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nikki says cho wrote disturbing plays and scared fellow classmates

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nikki says cho wrote disturbing plays and scared fellow classmates

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The Chos of suburban Seoul, South Korea, didn't have much. They lived in a rented 430-sq. ft. basement apartment, according to the Korean paper Chosun Ilbo, and when they set off for the U.S. in 1992, Cho Seong-Tae told his landlord that the family was going to America "because it is difficult to live here" and that it would be better to live in a place where he is unknown.

Cho's son Seung-Hui was only a first grader at Shinchang Elementary when the family left in August 1992. The boy mostly grew up in the U.S. and usually Americanized his name as Seung Cho. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

The Chos alighted first in Detroit but eventually settled in Centreville, Va., where they live in a two-story, cream-colored townhouse with two vegetable patches in the back, one with lettuces just beginning to sprout. They are said to be a hard-working couple who speak only a little English and run a dry-cleaning business. Their daughter graduated from Princeton in 2004 and, according to the Washington Post, works as a contractor for the State Department. The Chos are said to be cooperating with police; they allowed a 90-minute search of their home on Monday evening.

At Westfield High in nearby Chantilly, Cho was a quiet boy. Joseph Boayu, a high-school acquaintance, said Cho was so withdrawn that "sometimes you'd ask him a question, and he'd not even acknowledge that you asked him." He also said Cho earned A's in math.

At Virginia Tech, Cho sometimes referred to himself as Question Mark and spoke in a whisper, if at all; one of his suite mates told CNN last night that "he was just like a shadow." Mostly what he did every day was this: sit in the spare common area of the six-man suite in Harper Hall and type on his laptop. But he didn't spend endless hours on Facebook or wired into his iPod. He also never talked about his family. He didn't seem to have friends, and he rarely spoke, even to his roommate. He ventured out to attend class, to eat and, since February, to work out at the gym for the first time.

It was a big deal in the second-floor suite to get a hello out of him. A suite mate, Karan Grewal, a senior from Northern Virginia, told TIME that "we just thought he was shy." Grewal said there was no sign of medication in Cho's room, no books, no posters on his walls. While Grewal acknowledged that it would have been possible for Cho to hide guns in the suite, he said Cho never talked about weapons or killing. He simply didn't talk at all.

For years, Cho's odd behavior indicated to some university authorities that he could be dangerous. In coming weeks, the school will almost certainly have to explain why it did not do more to help him or expel him before his massacre.

In December 2005, campus police and mental health professionals in Blacksburg, Va., arranged to have Cho committed to a state psychiatric facility. Cho's brief hospitalization for suspected mental illness was disclosed this morning by Virginia Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum, who said Cho was taken to St. Albans psychiatric hospital in Radford, Va., on Dec. 13 of that year after two women students (neither of whom was among Cho's shooting victims) called campus police complaining that Cho had made troubling contacts with them. A third person — identified last night on CNN as a suite mate of Cho's — had also told police at the time that Cho was contemplating suicide.

Dr. Harvey Barker, head of the community mental-health agency called by campus police, told TIME's Michael Lindenberger that his agency had performed an involuntary psychiatric evaluation of Cho before he was committed to St. Albans. "We did an independent evaluation at the request of the police department," Barker said. "We did not make an recommendation [as to whether he was fit to remain on campus or in school]. That was not our role." Neither the campus police department's nor the hospital's records on Cho were part of the material accessed by the state's background-check system for firearms purchases.

Nikki Giovanni, the feminist poet and teacher at Virginia Tech who stirred the campus convocation yesterday with a poem, had Cho in a poetry class two years ago — and it wasn't long before she had him tossed out. "There was something mean about this boy," she said. "Troubled kids get drunk and jump off buildings. It was the meanness that bothered me." Giovanni recalled that Cho came to class in dark sunglasses and a hat. And every day, from very early in the semester, she would ask him to remove the one and then the other. "We would have this sort of ritual," she said.

Giovanni recalled that Cho "was very intimidating to my other students." Eventually, other kids began skipping class because of his behavior. The poet then wrote creative writing department boss Lucinda Roy a letter — in part to create a record — asking Roy to remove him from class. Giovanni said Cho turned in material that wasn't poetry but just junk. "He was writing weird things," she recalled. "It was terrible.... It was just intimidating."

In two achingly bad plays Cho authored — they were posted by AOL yesterday — he suggests he may have been sexually abused. In both plays, a schoolboy named John accuses authority figures of molesting him. In a play Cho titled Mr. Brownstone, John says the eponymous teacher raped him. "I wanna kill him," John says. In the other play, Richard McBeef, the accused molester kills John with his bare hands in the end.

Cho exhibited strange sexual behavior at Virginia Tech. Roy told CNN that he was taking pictures of women under desks, and two men identified as suite mates of Cho's told the network he had stalked three women. They said Cho usually slept fitfully and with the lights on. During the months that Cho lived in the dorm, his suite mates said he never had a single visitor — no girlfriends, not even family.

"He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses," Roy told TIME. "It was like talking to a hole sometimes.... Everything emptied out and seemed very dark when he entered." Roy shared her concerns with campus police and counselors, but they told her that unless his threats were explicit, there was little they could do. So Roy, in part because the school couldn't prevent Cho from taking courses, took him on for one-on-one classes herself to keep him away from other students.

Campus security, meanwhile, offered Giovanni protection. But the poet said, "He didn't scare me." She learned about the shootings on Monday, while flying back from the West coast. When she first learned the suspect was an Asian male, she said, "In the front of my mind, I knew it was Cho."

- Reported by Michael Duffy, Elaine Shannon, Michael Lindenberger and Tracy Samantha Schmidt/Blacksburg, Michael Weisskopf/Washington, and Adam Zagorin/Centreville

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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The Chos of suburban Seoul, South Korea, didn't have much. They lived in a rented 430-sq. ft. basement apartment, according to the Korean paper Chosun Ilbo, and when they set off for the U.S.

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BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 -- They met across the professor's desk. One on one. The chairman of the English department and the silent, brooding student who never took his sunglasses off.

He had so upset other instructors that Virginia Tech officials asked whether the professor wanted protection. Lucinda Roy declined. She thought Cho Seung Hui exuded loneliness, and she volunteered to teach him by herself, to spare her colleagues. The subject of the class was poetry.

Roy, other officials, investigators, acquaintances and neighbors helped fill in a dark portrait Tuesday of the bespectacled young South Korean citizen who had sought bizarre expression in literature and then massacred 32 fellow students and teachers here Monday in the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history. As police closed in, he shot himself and was found on the floor of a classroom building with his weapons nearby.

Cho, of Centreville, the son of immigrants who run a dry cleaning business and the brother of a State Department contractor who graduated from Princeton, was described by those who encountered him over the years as at times angry, menacing, disturbed and so depressed that he seemed near tears.

He often spoke in a whisper, if at all, refused to open up to teachers and classmates, and kept himself locked behind a facade of a hat, sunglasses and silence.

Authorities still are not sure what set him off and what propelled him Monday as he stalked the halls and classrooms of Norris Hall with two semiautomatic pistols, chaining doors closed and murdering and maiming as he went.

Authorities found two three-page notes in his dorm room after the shootings. They weren't suicide notes and provided no clue about why he did what he did. Instead, they were expletive-filled rants against the rich and privileged, even naming people who he thought had kept him down, federal and state law enforcement sources said. Two government officials said he had been treated for mental health problems.

Police also are uncertain why Cho stopped and shot himself to death in Norris Hall, where most of his victims lay scattered around him.

Any comprehension of what happened seemed to come only in hindsight.

Cho (whose full name is pronounced joh sung-wee) appears first to have alarmed the noted Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class in fall 2005, Giovanni said.

Cho took pictures of fellow students during class and wrote about death, she said in an interview. "Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made all of us pay attention closely. None of us were comfortable with that," she said.

The students once recited their poems in class. "It was like, 'What are you trying to say here?' It was more sinister," she said.

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Student Wrote About Death and Spoke in Whispers, But No One Imagined What Cho Seung Hui Would Do

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BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17 -- They met across the professor's desk. One on one. The chairman of the English department and the silent, brooding student who never took his sunglasses off. He had so upset other instructors that Virginia Tech officials asked whether the professor wanted protection. Lucinda Roy declined.

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Synopsis

Seung-Hui Cho was born in South Korea in 1984. When he was about 8 years old, his family immigrated to the United States, where they ran a dry-cleaning business in Virginia. Picked on by other students at a young age, Cho was later described by his college professors as a troubled loner. He was twice accused of stalking female students in 2005, but neither victim filed charges. A suicidal statement by Cho to a suitemate led to him being taken to a psychiatric hospital in December 2005, but he was released with orders to receive therapy as an outpatient. On April 16, 2007, Cho began his rampage by killing two students in a dormitory after 7 a.m. He later went to a classroom building and began shooting students and faculty members, killing 32 people and injuring several others around 9:45 a.m. The spree only ended when Cho turned one of his guns on himself, shooting himself in the head.

Early Life

Born in South Korea on January 18, 1984, Seung-Hui Cho is known for carrying out one of the most devastating mass murders in the United States in 2007. Several years before the shooting, when Cho was about 8 years old, he and his family came to the country from South Korea. They eventually settled in Centreville, Virginia, where they ran a dry-cleaning business. Cho was known as a shy child who liked basketball and did well in math. But according to an article in Newsweek magazine, Cho was also bullied by other children, including wealthy members of his church.

In high school, Cho was described as sullen and aloof. After graduating in 2003, he went on to study at Virginia Tech University. Located in Blacksburg, Virginia, the school has an extensive campus with more than 30,000 students residing there. Cho stood out as a near-silent loner who wrote gruesome poems, stories and plays. He sometimes referred to himself as "Question Mark."

