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| This photo provided by the Virginia State Police shows Ross Truett Ashley, age 22. Police identified the Virginia Tech gunman on Friday as Ross Truett Ashley, a part-time college student from nearby Radford University, though they still have not been able to say what led him to kill a police officer and then himself. |
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) -- A part-time college student at a small school near Virginia Tech was identified Friday as the gunman who shot a police officer to death and then killed himself, triggering a lockdown on a campus still coping with the nation's worst mass slaying in recent memory.
The day before the shootings, police said Ross Truett Ashley, 22, stole a sport utility vehicle at gunpoint from a real estate office in Radford. He dumped the car on the Virginia Tech campus.
Authorities have not been able to say what led Ashley to kill a police officer he did not know at a school he had never attended.
"That's very much the fundamental part of the investigation right now," state police spokeswoman Corrine Geller said Friday at a news conference.
Police said Ashley walked up to patrolman Deriek W. Crouse and fired, then took off for the campus greenhouses, ditching his pullover, wool cap and backpack. He made his way to a nearby parking lot and when a deputy spotted him, he took his own life.
Ashley was a business management major at Radford, the school said on its website. He was from Partlow, Va., about 160 miles northeast of Virginia Tech. In Radford, he lived in a second-floor apartment above a yogurt shop, consignment store, barber shop and a tattoo parlor.
Neighbor Nan Forbes, a Radford senior, said Ashley was quiet, rarely seen or heard from. She said she knew he was in trouble when she saw two police officers guarding the door to Ashley's apartment overlooking the business section of Radford's main drag.
"It does freak us out because we live in this building, but there was not one peep of trouble, nothing unusual," she said.
Crouse was a trained firearms and defense instructor with a specialty in crisis intervention. He had been on the force for four years, joining about six months after 33 people were killed in a classroom building and dorm April 16, 2007.
At 12:15 p.m. Thursday, Crouse pulled over a student and was shot while sitting in his unmarked cruiser. The student didn't have any link to the gunman, Geller said.
Shortly before 12:30 p.m., police received a call from a witness who said an officer had been shot. About six minutes later, the first campus-wide alert was sent by email, text message and electronic signs in university buildings. Many students on campus were preparing for exams, and some described a frantic scene after the initial alert. Soon, heavily armed officers were walking around campus, caravans of SWAT vehicles were driving around and other police cars with emergency lights flashing patrolled nearby.
Students outdoors went inside buildings. Those already there stayed put. Everybody waited.
Police aren't sure what the gunman was doing at this point. After the shooting, he fled on foot to the greenhouses, where he left some of his clothes and his ID.
Fifteen minutes after the witness called police, a deputy sheriff on patrol noticed a man at the back of another parking lot about a half-mile from the shooting. The man was by himself, looking around furtively and acting "a little suspicious," according to Geller.
The deputy drove up and down the rows of the sprawling Cage parking lot and lost sight of the man for a moment. The deputy then found the man lying on the pavement, shot to death. The handgun was nearby.
Police said nobody witnessed the suicide, the parking lot apparently vacant because of warnings. For three more hours, students checked their phones, computers and TVs. Finally, the school gave the all clear.
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, and the shooting brought back painful memories. About 150 students gathered silently Thursday night for a candlelight vigil on a field facing the stone plaza memorial for the 2007 victims.
"Why Tech, why again?" said Philip Sturgill, a jewelry store owner. "It's so senseless. This is a lovely, lovely place."
An official vigil is planned Friday night.
School spokesman Larry Hincker said the alert system worked exactly as expected.
"It's fair to say that life is very different at college campuses today. The telecommunications technology and protocols that we have available to us, that we now have in place, didn't exist years ago," he said. "We believe the system worked very well."
