Virginia Tech locked down after policeman shot dead

TERROR returned yesterday to Virginia Tech, only four years ago the scene of the worst shooting incident in American history, when a policeman was shot dead and the university campus was locked down for several hours amid fears of another massacre.
 
Patrol officer Deriek W Crouse was shot dead just before 1pm as he made a traffic stop on a campus carpark, near the college sports stadium.
 
According to The Washington Post: "Someone - not the person who was pulled over - walked up to the officer and shot him. The shooter then ran."
 
The body of the gunman and a weapon were later found in a different parking lot. It is thought that he killed himself as police and the FBI closed in.
 
The dead policeman had served on the campus police force for four years and was reported to be a father of five. Charles Steger, president of Virginia Tech, said: "Our hearts are broken again."
 
Steger was referring to the notorious incident in April 2007 when 32 people were gunned down on the campus by 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui, a Korean American student.

On that occasion, the university was faulted for not alerting students and faculty to the danger quickly enough. There were no such complaints this time. The Daily Telegraph reports: "The university's 30,000 students promptly received email and text message alerts warning them about the gunman." Many were moved to secure rooms and the all-clear was not sounded until four hours later.

In 2007, the massacre was a defining moment in the advent of citizen journalism. As we reported then, “Twitter finally found a purpose beyond the hyper-trivial, and photographs from dorm windows were being pooled on the photo-sharing website, Flickr.”

Back then, Twitter had around 300,000 users - today it has almost 400 million. The Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech’s student paper, saw its following on Twitter increase 10-fold to 20,000 yesterday as it sent out updates on the shooting.
 
"Twitter became even more critical when the newspaper's website crashed and the staff was evacuated from the newspaper office and moved to a secured area," reported the New York Times media blog. ·