Category Archives: VTech-Psych/legal failure

Buchanan links Virginia Tech to immigration

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Pat Buchanan argues that the killer at Virginia Tech is a product of the misguided “melting pot” ideology behind present immgration policies:

“Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation’s doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.Cho was one of them.

In stories about him, we learn he had no friends, rarely spoke and was a loner, isolated from classmates and roommates. Cho was the alien in Hokie Nation. And to vent his rage at those with whom he could not communicate, he decided to kill in cold blood dozens of us.

What happened in Blacksburg cannot be divorced from what’s been happening to America since the immigration act brought tens of millions of strangers to these shores, even as the old bonds of national community began to disintegrate and dissolve in the social revolutions of the 1960s.”

Here’s the rest of Buchanan’s article.

I am busy now, but want to comment on this post in detail. Perhaps on Tuesday, when my work lightens up. Hope some of you reading can check back then. Talking rationally about what we are not supposed to be able to talk about except irrationally is always a good thing. Meanwhile, here’s something that came to my mind when reading Buchanan’s article:

“Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.”

It’s from Letter III from Letters from an American farmer, by J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, reprinted from the original ed., with a prefatory note by W. P. Trent and an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York, Fox, Duffield, 1904.

I suppose Buchanan would argue that the immigrants Crevecoeur referred to were legal, came from European countries and were assimilable. But between, say, the Irish or Eastern European immigrant of the nineteenth century and one from Germany or Holland, between a Catholic and a Protestant was a gap almost as large as the cultural gap between some immigrants today and the mainstream of American culture, although what that mainstream might be is not the easiest thing to define.

Buchanan also overlooks the fact that Cho’s parents followed the route generations of immigrants have taken and have been urged to take — hard work in a small business, owning your home, and scrimping and saving to send your children to the elite schools and colleges which presumably assimilate them into the mainstream.

Cho’s sister — immersed in Bible studies, Christianity, and humanitarian work — seems to me as much a part of “heartland” American values as any one can be.

The holes in Buchanan’s argument don’t end there, of course. The beleagured Hokies whom he calls “us” included a number of immigrants and foreigners — Lebanese to Israeli to Sri Lankan — several of whom gave their lives for their native-born and non native-born friends. I suppose, under fire, they didn’t have enough time to get the skin colors, features, and immigration status sorted out.

Buchanan takes principled positions on a number of issues where other people duck, so it’s a disappointment that on this one, he falls into the trap of demagoguery. Still, there’s no need to resort to shoving his argument into the outer darkness of public debate, as this blog seems to want to.

For one thing, while his view on race and culture can be called “nativist” (probably correctly) all day long, it’s still a view held – sometimes silently but not always thoughtlessly or maliciously – by a good number of reasonable people, not only in the U.S but across the world. It’s a view that has suffused the major religions of the world for centuries.

I know people might label it racist (and it might well be on some levels), but since that’s often a term used to shut people up and because I never know what anyone actually means when they call someone a ‘racist’, I will simply call his position ‘racial’ or ‘racialist.’ By that, I mean he defends racial feeling as a legitimate category of human experience and not on its face suspect.

So, while I don’t agree with his position on immigration, I think it calls for more than ad hominem.

The only way to get through the impasse on this subject is to talk about it candidly.

As I see it, there are two constraints on the government in either direction: on one hand, we can’t make arguments about the constitutional limitations on the state while we reward people for breaking the law, but on the other, I agree with Tibor Machan that it’s best to take a minimalist approach. Limit the state’s role in the whole business: require would-be immigrants to obey the law (penalizing those who don’t) and require them to be financially self-sufficient and not a burden on the tax-payer.

Really, that’s all any state can justifiably police or practically accomplish. Any more than that, and we’ll just be stuffing the already distended belly of cetus washingtonii — which is what’s got us where we are in the first place.

Anthony Gregory is close to the way I see this, although I have more of a “commons” approach to property ownership in some areas than he seems to.
Identify and rectify the perverse incentives driving illegal immigration; don’t demonize immigrants. They’re just doing what makes economic sense to them.

