Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine appointed a Fairfax County police official to one of the final two spots on the Virginia Tech panel and investigators were combing through computer records to determine how Cho Seung-Hui planned the rampage that left 33 people dead.
Meanwhile, the university prepared to resume classes today. Norris Hall, the site of the classroom shootings, will remained closed. School officials began taking down some of the makeshift memorials that have appeared around campus, and the university’s student government asked hundreds of reporters to leave campus.
“The best way to know how to do that is get the campus back to normal,” student government spokeswoman Liz Hart said. “That includes being able to go back to class, to get back into our normal routine as much as a possible without being held back by anything external, reminding us that it will be a difficult road. We already know it.”
Authorities are sifting through cell phone records and personal computers found in Cho’s room.
Cho, 23, bought ammunition clips used in the shooting on eBay three weeks earlier, according to law enforcement officials. An eBay spokesman said the purchase was legal and that the company has cooperated with authorities.
Investigators are hoping to determine whether Cho had any contact with one of his first victims, a female student he shot in her dorm early Monday morning. A year earlier, campus police twice spoke with Cho after two separate women complained that he was stalking them.
Kaine appointed to the review Carroll Ann Ellis, director of the Fairfax County Police Department’s Victim Services, and retired Judge Diane Strickland, of Roanoke. The eight-person group will review the circumstances surrounding the shooting massacre at the Blacksburg college.
Ellis serves as a faculty member at the FBI’s National Academy, the National Victim Assistance Academy, and Northern Virginia Community College.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