Troubling Signs

One professor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her class for disturbing the other students. She told TIME magazine that "there was something mean about this boy." She said that he was "a bully" and always came to class wearing sunglasses and a hat, which she would always ask him to remove. Cho was also photographing the legs and knees of female students in the class. Other members of the English department faculty were concerned about him as well. Lucinda Roy, the co-director of the school's creative writing program, took him out of class and tutored him individually. She also encouraged Cho to get counseling.

In addition to his odd behavior and dark writings, Cho exhibited other potential warning signs. He was twice accused of stalking female students in 2005, but neither victim filed charges. A suicidal statement by Cho to a suitemate led to him being taken to a psychiatric hospital in December of that year. He was soon released with orders to receive therapy as an outpatient. Documents released in June 2007 indicate that he did attend at least one court-ordered counseling session at the Cook Counseling Center.

Five weeks before the shooting, Cho bought his first handgun and purchased the second one closer to the date of the attack. From evidence found in his dorm room, it was clear that he had been planning the assault on his fellow students and the faculty for quite some time.

The Virginia Tech Massacre

On April 16, 2007, Cho began his rampage by killing two students in a dormitory after 7 a.m. He later went to a classroom building and began shooting students and faculty members, killing 32 people and injuring numerous others around 9:45 a.m. The spree only ended when Cho turned one of his guns on himself, shooting himself in the head. The entire nation was shocked and horrified by the events at Virginia Tech. Up until that point, the largest campus shooting had taken place in 1966, when Charles Whitman killed 15 people on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

In between the two sets of attacks, Cho went to the post office to mail a package to NBC News in New York. Received two days after the murders, it contained video clips, photographs of Cho posing with his weapons, and a rambling document. In one of the video clips, he rails against rich "brats," and talks about being bullied and picked on; he also attacks Christianity and positioned himself as some type of avenger for the weak and defenseless. Cho even referenced the notorious Columbine school shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

After the shooting, Virginia Tech and many schools across the nation began examining their crisis management plans, as well as how they identify and handle potentially dangerous students.

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Seung-Hui Cho was born in South Korea in 1984. When he was about 8 years old, his family immigrated to the United States, where they ran a dry-cleaning business in Virginia. Picked on by other students at a young age, Cho was later described by his college professors as a troubled loner.

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Thirty-three people were killed Monday on the campus of Virginia Tech in what appears to be the deadliest shooting rampage in American history, according to federal law enforcement officials. Many of the victims were students shot in a dorm and a classroom building.

"Today, the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," said the university's president, Charles Steger. The campus police chief said this evening that 15 people were wounded by the gunman, although there were other reports of higher numbers of injuries.

Witnesses described scenes of mass chaos and unimaginable horror as some students were lined up against a wall and shot. Others jumped out of windows to escape, or crouched on floors to take cover.

The killings occurred in two separate attacks on the campus in Blacksburg, Va. The first took place around 7:15 a.m., when two people were shot and killed at a dormitory. More than two and a half hours later, 31 others, including the gunman, were shot and killed across campus in a classroom building, where some of the doors had been chained. Victims were found in different locations around the building.

The first attack started as students were getting ready for classes or were on their way there. The university did not evacuate the campus or notify students of that attack until several hours later.

As the rampage unfolded, details emerged from witnesses describing a gunman going room to room in a dormitory, Ambler Johnston Hall, and of gunfire later at Norris Hall, a science and engineering classroom building. When it was over, even sidewalks were stained with blood. Among those dead was the gunman, whose body was found along with victims in Norris Hall.

"Norris Hall is a tragic and sorrowful crime scene," said the campus police chief at Virginia Tech, Wendell Flinchum.

Chief Flinchum said the gunman took his own life. He said at a televised news briefing Monday evening that the police had a preliminary identification of the suspected gunman but were not yet ready to release it. He said the gunman was not a student.

According to a federal law enforcement official, the gunman did not have identification and could not be easily identified visually because of the severity of an apparently self-inflicted wound to the head. He said investigators were trying to trace purchase records for two handguns found near the body.

At televised news conferences Monday afternoon and Monday evening, Chief Flinchum and Mr. Steger tried to explain why authorities did not act to secure the rest of the campus immediately after the first shooting.

Chief Flinchum said that initially officials thought that the shooting was "domestic," suggesting that it was between individuals who knew each other, and isolated to the dormitory. He said the campus was not shut down after the first shooting because authorities thought that the attacker may have left the campus, or even the state.

"We knew we had two people shot," he said. "We secured the building. We secured the crime scene." He later added: "We acted on the best information we had at the time."

Chief Flinchum said officers initially began investigating a "person of interest" as a result of the dormitory shootings. The person, a man, was described as a friend of one of the dorm victims, but Chief Flinchum said the police had not detained him.

At 9:45, the police got another 911 call about shootings at Norris Hall, just as university officials were meeting to discuss the first shootings. "We were actually having a meeting about the earlier shootings when we learned that another shooting was under way," Mr. Steger told reporters Monday night. By the time officers arrived, the shooting had stopped and the gunman had killed himself, the chief said.

The police appeared to believe that the two shootings were related, but said they could not confirm that until they had the results of a ballistics analysis.

A parent of one student, Elaine Goss, said her son Alec Calhoun, a junior engineering major, jumped out a second-story window in Norris Hall when the gunman entered his classroom.

She said that she first spoke to her son, "I couldn't understand him; it was like gibberish."

"It took a while to figure out shootings, lots of shootings, and that his whole class had jumped out the window," she said.

Ms. Goss said her son hurt his back in the jump and went to a hospital.

Another student, Jessica Paulson, said she was on the fourth floor at Ambler Johnston Hall when the shootings occurred on the opposite side of the floor.

"You could hear two shots," one followed shortly by a second, recounted Ms. Paulson, who was preparing to go to an early class. Neither she nor most of the other students nearby understood what had happened until several hours later.

At least 17 Virginia Tech students were being treated for gunshot wounds and other injuries at Montgomery Regional Hospital, and four of them were in surgery, according to a hospital spokesman. At Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem, Va., four students and a staff member were treated for injuries. Two were in stable condition, and the conditions of the other three were described as "undetermined."

Officials said there may have been more injured and taken to other medical facilities.

The university has more than 25,000 full-time students on a campus that is spread over 2,600 acres.

The atmosphere on the Virginia Tech campus was desolate and preternaturally quiet by Monday afternoon. Students gathered in small groups, some crying, some talking quietly and others consoling each other.

Some students complained that they had not been notified of the first shooting on campus for more than two hours.

Kirsten Bernhards, 18, said she and many other students had no idea that a shooting had occurred when she left her dorm room in O'Shaughnessy Hall shortly before 10 a.m., more than two hours after the first shootings.

"I was leaving for my 10:10 film class," she said. "I had just locked the door and my neighbor said, 'Did you check your e-mail?' "

The university had, a few minutes earlier, sent out a bulletin warning students about an apparent gunman. But few students seemed to have any sense of urgency.

Ms. Bernhards said she walked toward her class, preoccupied with an upcoming exam and listening to music on her iPod. On the way, she said, she heard some loud cracks, and only later concluded they had been gunshots from the second round of shootings.

But even at that point, many students were walking around the campus with little if any sense of alarm.

It was only when Ms. Bernhards got close to Norris Hall, the second of two buildings where the shootings took place, that she realized that something had gone wrong.

"I looked up and I saw at least 10 guards with assault rifles aiming at the main entrance of Norris," she recalled.

Up until Monday, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history was in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire, killing 16 people before he was gunned down by the police. In the Columbine High attack in Colorado in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.

While few confirmed details about the gunman and the motive were clear, students told reporters at WTKR, a local television station, that the gunman had been looking for his girlfriend, and at one of the locations he lined up some students and shot them all, according to Mike Mather, a reporter for the station.

President Bush offered condolences this afternoon to relatives of the victims, and said federal investigators would help the Virginia authorities in any way possible. "We hold the victims in our hearts; we lift them up in our prayers," Mr. Bush said at the White House.

President Bush was "horrified" at the news of the shooting, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, earlier in the day.

One student captured partial images, broadcast on CNN, using his cellphone video camera. They showed grainy dark-clad figures on the street outside campus buildings. Popping sounds from the gunfire were audible.

"This place is in a state of panic," said a student who was interviewed on CNN, Shaver Deyerle. "Nobody knew what was going on at first."

He said the shootings reminded him of the Columbine High School killings.

The shootings at Virginia Tech come in the same week, eight years ago, as the shooting at Columbine on April 20, 1999.

The police were slowly evacuating students from campus buildings and all classes were canceled.

Families were told to reunite with students at the Inn at Virginia Tech, a facility of conference space and hotel rooms. University employees were told to assemble on Tuesday at the Cassell Coliseum to start to deal with the tragedy, a campus statement said.

Images on CNN showed the police with assault rifles swarming several buildings, sirens blaring in the background and a voice over a loudspeaker warning people across the campus to take cover in buildings and stay away from windows. Many students could be seen crouching on floors in classrooms and dormitories.

The police evacuated some students and faculty members, many of them to local hotels, and witnesses said some students were seen scrambling out of windows to get to safety. A Montgomery County school official said that all schools throughout the county were being shut down.

The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to lock down the campus. In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university.

The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The shooting suspect, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges.

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virginia polytechnic institute and state university

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Thirty-three people were killed Monday on the campus of Virginia Tech in what appears to be the deadliest shooting rampage in American history, according to federal law enforcement officials. Many of the victims were students shot in a dorm and a classroom building.

