Rappahannock’s Karl Thornhill caught up in nightmare after police tag him as “person of interest” in Hilscher shooting
By James P. Gannon
The mass killings this week at Virginia Tech University not only claimed the life of one Rappahannock County resident, Emily Hilscher, but also became a special kind of nightmare for her boyfriend from Rappahannock High School days, Karl David Thornhill.
Thornhill, like Hilscher, is a 2006 graduate of the county’s only high school, and is enrolled as a freshman in Radford University, just a few miles from the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech. The couple began dating during their last two years in high school and have continued their relationship over the past year in college.
In the early hours after Monday’s campus massacre, Thornhill not only had to deal with the shocking loss of his sweetheart, but suddenly found himself as the focus of the police investigation into the murders. Thornhill immediately became the “person of interest” that police began centering their investigation upon—on the erroneous assumption that the morning’s first shootings were the result of a “domestic incident,” cop-talk for a lover’s quarrel turned deadly.
Hilscher was one of the first two victims discovered Monday morning after a 911 call came in at 7:15 a.m. from West Ambler Johnston Hall, the campus dormitory where she lived. Virginia Tech Police responding to the dorm found Hilscher and student Ryan “Stack” Clark, the resident adviser on her floor, as the shooting victims in the dorm. Based on the evidence at the scene and initial interviews, police developed a theory of the killings that led them directly to the man known to be Emily’s boyfriend, David Thornhill.
Emily Hilscher’s dorm roommate, Heather Haugh, reportedly told police that Thornhill was a gun user and that he and Hilscher had fired guns at a shooting range recently. That was enough to propel Thornhill to the top of the suspect list, in fact if not in name.
Rappahannock County sources who have spoken to friends and family members of the Hilscher and Thornhill families gave essentially the same account of what happened next.
Police tracked down Karl Thornhill. One family friend said Thornhill was interrogated extensively and his hands were tested for gunpowder residue, which might have been present had he recently shot a weapon. According to this friend, he was released for a time, but then police descended upon him again–this time in the presence of his parents, who had driven from Rappahannock to Blacksburg to see him. As police ransacked the apartment, Thornhill and parents were ordered to lie prone on the floor and plastic handcuffs were put on the young Thornhill, according to this account.
Through the day’s news briefings on campus Monday and well into Tuesday, Virginia Tech police and university officials referred repeatedly to the “person of interest” and the domestic violence theory of the crime as reasons why they did not take more aggressive steps to warn students before a second round of shooting began about 9:30 a.m. in Norris Hall, where 30 were killed.
The identity of Karl Thornhill as the “person of interest” did not become clear until late Tuesday, when the search warrant for his premises was made public. By this time, the shooter had been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a senior student at Virginia Tech, who killed himself at the end of the rampage. Ballistics tests eventually showed that one of his two guns matched the bullets fired in the first killings at Ambler Johnston Hall.
Late Tuesday, Virginia State Police released a statement clearing Thornhill of any involvement in the shooting.
Attempts to reach the Rappahannock student, or his parents, Mr. and Mrs. David Thornhill, who live in the southern part of the county, were not successful. A telephone recording at the Thornhill home reported that the family was not taking any phone calls at this time, and further advised that if the caller was from the news media, not to leave a call-back request, as the family would not talk to reporters.
-- James P. Gannon
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