Virginia State Police have spent three days searching the Virginia Tech Duck Pond for evidence relating to the April 16 mass murder at the college, but have come away empty-handed.
While investigators would not specify what they were searching for, reports have alluded to a hard drive missing from the killer’s computer. Metal detectors were employed in a grid pattern to search the entire pond, as well as two smaller adjacent pools. Virginia Tech spokeswoman Corinne Geller said, “They were looking for anything that could have been of value or importance to the investigation.”
The search was part of “hundreds and hundreds of pieces of evidence and leads,” she said, adding, “When it comes to an investigation, you can’t give a time, and we owe it to the families of those who were killed and those who were injured and survived to make sure this investigation is done as timely and properly as possible.”
32 people were killed and another 25 wounded on the Virginia Tech campus on April 16, 2007, the worst incident of mass murder in modern U.S. history. Witnesses have said the killer was seen at the pond between 8:10 and 8:20 a.m. on the day of the shootings. While anti-videogame crusaders including Jack Thompson immediately claimed games were involved as a root cause of the massacre, investigators found no evidence to back up these claims, and a June report on the killings made no mention of games whatsoever.