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The unauthorized release of thousands of documents related to the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre has given new voice to killer Seung Hui Cho, who e-mailed regularly with professors in the years prior to the shootings and whom they reached out to repeatedly as it became clearer that he was a deeply troubled, even obsessive, young man.

The documents, including dozens of e-mails between Cho and his instructors in Virginia Tech's English Department, were posted Thursday on the Web site of the Collegiate Times student newspaper. They had been made available previously to victims' family members and were scheduled for public release in February. Collegiate Times editor in chief David Grant said the newspaper did not hack into the university's computers to obtain the material, but he declined to offer additional details.

Most profound among the documents are the e-mails between Cho and his professors.

The exchanges reveal a young man seemingly incapable of participating in class discussion yet intensely communicative about his grades, about the fact that he made others uncomfortable and about his own negative opinions of students and teachers. The e-mails also show that professors reached out again and again to him and one another in an effort to help.

On Feb. 9, 2006, English Professor Bob Hicok asked in an e-mail to Cho: "Can you tell me what keeps you from talking in class or to me? . . . If you don't let me know what's going on for you, there's nothing I can do to help."

"I don't know. I'm not all that good at talking. I don't know," Cho wrote back the same day.

"I'm sorry, but I need to know more than that," Hicok wrote back. "If you cannot talk to me and the class, or at least me, I don't see how you can pass this course. Can you, will you, tell me more about what's going on for you?"

"I can try to talk. I don't know," Cho replied the next day.

Taken together, the documents, which are available at http://www.collegiatetimes.com, reveal Cho's state of mind leading up to the shooting April 16, 2007, when the 23-year-old senior English major killed 32 students and professors and injured many others before taking his own life. Also included are records of the university's official response, police documents and various findings and correspondence on the massacre's aftermath. Grant refrained from posting records relating to families' legal settlements with the university and the state, he said.

At times, Cho's e-mails were verbose and obsessive, particularly as he sought to understand what was expected of him for an assignment or why he was receiving poor grades.

"I received F on the midterm and the initial commentary but it doesn't say the exact percentage," Cho wrote to Lucinda Roy in March 2004, when he was enrolled in her poetry survey course. "I know F is under 59% but I don't know if I got 0 or 59 because there was no number on them, it just said F. There's a huge difference between 0 and 59 and I wanted to know where I stand now."

Some instructors seemed to break through Cho's wall of silence, if only momentarily. Notable among them was Roy, chairwoman of the English department, who offered to teach Cho privately after he alienated and frightened students in a poetry class with instructor Nikki Giovanni by reading angry verses aloud. Roy's e-mails were kind, gentle and encouraging, and Cho seemed to respond.

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E-Mails Reveal Cho's Troubles At Va. Tech

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The unauthorized release of thousands of documents related to the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre has given new voice to killer Seung Hui Cho, who e-mailed regularly with professors in the years prior to the shootings and whom they reached out to repeatedly as it became clearer that he was a deeply troubled, even obsessive, young man.

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(CNN) -- In the wake of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School, some schools across the country turned themselves into near-fortresses.

They installed metal detectors and security cameras, banned backpacks, required students to carry IDs and posted police in the hallways -- all in the name of keeping students safe.

Now, 10 years after those highly publicized shootings in which two young men killed 13 people and themselves, school security has taken another dramatic turn.

Some of the noticeable security measures remain, but experts say the country is exploring a new way to protect kids from in-school violence: administrators now want to foster school communities that essentially can protect themselves with or without the high-tech gear.

"The first and best line of defense is always a well-trained, highly alert staff and student body," said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, an Ohio-based firm specializing in school security.

"The No. 1 way we find out about weapons in schools is not from a piece of equipment [such as a metal detector] but from a kid who comes forward and reports it to an adult that he or she trusts." See how many homicides have occurred in schools since 1992 "

The Obama administration plans to create secure schools indirectly, by improving overall education, getting kids more involved in their studies and strengthening school communities, said William Modzeleski, a high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Education who handles school security.

The trend is reflected in security funding, some of which comes from federal grants. Allocations for the Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free Schools program were cut by a third between 1999 and 2008, to about $294.8 million last year. And a program that has put about 6,300 police officers in public schools since Columbine was scrapped by the U.S. Department of Justice after 2005, according to Corey Ray, a spokesman for the department.

Ray said he's hopeful President Obama's stimulus package will put more police officers in schools. They act as law enforcement officers as well as counselors and mentors to students, he said.

Meanwhile, money for a school counseling grant program has increased since Columbine, with $52 million set aside for this fiscal year, compared to $20 million in 2000, the first year the program was funded, according to budget numbers compiled for CNN by the Department of Education. So while there's more money available for counseling, there's still been a steady decline in federal spending for other aspects of school security.

Some critics say a lack of available funding for high-tech security upgrades may be behind the shift toward less-costly and more indirect violence prevention measures.

"Right now, the economic situation is affecting [school security funding]. Particularly the technology components of security are going to suffer because there's just not going to be the money to do these kinds of things," said Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "We're in the process of laying off teachers and staff."

Trump, the security consultant in Ohio, said schools have lost their focus on security since Columbine. But he added that many effective security programs cost little or no money -- only the time it takes to train teachers and students how to spot potential problems and how to react if a shooting were to occur.

While metal detectors may not be the best tools to prevent school shootings, they still can be useful in some crime-ridden school districts and, along with security cameras, should not be abandoned entirely, Modzeleski said.

Some evidence suggests strong school communities -- where kids feel like they can come forward with problems -- can prevent violent crime.

A 2008 Secret Service report found that in more than 80 percent of instances of school violence, at least one person, usually a fellow student or peer, had knowledge of the attackers' plans. If people who suspect a problem feel comfortable enough in school to tell a teacher or a principal, then attacks could be prevented, Modzeleski said.

After Columbine, many states and school districts made quick moves to increase school security, experts say. Modzeleski said this was a "kneejerk" reaction to the tragic, but rare, event; and a decade later, policies are settling into a middle ground.

"Immediately after any of these incidents I think there's the immediate rush for more security," he said. "That's what I would call the kneejerk reaction to any type of these events: 'We need more cops; we need more metal detectors; we need more cameras.' After that settles in, I think people come to their senses and say, 'Hey, if we're going to keep our kids safe in schools, we need more than that.'" iReport.com: How did Columbine affect you?

After Columbine, some states started requiring schools to prepare for school shootings with lockdown drills, much in the way they prepare for fires or other disasters.

About once a month in Fort Wayne, Indiana, public and private school students pull down window shades and huddle in the back corners of dark classrooms while their schools go into lockdown mode, said John Weicker, security director at Fort Wayne Community Schools.

A school administrator roams the halls to make sure all doors are locked and all students are hidden from what might be a school shooter if this scenario was not a drill.

"You're training the kids," Weicker said.

Similar drills -- which, in some states, are attended by armed and masked SWAT teams -- are now practiced routinely in nearly three-quarters of schools, according to a recent survey of 445 administrators funded by the American Association of School Administrators.

It's difficult to say whether these policies are working, but by some measures, school safety has improved in the decade since Columbine. Watch parents remember children lost at Columbine "

On average, there have been about half as many deaths per year since Columbine as in the seven school years before the tragedy, according to a 2007 report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In the school year immediately following the Columbine shootings, the number of in-school homicides dropped from 33 in the 1998-1999 school year to 13 in the 1999-2000 year, the report says.

Several experts say the tragedy brought awareness to the issue of school security, which on the whole has been positive. They worry, however, that attention has been waning in the past few years.

A 17-year-old student in Fort Wayne, Indiana, however, said that while he is reassured by tight school security, it's a good thing that the Columbine shootings rarely enter his mind.

"There's a couple times that we'll talk about it in like a history class," said Travis Armstrong, a high school junior. "Because that did happen back a while ago, and therefore it is considered history."

All About Columbine High School

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Columbine massacre changed school security

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(CNN) -- In the wake of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School, some schools across the country turned themselves into near-fortresses. They installed metal detectors and security cameras, banned backpacks, required students to carry IDs and posted police in the hallways -- all in the name of keeping students safe.

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The techno music coursing through his earbuds was cranked up to full volume. The latest Batman movie blared from the screen. He shot round after round into the packed theater, as hundreds of spectators shrieked in terror. An alarm blasted.

And when James E. Holmes was done firing, after an outburst of violence months in the making, a single image stuck in his mind.

Jurors are watching 22 hours of conversations recorded last July between Holmes and Dr. William Reid, one of two court-appointed psychiatrists who evaluated the gunman after he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the July 20, 2012, massacre at the Century 16 complex in Aurora, Colo.

But the prosecution is showing the interviews in their entirety - just days after releasing Holmes' private journal - allowing jurors to peer into the shooter's mind, learn how he thinks, listen to responses that sounded detached, cold.

On Tuesday, Holmes described in halting terms what happened inside Theater 9 with its stadium seating, as Reid pushed him to remember what he had done and how he had felt. It was the first time anyone other than lawyers and psychiatrists had heard his version of events.

Listening to the interviews, jurors learned that Holmes favored silky sheets in red and black. He had a single houseplant of unknown genus in his 800-square-foot apartment near the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; he watered it daily, named it "Planty." He favored male-centric sitcoms like "The Big Bang Theory."

"Of Mice and Men" was his favorite John Steinbeck novel, he told Reid during their lengthy sessions. And he identified with Lennie, the tragic protagonist with the mind of a child in the body of a giant, a man who killed without meaning to.

He wanted to kill "as many people as possible," he said, but he also wanted to protect himself in the process. He "chose mass murder over doing something like a serial killing," he said, "because it was impersonal, it was something I could actually do."

In the days before the rampage, Holmes bought three movie tickets online, but none were for the auditorium he had carefully cased out. He found out, however, that it didn't matter. Once he got into the multiplex, no one kept him from his target: Theater 9.

