he was in line for a sandwich at a restaurant in a campus building when he received the text message alert.
White said he didn’t panic, thinking instead about a false alarm about a possible gunman that locked down the campus in August. White used an indoor walkway to go to a computer lab in an adjacent building, where he checked news reports.
“I decided to just check to see how serious it was. I saw it’s actually someone shooting someone, not something false, something that looks like a gun,” White said.
Campus was quieter than usual because classes ended Wednesday and students were preparing for exams, which were to begin Friday. The school postponed those tests.
The shooting came soon after the conclusion of a hearing where Virginia Tech was appealing a $55,000 fine by the U.S. Education Department in connection with the university’s response to the 2007 rampage.
The department said the school violated the law by waiting more than two hours after two students were shot to death in their dorm before sending an email warning. By then, student gunman Seung-Hui Cho was chaining the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more people and then himself.
The department said the email was too vague because it mentioned only a “shooting incident,” not the deaths. During testimony Thursday, the university’s police chief, Wendell Flinchum, said there were no immediate signs in the dorm to indicate a threat to the campus. He said the shootings were believed to be an isolated domestic incident and that the shooter had fled.
An administrative judge ended the hearing by asking each side to submit a brief by the end of January. It is unclear when he will rule.
Since the massacre, the school expanded its emergency notification systems. Alerts now go out by electronic message boards in classrooms, by text messages and other methods. Other colleges and universities have put in place similar systems.
Universities are required under the Clery Act to provide warnings in a timely manner and to report the number of crimes on campus.
During about a one-hour period on Thursday, the university issued four separate alerts.
Derek O’Dell, a third-year veterinary student at Virginia Tech who was wounded in the 2007 shooting, was shaken.
“It just brings up a lot of bad feelings, bad memories,” O’Dell said. “You pray there are no more victims, and pray for the families.”
O’Dell was monitoring the situation from his home a couple of miles from campus.
“At first I was just hoping it was a false alarm,” he said. “Then there were reports of two people dead, and the second person shot was in the parking lot where I usually park to go to school so it was kind of surreal.”
In August, a report of a possible gunman at Virginia Tech set off the longest, most extensive lockdown and search on campus since 2007. No gunman was found, and the school gave the all-clear about five hours after sirens began wailing and students and staff members started receiving warnings.
The system was also put to the test in 2008, when an exploding nail gun cartridge was mistaken for gunfire. Only one dorm was locked down during that emergency, and it reopened two hours later.
Diandra Spicak also contributed to this story.