The man who authorities say killed a Virginia Tech police officer had visited a shooting range this year but hadn’t gone for several months because he didn’t have bullets for his gun, according to a friend. The widow of the slain police officer revealed that they had exchanged texts about an hour before the shooting and that she sent him two text messages concerning his safety after he was fatally shot. Continue reading after the jump.
Matt Dailey told The Roanoke Times in a story published Sunday that he considered 22-year-old Ross Truett Ashley his best friend. Authorities say Ashley killed police officer Deriek Crouse on the Virginia Tech campus while the officer made a traffic stop Thursday, then killed himself not long after.
Dailey said he and Ashley had made two or three trips to the shooting range — the same one used by Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who killed 32 people and then himself on the campus in 2007.
However, Dailey dismissed any comparisons between Cho and his friend. He also said he didn’t think Ashley had used his gun for some time.
“He didn’t keep (the gun) locked away, but all summer I don’t think he had any bullets for the gun,” Dailey said. “He didn’t buy bullets that often because bullets are expensive.”
There were no red flags to suggest Ashley had been planning anything, Dailey said, echoing statements made by other friends in recent interviews with The Associated Press. Ashley could be withdrawn and “was definitely off in some ways” but not more so than anyone else, Dailey told the newspaper.
Furthermore, he said he didn’t think Ashley was the type of person to carry out such a drastic act without some sort of reason.
“But I’m not sure what the reason is because I didn’t get to talk to him,” Dailey said.
Police said they are looking for a motive for why 22-year-old Ross Truett Ashley shot Crouse, seemingly at random, on the school’s campus and then killed himself.
Mrs Crouse said the 39-year-old officer had texted her ‘Love you lots’ at 11.20am, about an hour before he was shot after pulling over a motorist who was not involved in the shooting. She responded, ‘Kisses!!!!!! Love you.’
As word of the shooting spread and the campus was locked down, she said she texted her husband at 12.52pm, ‘What’s going on?????’
Three minutes later, she texted again, ‘I just need to kno ur ok.’
She said she told herself he was busy with the emergency response but learned an hour later from her son that two people had come by the house looking for her.
She dropped her coffee mug and her knees buckled, and then a car pulled into the parking lot of her cosmetology school.
‘My first thought was, “I wish I had kissed him better that morning”,’ Mrs Crouse, 37, told the The Roanoke Times.
Mrs Crouse said she and her husband met and became friends in high school and reconnected years later after their first marriages didn’t work out. He had one son, she had four boys.
Deriek Crouse, who had joined the Army Reserves after three years in the Army, mostly at Fort Hood, Texas, found her on the classmates.com website as he waited to be taken to the war zone during his deployment to Iraq in 2004.
They corresponded during his year in Iraq, and upon his return, he moved in with her and her sons.
He began pursuing a career in law enforcement, using benefits from the Army and a layoff from a textiles company to attend a criminal justice academy.
Crazed: Police have identified Ross Truett Ashley as the gunman who brought terror to Virginia Tech
He joined the Virginia Tech police department about six months after the April 16, 2007 massacre in which a student gunman killed 32 people and himself.
Tina Crouse said her husband carried himself with authority at work, but could be like a kid at home, shouting at Pittsburgh Steelers games on TV and still listening to a favorite band from high school, Metallica.
She said he was her “idol” and had a way of calming her down, such as when she expressed frustration about her job and he encouraged her to quit and attend cosmetology school. “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” he liked to say.
Tina Crouse said her husband had finally settled down after moving around his whole life.
He had left early for work Thursday, but not before climbing back into bed to stroke her hair and tell her he loved her, as he always did.
‘He deserved to be able to live out his life. and he didn’t get to enjoy it because some stupid person chose him,’ she said, sobbing.
She told the newspaper, ‘Somebody took our life from us.’
Ross Truett Ashley, a 22-year-old part-time business student at Radford University, about 10 miles from the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, was described as a typical college student in many ways, making it difficult to understand why he would commit an armed robbery and then, apparently at random, target the patrolman before killing himself.
He first drew authorities’ attention Wednesday when, they say, he walked into his landlord’s office with a handgun and demanded the keys to a Mercedes-Benz SUV.