Before leaving his booby-trapped apartment late on July 19, 2012, Holmes loaded the magazines for his four weapons and pulled on a pair of ballistic pants. Inside his cramped Hyundai Tiburon sitting in the theater parking lot, he said, he quickly put on the rest of his gear.

"Then an employee came out to the dumpster and threw something away," Holmes said. "But I had tinted the windows and they didn't see me. I heard them."

He worried, he told Reid, about whether "they're going to interrupt the process or not. But they didn't. They just went back inside the theater after throwing the trash away."

Reid: "Were you prepared to do that if necessary?"

Reid asked whether Holmes had any other thoughts as he prepared to reenter the theater and carry out his "mission," whether his heart was pumping, his adrenaline racing.

"Calm and collected," Holmes replied.

His AR-15 assault weapon was slung across his chest. He had a Glock handgun tucked in his belt, spare magazines in pouches, a shotgun at the ready. He dropped one tear-gas canister and it rolled away, but he had a spare.

"First, I open the tear-gas canister while I'm still outside the door," he said. "It made a hissing sound. I went inside and tossed it over to the right side of the theater.... I could see people trying to leave and sitting down under their seats."

He raised his shotgun. He began shooting. He heard a scream.

When he was finished, he said, he thought he had killed three people and wounded 20.

And just who were those people? A means to an end, he told Reid, who has treated thousands of patients and testified in 60 to 70 trials in 20 states. The victims were "numbers," Holmes said, "a conglomerate mass," barely human beings in their own right.

"I knew it was legally wrong," he said. "You get punished for killing people." But they were "not real people. It was just kind of amorphous people who were going to get hurt.... I didn't look at them. I didn't, like, single them out as individuals."

In fact, he said, he could barely see them through the scratched protective lens of his cumbersome gas mask as he shot randomly into the auditorium. He wanted it that way, he told Reid.

Holmes didn't know whom he had killed, and he did not care, he said.

Their deaths, he said early on in the interview process, had a simple purpose: to increase his self worth and make him feel better.

The way Holmes saw it, "if you take away a life, it adds to your own value.... Anything they would have done or, like, pursued, gets canceled out and given to me." It's a calculation, he said, that comes from economics.

There was one thing more.

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James Holmes wanted to kill 'as many people as possible' in Colorado theater rampage

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The techno music coursing through his earbuds was cranked up to full volume. The latest Batman movie blared from the screen. He shot round after round into the packed theater, as hundreds of spectators shrieked in terror. An alarm blasted. And when James E.

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Before events at the school

At some point before he went to the school, investigators believe Adam Lanza, 20, killed his mother, Nancy Lanza.

He grabbed three guns from the house -- a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle made by Bushmaster and pistols made by Glock and Sig Sauer -- and went to the elementary school wearing black fatigues and a military vest, according to a law enforcement official.

Classes were under way at the school. Approximately 700 students were present.

Earlier this year, the school principal, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, ordered a new security system installed that required visitors to be visibly identified and buzzed in. As part of the security system, the school locked its doors each day at 9:30 a.m.

The door was locked when the gunman arrived.

Authorities now know the gunman used "an assault weapon" to "literally (shoot) an entrance into the building," Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said.

Inside the school

Hochsprung heard loud pops. She, school psychologist Mary Sherlach and vice principal Natalie Hammond went out to investigate.

Only Hammond returned from the hallway alive. She was wounded.

At about 9:30 a.m., as announcements were read over the loudspeaker to the students, shots were heard across the school. Students described being ushered into bathrooms and closets by teachers after hearing the first shots.

Lanza moved toward two classrooms of kindergartners and first-graders, police said.

In one classroom was Lauren Rousseau, a substitute teacher who was filling in for a teacher out on maternity leave. The gunman shot all 14 students in the classroom, law enforcement officers said.

In another classroom, Victoria Soto, 27, moved her first-grade students away from the door. The gunman burst in and shot her, according to the father of a surviving student. Six students were killed in that classroom.

First responders arrive

At the police station, dispatchers began to take calls from inside the school. Authorities say the first emergency call about the shooting came in at "approximately" 9:30 a.m.

"Sandy Hook school. Caller is indicating she thinks someone is shooting in the building," a dispatcher told fire and medical personnel, according to 911 tapes.

The first officer arrived on the scene of the Sandy Hook school shooting two minutes and 41 seconds after the first police radio broadcast of the shooting. Previous CNN reporting cited an incorrect arrival time based on early reports.

Police report that no law enforcement officers discharged their weapons at any point.

The gunman took his own life, police said. He took out a handgun and shot himself in a classroom as law enforcement officers approached, officials said.

Twenty students, ages 6 and 7, and six adults were killed at the school.

Police secured the building, ensuring no other shooters were on site. Police then escorted students and faculty out of the building to a nearby firehouse.

As reports of the shooting made their way around town, frantic parents descended on the firehouse where the children had been taken.

By nightfall, the firehouse became a gathering point for parents and family members whose loved ones would never walk out of the school.

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Sandy Hook Elementary shooting: What happened?

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At some point before he went to the school, investigators believe Adam Lanza, 20, killed his mother, Nancy Lanza. He grabbed three guns from the house -- a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle made by Bushmaster and pistols made by Glock and Sig Sauer -- and went to the elementary school wearing black fatigues and a military vest, according to a law enforcement official.

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In the years leading up to the December 2012 massacre at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, Adam Lanza went from a merely shy pre-teen to a mentally ill recluse obsessed with school shootings.

But during that long descent, Lanza never gave anyone any indication that he would one day turn a gun on his mother and then storm his onetime grade school with a semiautomatic rifle, killing 20 first-graders and six adults, investigators reported Monday.

And so Connecticut authorities closed the book on the second-deadliest shooting in U.S. history with the motive still a mystery. Lanza shot himself at the end of his 11-minute rampage, and police found no sign that he "voiced or gave any indication to others that he intended to commit such a crime himself," according to a 44-page summary of the investigation, released Monday.

"The evidence clearly shows that the shooter planned his actions, including the taking of his own life, but there is no clear indication why he did so, or why he targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School," the report states.

Though he had attended Sandy Hook from first through fifth grades, investigators found no sign the 20-year-old was targeting any student, teacher or other employee at the school.

"In fact, as best as can be determined, the shooter had no prior contact with anyone in the school that day," the report states.

Lanza "had significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others," the report states. "What contribution this made to the shootings, if any, is unknown as those mental health professionals who saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future behavior."

The killings in Newtown, about 60 miles outside New York, happened less than five months after a similar bloodbath at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver. Those mass slayings triggered a nationwide debate over gun violence, school safety and mental health -- a debate that produced some new restrictions on firearms in several states. But it also yielded a backlash against those laws by gun-rights advocates and only limited action on a federal level after a Republican filibuster blocked expanded background checks for gun buyers.

Various witnesses described a fifth-grade Lanza as quiet but bright: "He wouldn't necessarily engage in conversation, but wouldn't ignore one," the report states. He attended parties, enjoyed music and played the saxophone.

But the same year, according to investigators, Lanza produced something called the "Big Book of Granny" -- in which a woman armed with a gun in her cane goes on killing sprees with her son, with children sometimes the targets. The story was related to a class project, but apparently never was handed in to the school, the report notes.

"It can't be a red flag if nobody sees it," Casey Jordan, a criminologist at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, told CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront.

By late middle school, Lanza "did not like noise and confusion and began to have issues when he had to walk to different classes," the report states. He didn't want to be in a crowd. He started receiving tutoring and home schooling. By ninth grade, he was "shutting himself in the bedroom and playing video games all day."

"He was so enormously isolated," Jordan said. "His mother was not allowed in his room. No one was. So this didn't happen overnight. This was years of him slowly withdrawing, and we have that history going back to fifth grade, sixth grade."

As a child, Lanza had seizures and washed his hands excessively. In 2005, he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, with doctors noting he "lacked empathy" and showed "extreme anxiety and discomfort with changes, noise, and physical contact with others." In high school, where he took part in a school tech club, Lanza never spoke of violence, but "was also remembered for pulling his sleeves over his hand to touch something," the report states.

After the shooting, investigators found that Lanza had sorted out the details of school shootings and other mass murders in spreadsheets. Among the clippings he kept was a reprint of a story in The New York Times about a man who shot at schoolchildren in 1891, wounding several with a shotgun. His computer contained two videos depicting gunshot suicides, two pictures of Lanza pointing guns at his own head and movies depicting school shootings.

But while many of his video games were violent, others were not. For months before the killings at Sandy Hook, he would go to a movie theater on weekends to play the dance game "Dance Dance Revolution" for hours, the report recounts.

Lanza lived with his mother, 52-year-old Nancy Lanza, after his parents split up in 2001. Nancy Lanza "took care of all of the shooter's needs" and "worried about what would happen to the shooter if anything happened to her," according to the report.

It didn't sound easy: The shooter was particular about the food that he ate and its arrangement on a plate in relation to other foods on the plate," the report recounts. "Certain types of dishware could not be used for particular foods. The mother would shop for him and cook to the shooter's specifications, though sometimes he would cook for himself."

Nancy Lanza did her son's laundry every day, but was not allowed into his room -- "No one was allowed in his room," where the windows were covered with black plastic trash bags, the report notes. Adam Lanza "disliked birthdays, Christmas and holidays," forbidding his mother from putting up a Christmas tree: "The mother explained it by saying that shooter had no emotions or feelings."

He was not medicated: Lanza "did not drink alcohol, take drugs, prescription or otherwise, and hated the thought of doing any of those things," investigators found. An autopsy found no sign of drugs in his system at the time of the killings, the report states.

