First on the scene at Virginia Tech

by Patrick Hodges

On April 16, 2007, Patrick Hodges, a photojournalist at CBS station WDBJ, Roanoke, Va. was the first television photojournalist on the scene of the Virginia Tech mass shootings in which 32 people died.

[Based on an interview with Patrick Hodges, conducted in March, 2008.]

I grew up in a home where hunting and that sort of thing were done on a regular basis -- we grew up with guns in the house, and experiencing guns and using them. I shot my first gun at a very young age -- I was probably ten or eleven years old. So guns were something you respected, but they were treated as tools. I was very familiar with them, and I was comfortable with them, and I was never really against guns at all.

On April 16, I was sent to Tech to check out the first shooting, at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a residence hall there. And I thought, you know, my initial reaction because of the time of year and the situation that students are in, that's the time of year where I knew from friends at the university that students would attempt suicide. Because it was the time of year that they were receiving their notices that they were going to flunk out, that they weren't going to pass. So my initial thought was, I thought it was just one victim, that must be what's going on. So, I pulled up, you know, fully expecting to have one of my contacts on the police force tell me that it was a suicide and since we didn't cover suicides, I would call my newsroom and move on to other things I was supposed to do that day.

But when I showed up at West Ambler Johnston, the police were just starting to leave to go to Norris Hall [the academic building where most of the shootings took place]. So I never even stopped at West Ambler Johnston I just followed them to Norris Hall. And, you know, there were maybe five police officers that I could see when I got to Norris Hall. And I got out of my vehicle, grabbed my video camera, and it just so happened that the first video I took, the first video that was actually taken at Norris Hall that morning, was the Virginia Tech police chief, the Blacksburg police chief, and one other person that I believe was the public information officer for the Blacksburg police department pulling up to the scene at Norris Hall. And, you know, there was so much going on, there was so much, not being able to get enough detail, it was Friday before I realized who the three people that got out of the car were. And that was, that would have been around 9:40, just as, you know, the shooting was ending.

I was at the end of the building adjoining Norris Hall because there was construction going on there and it's a very narrow alleyway, I was on the back side of Norris Hall. I shot the video that everybody is familiar with, where the officers are running around and crouched behind the trees with the snow flurries blowing. The particular piece of video that I was asked about the most was one of my friends on the police department, a very big guy, he probably weighs 250, 300 pounds, he comes running up the sidewalk with a machine gun as fast as he can go. That was taken from the back of Norris Hall.

That day, there was so much going on. My mind kind of went into a denial phase, you know, looking back. I showed up shortly after 9. It was after 3 before I could leave that alleyway, because I got blocked in. I saw every one of those ambulances parade by. And it never clicked in my mind that they were there to pick up victims. My thought was always that it was some kind of standoff.

I had arrived at work about 8 o'clock that morning, and I didn't get home until around 3 or 4 in the morning of April 17th – the next morning. And I sat down to look in my email, and I think I really started to realize the magnitude of what happened when every website I went to, every news link had video that I had shot. All the ones you would expect -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, but also the BBC, websites in Australia, websites in Japan, had gotten ahold of my video. I mean, people came up to me that day when they saw my TV station's logo on my camera and they said “We listened to you on the radio all the way here.” I didn't make the connection that there was enough magnitude that radio stations had interrupted their broadcasts and put CNN on live.

Yeah, and that was that day. And then, you know, a couple days later the reality started to set in of what was going on. You know, I realized that Kevin Granada, one of the professors that was killed -- I do still photography as well as the video I was doing at the time, and my wife said, “Do you realize that one of the people killed, his wife is the one that's booked the lacrosse teams that you were supposed to shoot this weekend, and his son plays on one of those teams you were supposed to take pictures of this weekend.” And he was the coach. And then we had a college student that was staying with us at the time, and she was a senior, of course I was trying to get a hold of her to make sure she was okay and tell her to stay off campus because I knew something was going on. And one of her very close friends, her friend's boyfriend was killed. And then as I talked to people who I dealt with on a daily basis, I discovered that of the 32 victims, I had relationships like that with 11 of them, where I was one person removed. And so, you know, that's when the shock and everything started to set in.


I still have that same healthy respect for guns but it's really kind of ingrained in me that, you know, it's still not the gun's fault, and putting the regulations on the guns doesn't help, because the people who want the guns are going to get the guns. You know, when I look at April 16th, Cho had been planning that long enough that he scheduled his purchase of guns so that it would comply with the law. It was against school policy and, you know, he could have been expelled from school for having the guns and keeping them in his dorm room, which is obviously where he kept them. If you have a gun at Virginia Tech it's supposed to be reported to the police and put in a holding room. They have a holding room for student guns that they keep locked up and you come sign it out when you need it. Obviously he knew that, he didn't abide by that.

So I don't think having a law that would have prevented him from getting a gun would have meant he couldn't get a gun, it just would've meant he had to use another means. So I don't think that's the solution. But I think it's really opened our eyes and our minds to saying we really need to be watching who we're giving guns to, and the types of people we're giving guns to. But I don't know where the answer is. But I think it's made us as a culture and as a society much more aware of the people around us and the circumstances around us.

You know, if we think about it, if he couldn't have gotten a gun -- he took a gun and killed 32 people, and that's a terrible tragedy. If he couldn't have gotten a gun what would have prevented him from renting a car, which he had done, and one Saturday after a football game driving down to Lane Stadium and plowing it into the crowd as people came out of the stadium and killing 50 or 60 people? I mean, he had made it up in his mind, he wanted to kill people. And why it was Norris Hall, why it was April 16th, why it was the second floor, we'll never know those things. And what he would've done if he had to choose another method we don't know.


If you think about if he hadn't gotten the gun, what would he have done, maybe he would have used a baseball bat. But more importantly, you know, what set him off to do that, and why wasn't somebody paying enough attention that he got the help he needed and that's the question that runs through my mind. You know, I've seen situations where there was a gun in the house and you know, a husband is attacking a wife and the wife grabs the gun and kills the husband and protects herself. And I remember covering that from a news perspective. Had that husband not had that gun, what would have happened to that poor wife?

So we don't live in a perfect society. People talk about Utopia and peace on Earth, but we're all different, we have different values and people are far from perfect. And as long as there are imperfect people, there are going to be bad things that happen. I mean, if you look back at the Bible, you know there's Adam and Eve, there's Cain, there's Abel. You've got a father, a mother, and their two sons, and one brother got mad at the other and killed him. And, you know, he picked up a rock. We've changed our methods and we've changed our means but we haven't changed the people. And until you change the people it doesn't matter what you do to try to prevent the methods and the means. The solution doesn't seem to be in taking the tools away, the solution seems to be we need to find a way to change the people and teach them respect for others.

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