As investigators worked to unravel a motive, thousands of people gathered for a candlelight vigil Friday night on a campus all too familiar with tragedy, the Associated Press reports.
Those who knew Ashley said he could be standoffish. He liked to run down the hallways and recently shaved his head, a neighbor said.
Virginia State Police said he walked up to officer Deriek W. Crouse after noon on Thursday and shot him dead as the patrolman sat in his unmarked cruiser during a traffic stop.
Ashley was not involved in the stop and did not know the driver, who is cooperating with police, they said.
Authorities said Ashley then took off for the campus greenhouses, ditching his pullover, wool cap and backpack as police quickly sent out a campus-wide alert that a gunman was on the loose.
Officials said the alert system put in place after the nation’s worst mass slaying in recent memory worked well, but it nevertheless rattled a community still coping with the day a student gunman killed 32 people and then himself.
A deputy sheriff on patrol noticed a man acting suspiciously in a parking lot about a half-mile from the shooting. The deputy drove up and down the rows of the sprawling Cage parking lot and lost sight of the man for a moment, then found Ashley shot to death on the pavement, a handgun nearby. No one saw him take his life and he wasn’t carrying any ID.
State police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said Ashley appears to have acted alone and didn’t know the slain officer: ‘At this time we have no connection between the two of them, that they knew one another or had encountered one another prior to the shooting,’ she said.
Ashley lived in an apartment on the top floor of a worn, gray three-storey brick building in the small city of Radford, a college town and made the dean’s list in 2008 at the University of Virginia-Wise, which is located in south west Virginia.
At the Virginia Tech campus, thousands of people silently filled the Drillfield for a candlelight vigil Friday night to remember Crouse, a firearms and defense instructor with a specialty in crisis intervention.
He had been on the campus force for four years, joining it about six months after the April 16, 2007 massacre.
Crouse was a member of the Army Reserves who served a year in Iraq beginning in March 2004, according to the U.S. Army Human Resources Command.
He was assigned to active duty service at Fort Hood, Texas, from October 1993 until July 1996, where he was listed as an M1 armor crewman, or tank operator.
From July 1996 to May 2001, Crouse was listed as a motor transport operator with the 316th Sustainment Command in Galax, Virginia.
Crouse’s last rank was staff sergeant.
For about nine months in 2007, Crouse worked as an officer with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office at the county’s jail before leaving for the Virginia Tech police, said Capt. Brian Wright, a spokesman with the department.
Those who worked with Crouse remembered him as a ‘great employee’ and a ‘hard worker,’ said Wright, who had worked security with Crouse at Virginia Tech football games.
‘He was just very personable, easy to talk to,’ Wright said. ‘Everybody liked him.’
The Friday night vigil included a moment of silence and closed with two trumpeters stationed across the field from each other playing “Echo Taps” as students raised their candles.
Kathleen O’Dwyer, a fifth-year engineering major at Tech, said it was important to come for Crouse’s family. Crouse was married and had five children and stepchildren.
‘Also it’s for the community, to see the violence that happens isn’t what we’re about,’ said O’Dwyer, who will be graduating next week.
Nobody answered the door Friday evening at Ashley’s parents’ home in Spotsylvania County, along the Interstate 95 corridor between Richmond and Washington.
The house was dark and no vehicles were in the driveway. The two-storey, log cabin-style home in a semi-rural area sits about 200 yards off the road up a narrow gravel drive.
Billie Jo Phillippe, who lives three houses down, said she didn’t really associate with the family.
‘They stay off to themselves a lot,’ she said. ‘He was a clean-cut young guy but standoffish.’
Authorities declined to answer some questions about Ashley, including whether he had any mental health issues or was licensed to carry a handgun.
But Gov. Bob McDonnell commented briefly on the shooting while helping load presents into a van for the Marine Corps Reserves’ Toys for Tots program.
‘Some crimes, there’s a relationship between a perpetrator and a victim, and some there aren’t,’ said McDonnell, a former prosecutor and attorney general.
There are random acts of violence, they involve either mental health issues, or robbery, or other motivations….Unfortunately in our society random acts of violence do occur, we unfortunately see it every day somewhere in this country.’