One person described Lanza's relationship with his mother as "strained," while another told investigators he didn't appear to have "an emotional connection to his mother." But others said Nancy Lanza "was the only person to whom the shooter would talk."

Lanza's mother "tried within her limits" to help her son live a normal life, Jordan said, but "we have a society that shames mental illness."

"The mother was overwhelmed, did not know what to do with him and did allow him to isolate," Jordan said. "She tried to bring him out with the one activity they had in common, which was going to the shooting range."

Nancy Lanza grew up with firearms and "thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns," the report states. Both she and Adam Lanza shot pistols at a local range, where Adam "was described as quiet and polite." There was a large but undisclosed number of weapons in the home, all of which had been purchased by Nancy Lanza.

On December 14, 2012, the morning after Nancy Lanza had returned from a trip to New Hampshire, her son shot her four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. Then it was off to the school where he once had been a relatively happy child, packing four other guns and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition. He fired more than 150 shots from a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle before turning a 10mm Glock pistol on himself once police arrived, according to the report.

Monday's report is separate from a much longer evidence file that Connecticut State Police will release at an unspecified date. That cache will be "thousands of pages long," according to Connecticut State Police spokesman Paul Vance.

The documents will include witness statements, a timeline of events and background on Lanza, and Vance said he believes they will offer a motive. The file is still being reviewed, with witness names and other identifying information being redacted, and there is no scheduled date for its release, Vance said.

But the family of Victoria Soto, a teacher who shielded her students before being shot to death, said Monday's release is "yet another blow that our family has been dealt."

A statement from the family said, "While others search for the answer as to why this happened, we search for the how. How can we live without Vicki? How do we celebrate Christmas without Vicki? How do we go on every day missing a piece of our family? Those are the questions we seek the answers for. There is nothing in the report that will answer those for us."

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said the report's release "will no doubt be difficult" for the relatives of those killed at Sandy Hook.

"But if there is one thing that I believe we must do, it's that we must honor the lives that were lost by taking steps to protect ourselves from another horror like this," Malloy said. "I hope that the information in this summary and in the supporting documents that will be released by the State Police takes us closer to that goal."

Victims' family members were informed of the report, said Mark Dupuis, a spokesman for Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky, whose office conducted the investigation.

"We are sensitive to the needs of the families, and those needs are being addressed," Dupuis said.

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sandy hook killer adam lanza took motive to his grave - cnn

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Sandy Hook killer took motive to his grave

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In the years leading up to the December 2012 massacre at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, Adam Lanza went from a merely shy pre-teen to a mentally ill recluse obsessed with school shootings.

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44 Minutes The North Hollywood Shoot-Out full length

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After a failed bank robbery, two heavily armed men hold the Los Angeles Police Department at bay for 44 minutes.

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TERROR IN LITTLETON: THE OVERVIEW

In the deadliest school massacre in the nation's history, two young men stormed into a suburban high school here at lunch time today with guns and explosives, killing as many as 23 students and teachers and wounding at least 20 in a five-hour siege, the authorities said.

The two students who are believed to have been the gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who were students at Columbine High School, were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the library, said Steve Davis, the spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.

Beginning about 11:30 A.M., the gunmen, wearing ski masks, stalked through the school as they fired semiautomatic weapons at students and teachers and tossed explosives , with one student being hit nine times in the chest by shrapnel, the authorities said. Gunshots continued to ring out at the school for hours. One bomb exploded in the library, officials said, and one in a car outside. Two more cars were rigged with bombs.

About 3 P.M., hundreds of police officers evacuated the building and searched for the gunmen. Their bodies and those of several of their victims appeared to have been wired with explosives.

Sheriff John Stone said, ''It appears to be a suicide mission.''

Mr. Davis said that as many as 25 people were dead, ''a mixture of students and faculty.'' He said that most of the bodies were found in the school's entrance, the library and the commons cafeteria. No precise death toll was available.

Kaleb Newberry, 16, said: ''I was in class and one teacher came in and basically told us to run for our lives, I saw a girl maybe five paces behind me fall. She was shot in the leg, but a teacher helped her.''

Students said the gunmen were part of a group of misfits who called themselves the trench coat mafia, which expressed disdain for racial minorities and athletes. Members of the group found their way out of anonymity at the school by banning together, dressing in dark gothic-style clothing including long black coats. They became easy to notice among the 1,870 students at the school, since every day, regardless of the weather, they wore their coats. [Page A17.]

Today the gunmen appeared to aim at minority members and athletes at the 1,800-student school, as well as peers who had poked fun at the group in the past.

School officials had had no reports of trouble from the suspects, Mr. Davis said.

Some victims were forced to wait inside the school for rescue. By early evening, bodies had not been removed because of the crime scene investigation and the possible presence of explosives, a spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department said.

Mr. Davis said at a news conference tonight that two other students at the school, thought to be friends of the gunmen, were in custody for questioning in connection with the shooting.

''You can't really go in and do this kind of damage without a lot of preparation.'' Mr. Davis said, ''without a lot of ammunition and apparently some type of bombs.''

Fourteen-year-old Katie Corona, said she was trapped in a classroom with her teacher and about 30 classmates for hours.

''I thought I was going to die,'' she said. ''I really didn't think I was going to make it. We would hear shots, then we heard crying. We had no clue what was going on.''

''Everyone around me got shot and I begged him for 10 minutes not to shoot me,'' one young woman, who was not identified, said tonight in an interview broadcast on the Cable News Network. ''And he just put the gun in my face and started laughing and saying it was all because people were mean to him last year.''

Another student, who said she heard more gunshots while hiding in the closet with a teacher and some friends, said she kept thinking to herself, ''This can't be happening to our school.''

''You should be safe at school,'' added a second young woman, who also was not identified. ''This should be a safe place.''

The families of those killed were being notified tonight at Leawood Elementary School, where students and parents had gathered.

The mass shooting was the first at an American school during this academic year, but revived memories of similar tragedies that struck six different communities last year and set off national alarms about teen-age violence. Four girls and a teacher were shot to death and 10 people were wounded during a false fire alarm at a middle school in Jonesboro, Ark., last March.

President Clinton immediately dispatched a crisis-response team to aid the school community and the victim's families.

''We don't know yet all the how's or why's of this tragedy; perhaps we will never fully understand it,'' the President said in a nationally televised news conference just before 8 P.M. ''St. Paul reminds us that we all see things in life darkly, that we only partly understand what is happening.''

He added, ''We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.''

A sunny spring day turned into a bloody nightmare for this suburb of 35,000 people southwest of Denver, as ambulances ferried the injured from the high school, past tennis courts, a baseball diamond and a packed student parking lot.

''I hope we can all pull together, because we will need all our strengths,'' Jane Hammond, Jefferson County superintendent of schools, said tonight. The blood banks in the Denver area have been overwhelmend with calls from donors. Tonight at least three church vigils for the dead and injured.

Just before 8 P.M., Lisa Appleton, 16, a sophomore, waited in front of the Leawood school for news of her best friend, Julie Toms, who had been missing since students began leaving the school.

''I can't even feel it,'' she said. ''There's no way to know whether she's dead or alive.''

About 3 P.M., SWAT teams police officers used a fire truck and an armored car to get close to the building, dozens of students raced out of the two-story building, some slipping in the mud, others holding up their hands in the air or behind their heads. Police said they feared that the gunmen would try to escape by mingling with the trapped students.

One student, bloodied from an injury, broke out a second-story window, and climbed down into the hands of the police.

As police officers established a wide perimeter around the beige school, students and school workers gathered on nearby tree-lined streets and told of the chaos and horror inside the building.

As fire alarms rang in the halls, students who had seen the gunmen trampled each other to get out of the building, running through one exit where three bodies lay on a staircase.

Trapped inside, others took refuge in classrooms, bathrooms and a choir room, frantically barricading doors with desks and file cabinets.

One cafeteria worker who barricaded herself in a woman's bathroom said, ''We could hear them blowing the heck out of the place.''

A student, Jonathan Ladd, said, ''I heard gunshots going off, bullets ricocheting off lockers.''

The trench coat mafia is a small band of about a dozen juniors and seniors at Columbine who are easily recognized yet little feared, according to people who live in the neighborhood near the school. Regardless of the weather, they favor long black coats and the Gothic look popularized by the rock singer Marilyn Manson, neighbors said. Some even wear white pancake makeup and dark eyeliner, one student said.

''It was that devilish, half-dead, half-alive look,'' said Bret, a 16-year-old sophomore who spoke on the condition only his first name be used.

The group often gathered in the cafeteria after school. Chris McCaffrey, manager of Angie's Restaurant a few blocks from Columbine, said that residents had known about the group for about five years, and that no one considered it a threat.

''Mostly it was just kids who nobody wanted to have anything to do with,'' Mr. McCaffrey said. ''They weren't particularly feared. They were just a bunch of punks who kind of hang around the school.''

Students said the group was mostly boys, but that some girls appeared to be closely associated with it. One student described the group as ''nerds, geeks and dweebs trying to find someplace to fit in.''

Bret suggested the mafia might have targeted athletes out of resentment for their own lack of popularity and success at school.

The students ''weren't really accepted as younger kids and as they got older they were accepted by this group,'' Bret said. ''They got their fair share of being picked on. I could understand that they might have targeted some of the more popular kids.''

David Mesch, another student, who was searching for his mother who works for the school, said, ''They were wearing masks; they were members of the trench coat mafia.''

President Clinton said tonight that he was ''profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in Littleton.''

In an age when cellular telephones are increasingly common among high school students, several trapped students called television stations when they could not get through on 911 lines.

