Virginia Tech Shootings:

Double jeopardy

One girl remembering the attack had an extra reason to be particularly perplexed

Regina Rohde, a student at Virginia Tech, was also a student of Columbine High School on the day when, just like Cho Seung-hui, two of her classmates (Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold) decided that they wanted to become murderers.

“It was a lot of the same reactions. ‘What’s going on? Who’s hurt? Where do we go?’ - the same kind of questions that we asked ourselves at Columbine”, Regina told the Today Show.

Terrifyingly, Regina was one of the many students trapped in the cafeteria at Columbine High, (the epicenter of the attack) but was lucky enough to escape the building before the police had even been called.

“You can go about your daily life not constantly looking around you. It’s taken years to get to that point though. [But] you never get back to that complete sense of security,” she explained.

“For some reason, I didn’t really go back to that day eight years ago until quite a bit later,” she said.

Even now, she said, “I don’t think it’s really hit a lot of people, yet, myself included. I haven’t really come to understand yet what truly was going on.”

It has been discovered that on his rampage, it took nine minutes for Cho Seung-hui to fire 170 bullets, killing 30 people and injuring many more.

Editorial - May 2007