On April 16, 2007, Erin Nicole Peterson, an 18-year-old female student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, was tragically killed in her Intermediate French class in Norris Hall. A freshman from Centreville, Virginia, majoring in International Studies, she was one of 32 victims in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the time. Erin was a graduate of Westfield High School, where she had been a member of the National Honor Society and captain of the women's basketball team.
The perpetrator of the massacre was identified as Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech. Cho, armed with two pistols, carried out the attacks in two separate locations on campus before taking his own life. Erin and ten of her classmates, along with their professor, were among the thirty people he murdered in Norris Hall after he had chained the doors shut.
In the wake of the tragedy, Erin's parents, Grafton and Celeste Peterson, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the university and the state. They argued that campus officials should have issued a campus-wide alert after the first shooting occurred in a dormitory earlier that day, which could have potentially saved the lives of those in Norris Hall. While they initially won a victory in circuit court, the Virginia Supreme Court later overturned the verdict, ruling that the commonwealth had no duty to warn students about potential criminal acts by Cho. The profound grief over their only child's death deeply affected Erin's parents for the remainder of their lives.