''I hear a couple of gunshots, people running up and down,'' a student said in a frightened whisper to KUSA-TV, a Denver television station. Identifying himself only as James, he added, ''There are a bunch of kids downstairs, I can hear them crying.''

Aware that the gunmen might be watching on a classroom television set, he said, ''I am staying upstairs,'' and then hung up.

In a state with a relatively low crime rate, the siege after the shootings was broadcast live by Denver television stations, without commercial breaks all afternoon. Broadcast and cable networks turned to local affiliates for help with their coverage.

''This is a cultural virus,'' Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado said before hurrying to the scene. Noting that he felt particularly affected by the tragedy because his 16-year-old daughter goes to a suburban Denver high school, he said, ''We have to ask ourselves what kind of children we are raising.''

At the White House, the President said the nation should focus on praying for the victims' families and others at the school. He said that Attorney General Janet Reno was closely monitoring the situation, and that he had spoken this afternoon with Governor Owens and Patricia Holloway, the county commissioner, whose comments he shared with the nation.

In midafternoon, police officers briefly detained three young white men who wore camouflaged pants and black jackets, next to the high school. After they were released, the men said they knew the gunmen inside the high school. Emblazoned on the back of one man's jacket were the words, ''Ban Religion'' and a red-painted stop sign printed over a cross.

''Blood was going all over,'' a shaken girl said, as she was comforted by her father. Those here were reminded of other school shooting incidents.

Bob Sapin, a student, told a television station minutes after watching the shootings, ''I just can't believe it is happening at my school.''

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TERROR IN LITTLETON: THE OVERVIEW; 2 STUDENTS IN COLORADO SCHOOL SAID TO GUN DOWN AS MANY AS 23 AND KILL THEMSELVES IN A SIEGE

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Armed youths identified as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold storm into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo, killing up to 23 students and teachers and wounding at least 20 in five-hour siege before killing themselves; at least 13 bombs are found in school; one, set with timer, explodes in school

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The intersections of fate and chance are full of mystery. Even the most rational and least superstitious person will, after a brush with death, come out the other side with a new perspective on life and its purpose.

Was it fate that brought Zack Golditch to Aurora, Colorado, where he grew up? Was it fate that synchronized the mental descent of James Holmes with the production and theatrical release of The Dark Knight Rises? Was it all part of the plan, or was it a coin flip that put Golditch, a star high school football player at Gateway High, in Theater 8 instead of Theater 9 on an infamous night at the Century Aurora 16 Multiplex Theater at the Town Center at Aurora mall? And what about the path of the bullet that shot out of Holmes' gun, ripped through a wall and tore through Golditch's neck, just to this side of his jugular, just to that side of his spinal cord?

"It's in my mind every single day," Golditch said.

There were 82 victims of Holmes' rampage. There were the 70 he injured and the 12 he murdered. He was given 12 life sentences for the counts of first-degree murder plus an additional 3,318 years for the counts of attempted murder. What did it mean that Golditch was one of the 70, and his schoolmate, former Gateway baseball player Alexander Boik, was one of the 12?

What to make of that? How does someone so young make sense of that? How, four years later, has that changed a person like Golditch, now in his junior season as an offensive lineman with Colorado State?

"It was something that was put onto me," Golditch said. "I didn't ask for it. I didn't expect it. It wasn't what I was working to be defined as. ...That's been a struggle."

Four years ago, Golditch was working to be defined as a football player, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Since he started playing at age nine, football was his only hobby. When it came time to write a book report, Zack read something about football. Research paper? Football. Make an art project? Zack created a self-sculpture made of wire that read, "I'm wired for football."

It got to the point teachers had a talk with Christine Golditch about her son's singular interest. They said: "He's got to read about something other than football. We want him to have a wider range of knowledge."

Mom wasn't so sure there was a problem.

"I said, 'Knowledge?' Why don't you ask him about football? He'll blow you out of the water,'" Christine said.

But his grades were good enough all the same, and in the Denver area, eighth graders and their parents have choices about which public high schools they want to attend. By then, Golditch was so big and so good that a few of the high school football coaches came whistling by to see if he might want to join the football team at their prestigious schools.

Then the kid chose Gateway, which was anything but a football powerhouse.

Situated in a less affluent neighborhood than its rivals, Gateway was a program that could really use a player like Zack Golditch. Its pockets weren't as deep, its tradition wasn't as rich, and its players weren't as committed as those at some other nearby schools. One of the problems then-Gateway head coach Justin Hoffman was having in the summer of 2012 was attendance at weightlifting sessions. Kids were missing sessions and coming up with creative excuses for doing so. Hoffman was trying to clean it up, but culture changes take time.

The team had a weightlifting session scheduled for 6 a.m., July 21, 2012. Everyone was expected to be there.

Six hours earlier, though, just before midnight, Golditch was at the movies. The new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, had a midnight showing on multiple screens. Golditch had a ticket for Theater 8. In the front row of Theater 9 next door sat a troubled young man named James Holmes, who left his seat 18 minutes into the movie and propped open an emergency exit door with a tablecloth holder.

Holmes changed clothes in his white Hyundai Tiburon and 10 minutes later entered the Century 16 theater through the propped-open exit door. He carried a 12-gauge shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle and a .40-caliber pistol. He was dressed in body armor.

He threw a couple of tear gas canisters into the crowd. Some in the audience later said they thought it was a prank. Then Holmes began firing, first toward the ceiling. In Theater 8 next door, Golditch thought what he heard was fireworks.

He turned his head up and to the right to see what was going on. As he did, one of Holmes' shots went straight through his neck and out the other side. Two others in Theater 8 were also hit.

At 12:35 a.m., Christine's phone rang. It was Zack.

"Mom, I've been shot," he said. "I'm still at the theater. I'm OK."

That was not entirely true. Zack didn't know how much blood he had lost, and paramedics, feeling he was on the verge of passing out anyway, didn't want to tell him. So they lied to him about his condition.

Christine thought it was a lie of a different kind.

"I jumped out of bed saying, 'What? This is not funny. This is not funny. Don't play no dirty joke on me right now,'" she said. "He goes, 'No, mom, this is not a joke.'"

It was hours before Christine and Stewart Golditch could see their youngest son in the emergency room. Meanwhile, Golditch exchanged some messages with Hoffman, who assured him it was OK if he missed weights that morning.

But at 6 a.m., the door to the weight room at Gateway High School swung open, and there stood Zack Golditch with two open wounds, his neck wrapped in gauze, ready for his turn on the squat rack.

"There are no more excuses," he said.

His teammates were in shock. Hoffman was in shock.

"It's one of those things I'll never forget," Hoffman said.

By the time of the shooting, Golditch, then a senior, had transformed himself and his school. Gateway had reached the state playoffs the previous three years, and Golditch had gone from the big kid who was always afraid of hurting people to a savage competitor.

To hear Hoffman tell it, it all happened in a single moment at a Colorado state track meet where Golditch was throwing discus, just two months before the shooting.

Hoffman had long thought there was something inside Golditch that he himself wasn't aware of and had never previously accessed. Now it was the end of the kid's junior year, and Hoffman was starting to wonder if he was ever going to see it.

"There was a point in his career where we really wondered if he had aspirations," said Hoffman, who now coaches at nearby Rangeview High School. "It was like he was missing something."

Golditch put up a couple of good-not-great throws to start the meet, which prompted Hoffman to pull him aside for a confrontational conversation that boiled down to "If not now, when?"

"You've got to throw your best throw right now," Hoffman said. "And he did."

Golditch's next throw sailed 167'11". It won him the state championship by nearly four feet. And everybody that made fun of him for going to Gateway had to eat it.

"It's like a monster [had] awoken," Hoffman said. "Then the shooting happens."

In one-on-one conversation, Golditch has a soft manner that contradicts his massive 6'5", 295-pound body and competitive intensity. Between being the victim of a notorious crime and being a Division I athlete, he has a lot of experience being interviewed and written about.

Publicly, he has spoken a lot about the shooting. Privately, he'll sometimes avoid it if he can.

"People will be like, 'Hey, I heard this from so-and-so; is that true?" he said. "Sometimes I'll deny it. I'll be like, 'No, that was somebody else from my school.' It kinda depends on who they are and how interested they are about me."

This is a common sentiment among those who have been victims of tragedies or have survived potentially fatal illnesses. They often express a renewed appreciation for life and for everyone's concern, and a renewed desire to help others, but also often a desire not to be defined by a single event they never would have chosen.

"It sticks in people's minds," Golditch said. "To a lot of people who don't know me, that's all they know of me."

That was the case when Golditch arrived at Colorado State in the summer of 2013. The coaching staff had informed some of the other players that a survivor of the Aurora massacre would be joining the program in the fall, so by the time he arrived, he was already that guy.

Golditch didn't mind talking about it, but only if it was going to be a real conversation.

"It's hard for other people to move past it," he said.

Some of his Gateway teammates and classmates had a harder time with the shooting than Golditch did. Gateway brought in counselors to help students process their emotions, and it had to change the way it handled things like fire drills and alarms.

"We were pretty fragile," Hoffman said. "We had a couple players in practice who, as soon as sirens would go off or an ambulance, fire truck, everything else like that, all of a sudden they'd go into their own PTSD-type of thing."

Golditch's biggest wounds were of the flesh. Psychologically, his biggest challenges were on the practice fields and classrooms at Colorado State in Fort Collins, Colorado. He was the first person in his family to go to college and soon found that if he was going to make it through, he was going to have to work harder than he ever had before. First semester, his grades weren't great, and he began having doubts about whether he was good enough to play football at that level.

He was no longer the biggest or the strongest, and his athletic career was no longer about awakening some internal beast; it was about finding a way to outperform more gifted competitors.

"It was rough," he said. "The very first day of workouts, I was so sore, I was beat. I was so tired. I had never gone through anything like that in my entire life. I called my high school coach and was like, 'Hey, I don't know if this is for me.'"

Golditch now is a redshirt junior at CSU, where he has started 24 of the last 25 games on the Rams offensive line. Colorado State has won at least seven games every year Golditch has been there, and it will play Idaho in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl on Dec. 22. Turns out he can play at that level.

Goldie @Zack_Golditch60
You never know how something as small as a smile can impact someone. Thank you UChealth and Children's! #GoRams https://t.co/L2XiFFenzP

"My high school coach really instilled something in me," he said. "You can't complain about what you can't control. So when I come across a situation on the field I can't control, I'm not complaining about it, looking for an excuse. It's kind of hard to say, but I feel like I'm willing to do that much more to get the edge. It's like, 'You're good, but I'm going to be that much better.'"

The shooting also instilled something in Golditch: a desire to open himself up to those who need his perspective. Before this season, he was named to the watch list for the Wuerffel Trophy, which recognizes college football players for their off-field service.

People open up to him, he finds, and while at CSU, Golditch has been involved with a number of service events including at the burn unit of a local hospital, the Boys & Girls Club and Respite Care as well as coaching at several youth football camps.

"I just want to help," he said.

Golditch didn't know that about himself before the shooting. He didn't know he liked talking to people, hearing their stories, helping them help themselves.

Though he intends to take his football career as far as he can, when Golditch talks about the future, he doesn't talk about playing in the NFL.

A kid wired for football found some new circuitry. He wants to work with people, maybe as a counselor in his old school district.

"I think I realized that I'm good at talking to other people, especially the ones that want to talk to me," he said. "Just seeing the impact a simple conversation can have on somebody, it feels really, really good."
Tully Corcoran has been working in professional journalism since 2003, covering everything from high school soccer to the NFL to the Final Four. He lives in Houston.

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Theater Mass Shooting Survivor Zack Golditch Finding Life's Bigger Than Football

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The intersections of fate and chance are full of mystery. Even the most rational and least superstitious person will, after a brush with death, come out the other side with a new perspective on life and its purpose. Was it fate that brought Zack Golditch to Aurora, Colorado, where he grew up?

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The gunman who opened fire inside a Munich shopping center Friday killing 9 people sent out an online invitation about a bogus free giveaway to attract more people to the site of the attack, investigators said.

The gunman hacked a Facebook account and sent a message urging people to come to the Olympia Einkaufszentrum mall for a free giveaway, a police investigator said.

The posting, sent from a young woman's account, urged people to come to the mall at 4 p.m., saying: "I'll give you something if you want, but not too expensive." Police believe the gunman sent the message.

The sad result of #munich #gunfire
10 fatal casualties, among them the shooter
16 injured
For more see(german text): https://t.co/ZooBf7NG6J
- Polizei München (@PolizeiMuenchen) July 23, 2016

The motive behind the shooting remains unclear, despite early reports indicating it appeared to be terror related.

Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae says "no evidence" of links to the Islamic State group has been found in the home and room of the Munich shooting suspect.

Andrae also told a news conference that the crime and the perpetrator had "absolutely no" link to the issue of refugees.

Peter Beck, a Munich police spokesman, said officers were still collecting evidence at the scene of the crime Saturday morning.

"With regard to the suspect we have to examine everything, but we don't know yet what triggered the crime," Beck told The Associated Press.

Beck said the number of people receiving hospital treatment stood at 16, three of whom were seriously wounded. Security restrictions in the city have been lifted and public transport is operating as normal, Beck said.

The suspect was identified as an 18-year-old German-Iranian man, who was born and raised in Munich. Prosecutor Steinkraus Koch tells a news conference the suspect had a book titled: "Rampage in Head: Why Students Kill."

Police Chief Andre says that the suspect appeared to be "obsessed with shooting rampages."

Investigators also found evidence that the Munich-born suspect had suffered from psychological problems and received treatment, but details were still being confirmed, Steinkraus-Koch said.

Some 2,300 police from across Germany and neighboring Austria were scrambled in response to the attack, which happened less than a week after a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker wounded five people in an ax-and-knife rampage that started on a regional train near the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the train attack, but authorities have said the teen -- who was shot and killed by police -- likely acted alone.

The suspect's body was found about 2 1/2 hours after the attack, which started shortly before 6 p.m. at a McDonald's restaurant across the street from the mall.

A cell-phone video posted online showed the suspect dressed in black standing on a rooftop parking area of the mall yelling back and forth with the person filming, saying at one point "I'm German" and eventually firing shots. Andrae said police believe the video is genuine.

David Akhavan, a 37-year-old who from Tehran, Iran, who works at the Shandiz Persian restaurant, described his anguish as he learned of the shooting.

"I started to get texts from friends asking if I was safe," he said. "Then, my thoughts were: please, don't be a Muslim. Please don't be Middle Eastern. Please don't be Afghan. I don't accept any of this violence."

The mayor of Munich has declared a day of mourning for the victims of Friday's shooting in the Bavarian capital. Dieter Reiter says the city is "shocked and aghast at this terrible act."

In a statement Saturday on Facebook, Reiter expressed his condolences to the victims, their family and friends, and thanked security forces for their work.

Ten people, including the alleged shooter, were killed in the attack.

Reiter said Saturday would be "a day of mourning, not of celebration" and that all public festivals in the city over the weekend had been canceled.

"These are difficult hours for Munich," he said, adding that the city's citizens had shown great solidarity toward each other. "Our city stands united."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Munich gunman obsessed with mass shootings, sent out invitations to mall before rampage, cops say

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The gunman who opened fire inside a Munich shopping center Friday killing 9 people sent out an online invitation about a bogus free giveaway to attract more people to the site of the attack, investigators said. The gunman hacked a Facebook account and sent a message urging people to come to the Olympia Einkaufszentrum mall for a free giveaway, a police investigator said.

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In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been at least mass shootings, with at least people killed and wounded.

The counts come from the Gun Violence Archive, a database that tracks events since 2013 in which four or more people (not counting the shooter) were shot at the same general time and location. The database's researchers comb through hundreds of news stories, police reports, and other sources each day and individually verify the reports. Still, since some shootings aren't reported, the database is likely missing some shootings, and some are missing details. The count is also a constant work in progress, so some of the numbers and details may be slightly imprecise.

Vox's Soo Oh created an interactive map with this database. It shows the mass shootings that have been counted by the Gun Violence Archive since 2013, after the Sandy Hook shooting:

Are mass shootings increasing? It depends on which definition you use.

Using one common definition - shootings at a public place in which the shooter murdered four or more people, excluding domestic, gang, and drug violence - they appear to be getting more common, according to an analysis from Harvard School of Public Health researchers.

But not everyone agrees with this definition. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, for example, defines mass shootings more widely, as any shooting in which at least four people were murdered. Under those terms, mass shootings don't appear to be increasing.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health call the definition Fox uses too broad, since it catches domestic, gang, and drug-related shootings that aren't usually considered mass shootings in layman's terms.

The Gun Violence Archive's definition, which is what's used for the map above, is even broader than Fox's - counting not just murders but injuries, too. So it counts all shootings in which four or more people were shot but not necessarily killed (excluding the shooter). That includes domestic, gang, and drug-related shootings in which four or more people were killed or wounded, as well.

Even under the Gun Violence Archive's broad definition, it's worth noting that mass shootings make up a tiny portion of America's firearm deaths, which total more than 32,000 each year.

And the US has way more gun violence than its developed peers: According to United Nations data compiled by Simon Rogers while at the Guardian, the US had 29.7 firearm homicides per 1 million people in 2012, while Switzerland had 7.7, Canada had 5.1, and Germany had 1.9.

But why does the US have so many more gun homicides than other developed countries? One possible explanation: Americans are generally much more likely to own guns.

The US makes up about 4.4 percent of the global population but possesses 42 percent of the world's civilian-owned guns. And the empirical research shows that places with more guns have more homicides.

Criminal justice experts widely recognize that America's unusually high levels of gun violence are a result of cultural and policy decisions that have made firearms far more available in America than in most of the world. For the US, that means not just more mass shootings, but more gun violence in general.

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Mass shootings since Sandy Hook, in one map

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In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been at least mass shootings, with at least people killed and wounded.

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It's been two weeks since a gunman ended the lives of 49 victims and injured dozens of others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. As survivors heal and a community embraces the wounded and honors the dead, questions linger about what happened that night - and how the U.S. would respond after its deadliest mass shooting in recent history.

Many details of the attack still aren't known. But thanks to police and FBI records and witness accounts, it's become clearer - if still impossible to comprehend - what transpired in Orlando in the early hours of June 12, between 2:02 a.m. and 5:15 a.m. ET.

'All Hell Broke Loose'

The weekend had already started on a tragic note, with the death on Saturday morning of a former contestant on The Voice. Christina Grimmie had been shot the night before as she signed autographs following a performance at an Orlando theater, and the city was struggling to come to terms with this violent crime.

Saturday night was Latin Night at Pulse, one of the city's best-known gay clubs, and the place was packed with patrons both gay and straight, young and not-so-young, from the U.S., Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and elsewhere, having a good time, dancing salsa and bachata.

At 2:02 a.m., according to an FBI timeline, Orlando police received reports that multiple shots had been fired at Pulse. An off-duty officer was working there and "engaged in a gun battle" with the shooter, said Orlando Police Chief John Mina. "The suspect, at some point, went back inside the club, where more shots were fired," Mina said. Additional officers had arrived at 2:04 a.m. and entered Pulse four minutes later, exchanging fire with the attacker.

At 2:09 a.m., a warning appeared on the club's Facebook page: "Everyone get out of pulse and keep running."

Many did. But not everyone could.

As soon as Angel Colon heard the gunshots, he and his friends ran for their lives. But Colon was shot three times. He fell and was trampled. All around him, he heard shots and cries for help.

"I could just see him shooting at everyone and I can hear the [shots getting] closer, and I look over and he shoots the girl next to me," he said. "And I'm just there laying down and I'm thinking, 'I'm next. I'm dead.' "

"Just all hell broke loose, people running for the door, jumping over the gates," said Ray Rivera, also known as DJ Infinite, who'd been playing music that night in the patio area. He took cover behind his booth, shielded two others and was able to flee to safety.

Some wounded clubgoers played dead on the dance floor. Others barricaded themselves inside bathroom stalls and, not wanting to speak, texted loved ones for help. The gunman paced around the rear of the club, laughing and shooting at bodies already on the ground.

A SWAT team was called at 2:18 a.m.

At 2:35 a.m., about half an hour after the shooting began, the shooter made oneof several 911 calls, according to the FBI.

"I wanna let you know, I'm in Orlando and I did the shootings," the gunman told the operator during this 50-second call, according to a transcript released by the FBI.

"What's your name?" the operator asked.

"My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State."

At 2:48 a.m., the gunman - whose name was Omar Mir Seddique Mateen - spoke with crisis negotiators from the Orlando police. He had a second conversation with them at 3:03 a.m. and a third at 3:24 a.m.

Mateen identified himself as "an Islamic soldier," according to the FBI, and threatened to detonate explosives, including a car bomb and a suicide vest - the kind "used in France," he said, referring to the terrorist attacks in Paris last November. Searches inside and outside the club failed to turn up these items, investigators said.

Mateen is also believed to have spent time online during his siege of the club, checking Facebook and searching for "Pulse Orlando" and "shooting." He called a friend. He texted his wife.

At 3:58 a.m., the Orlando Police Department's Twitter account warned residents to stay away from the area.

At 4:21 a.m., police cleared a way for some people trapped inside the club to escape by dislodging an air conditioning unit from a Pulse dressing room window. As clubgoers were being rescued, they told police the shooter had threatened to put bomb vests on four people within 15 minutes.

As 5 a.m. approached, those inside had been trapped for nearly three hours, some wounded and bleeding, calling police from their cellphones and pleading for help.

Police used explosives to try to breach the exterior cinder block wall of a bathroom where a dozen or so people were hiding, near another bathroom where Mateen had holed up with several hostages.

"I could see his feet, like scooting back, scooting back, scooting back, as he heard the police outside," said Patience Carter, one of the hostages with Mateen.

At 5:02 a.m., a SWAT team and the Orange County Sheriff's Office Hazardous Device Team "began to breach [the bathroom] wall with explosive charge and armored vehicle to make entry," according to the FBI.

"And the last thing that I heard before the police said, you know, 'Move away from the walls' - because, obviously, they were about to bust through again - [the shooter] said, 'Hey, you,' to someone on the floor inside the bathroom," Carter said. "And shot them. Shot another person, and then shot another person who happened to be directly behind me."

When the wall was broken, hostages began to emerge - and so did Mateen.

"The suspect came out of that hole himself, armed with a handgun and a long gun," Orlando's police chief said.Mateen began firing at police, and they fired back. An officer was hit in the gun battle but was saved from serious injury by his Kevlar helmet.

At 5:15 a.m., police reported the shooter was down.

A police tweet confirmed Mateen's death at 5:53 a.m., just before sunrise Sunday morning.

Pulse Shooting: The shooter inside the club is dead.
- Orlando Police (@OrlandoPolice) June 12, 2016

'I Don't Know Why He Did It'

The 29-year-old gunman was a U.S. citizen, born in New York in 1986. His parents moved to New York from Afghanistan in the 1980s, and eventually, the family relocated to Port St. Lucie, Fla. Mateen's last known residence was in Fort Pierce, in St. Lucie County - about a two-hour drive from Orlando.

Investigators said Mateen legally purchased the two weapons he used at Pulse, a Sig Sauer MCX assault-style rifle and a handgun, in Port St. Lucie in the week before the attack. A third weapon was found in his vehicle.

According to public records, Mateen had possessed a valid firearm license since September 2011. He was also licensed to be a security officer, working most recently for the global security company G4S, where he'd been employed since 2007.

FBI Director James Comey said Mateen had been investigated in 2013 and again in 2014. In May 2013, Mateen claimed to have ties to both al-Qaida and Hezbollah, sparking a 10-month inquiry that sought anything tying him to more substantial threats. He was placed on a watch list when the investigation began, and taken off when it was closed in March 2014.

In July 2014, FBI agents again looked at Mateen as they investigated anyone with possible ties to Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, a U.S. citizen from Florida who blew himself up in a 2014 suicide attack in Syria. "No ties of consequence" were found, Comey said.

Mateen was married twice and had a 3-year-old son. The gunman's father, Seddique Mir Mateen, condemned the attack. "I apologize for what my son did. I don't know why he did it," he told NBC News. "He is dead, so I can't ask him. I wish I knew."

The elder Mateen said his son had become angered recently at the sight of two men kissing. But multiple media outlets reported that some Pulse regulars recognized Mateen and said he had frequented the nightclub as a patron. At least two men said they interacted with Mateen on gay dating apps. But "the FBI has found no evidence so far to support claims by those who say Mateen had gay lovers or communicated on gay dating apps," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Mateen's first marriage ended in divorce. His ex-wife, Sitora Yusifiy, said he was an abusive husband. A grand jury is looking into what his second wife, Noor Salman, might have known about her husband's plans to target Pulse and whether she should face charges in connection with the attack. Mateen texted Salman as the attack was underway.

Mateen's motivations remain unclear. Although he claimed allegiance to ISIS, he also said during his 911 conversations that the Tsarnaev brothers, who attacked the Boston Marathon in 2012 (but did not affiliate themselves with ISIS), were his "homeboys," the FBI said.

His father has insisted the attack had "nothing to do with religion."

'We Will Be Defined By How We Respond'

"Around 2:00 [a.m.] or so, we got word that there were some shootings," Dr. Gary Parrish, medical director of the emergency department at the Orlando Regional Medical Center, told reporters on June 14. "But we didn't know quite what was about to hit us."

Patients suffering wounds to the chest, pelvis, extremities and abdomen began flooding into the emergency room shortly after 2 a.m., said Dr. Chadwick Smith, a surgeon at the hospital.

The wounded were brought in by the "truckloads and ambulance loads," doctors said. So much blood was lost that the hospital exhausted its entire medical supply. More had to be brought in from nearby hospitals.

Operating rooms, Smith said, were cleaned hastily between surgeries, in about a minute - again and again and again.

"We are dealing with something we never imagined," Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer tweeted the morning after the attack. But, he said later, "We will not be defined by the act of a cowardly hater. We will be defined by how we respond, how we treat each other."

Vigils around the country and the world have honored the memory of the victims. On Friday, Florida's governor and Cabinet members placed 49 state flags for the victims on the lawn of Florida's historic capitol in Tallahassee.

Meanwhile, gun sales increased in the days following the massacre. A Florida congressional candidate announced a contest on Facebook to give away an AR-15 rifle, similar to the weapon Mateen used, on July 4.

In Washington, D.C., the Senate voted on four gun-control measures. All four failed.

Dr. Joshua Corsa, a surgeon who was on duty at the Orlando Regional Medical Center the night of the attack, has vowed to continue wearing the bloodstained shoes he had on that night, until every wounded victim is discharged from the hospital.

On Thursday, 11 days after the attack, Pulse's owner hosted a "Latin Night" street party for employees, patrons and friends, with music blaring and a dance floor in a restaurant parking lot. A thousand people showed up. "It's not a party, really, but I feel happy to see everyone," said one Pulse patron, who'd survived after hiding in a bathroom during the June 12 attack. "We needed this."

The section of Orlando's Orange Avenue near Pulse has reopened for business and traffic, though the club itself remains closed for now. "We can't feel normal yet after what happened," a Pulse employee told the Orlando Sentinel. But life is returning to a scarred city.

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3 Hours In Orlando: Piecing Together An Attack And Its Aftermath

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It's been two weeks since a gunman ended the lives of 49 victims and injured dozens of others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. As survivors heal and a community embraces the wounded and honors the dead, questions linger about what happened that night - and how the U.S.

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Kelly also said he doesn't support the idea of a registry for Muslims or for other religious groups.

In Afghanistan, nearly 40 people died today in a pair of bombings that rocked Kabul. The Taliban claimed responsibility. The blasts erupted near the Afghan parliament complex during evening rush hour. In addition to the dead, more than 70 others were wounded.

Thousands of people in Northern California remain under evacuation orders tonight, as heavy rain and snow roll over the region. Even police vehicles got stuck in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where up to 10 feet of snow was falling, and even ski resorts had to shut down.

Elsewhere, flooding in Sonoma County is now the worst in a decade, forcing officials to open a Sacramento dam for the first time since 2005.

Wall Street mostly marked time today. The Dow Jones industrial average lost nearly 32 points to close at 19855. The Nasdaq rose 20 points, and the S&P 500 was unchanged.

And the newly crowned champions of college football are back home in Clemson, South Carolina, tonight, after an epic victory over Alabama. The Tigers scored last night with one second left on the clock to win 35 to 31. It was a rematch of last year's title game, when Alabama won.

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News Wrap: Dylann Roof is first to get death sentence for federal hate crime

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In our news wrap Tuesday, a federal jury sentenced Dylann Roof to death for the racially motivated murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Also, nearly 40 people died in a pair of bombings near the Afghan Parliament complex in Kabul.