As for the cultural angle, Joe Sobran, who seems to partly share Buchanan’s belief in the need for a degree of homogeneity in culture (and I suppose race) for a society to hold together, has a good recent piece on the subject:

“Today conservatives nearly as much as liberals accept the deadly premise that the state is the answer for every problem, when most of our huge problems are created by the state itself. Immigrants don’t tax us; the state does (while also imposing trillions in debt on our descendants into the bargain). Immigrants don’t send our sons (and, now, daughters) to war; the state does. Immigrants don’t attack our traditional morality and the natural law itself; the state does. So whom do we need to be protected from — immigrants or the state?

While the tyranny Belloc predicted keeps growing new tentacles, we are constantly distracted from the implacable pattern before our eyes by momentary but essentially minor excitements — terrorism, same-sex “marriage,” elections, even politicians’ verbal gaffes. Truly, to quote one of Belloc’s friends once again, “Men can always be blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough.”

More later….

Guns forbidden to those deemed dangerous or treated involuntarily for mental illness

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AP April 30, 2007

Story Highlights

• Database lists people barred from busing guns
• List would include anyone ordered to undergo mental health treatment
• Virginia Tech gunman was treated as an outpatient
• Court finding that shooter was a danger never made it into database
RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) — Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said Monday he has closed the loophole that allowed a mentally disturbed Virginia Tech student to acquire the guns he used to kill 32 students and faculty members.

Kaine issued an executive order requiring that a database of people who are prohibited from buying guns include anyone found to be dangerous and ordered to undergo involuntary mental health treatment.

Seung-Hui Cho had been ordered by a court to undergo psychiatric counseling after a judge ruled that he was a danger to himself.

But because Cho was treated as an outpatient and never committed to a mental health hospital, the court finding never made it into the database that gun dealers must check before selling a firearm. The law prohibits selling firearms to people judged to have mental disabilities.

“Whether that treatment is to be provided in an inpatient or outpatient facility is of no moment,” Kaine said.

Cho did not disclose his mental health problems or the court-ordered treatment in a form he completed before buying the guns.

“His lie on the form would have been caught,” had the order been in place before Cho attempted to buy the guns, Kaine said.

But it would not prevent Cho from acquiring guns by several other means that require no background check in Virginia, including buy-and-trade publications, individual transactions among gun collectors or hobbyists, and gun shows — vast firearms bazaars where scores of people sell or swap firearms.

Legislation that would also subject firearms sales at gun shows to instant background checks is introduced annually in Virginia, and just as often it dies without reaching a floor vote in the General Assembly.

Kaine, a Democrat, has said he expects new support for the legislation this year and that he would support it, as he has in the past.

The executive order does not apply to people who seek mental health care of their own will. After the report is added to Virginia’s state police database, it becomes part of a federal database that gun dealers nationwide use.

Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech senior described as a troubled loner, bought his guns legally through gun shops before gunning down 32 people on campus, then killing himself.

No motive has been established for his rampage.

V-Tech timeline/other contradictions, media framing, families contact law firm, 5/3

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Update: Explanation of why he chose the 2nd floor of Norris – the only classrooms were there…

The rest of the building consisted of labs and offices.

It still doesn’t explain why he chose the engineering building rather where he had no classes and presumably didn’t know his way around as well. Maybe the entrances were easier to chain. See this comment:

Erin Sheehan, a survivor of the shootings in the German class, said “[Cho] peeked in twice, earlier in the lesson, like he was looking for someone, somebody, before he started shooting.” It seems likely that his peeking resulted in spotting the person he was looking for (since he then burst in and started shooting). This means, probably, that another part of the story lies with one of the students in this class. Most likely this student is dead, but there’s a chance he/she is among the wounded/unharmed.

And this (not so certain about its origin):

nytimes failed to report that the mother of Cho Seung-Hui took overdose drug and his father cut his wrists, as reported on chinese tv stations last nite
Update: this report expresses initial doubts about how he was shot….and how many died in the dorm (is that because both victims, Ryan and Emily, were not at the time dead or because initially police thought only person had been shot?)
Update: This account describes how police entered through a side door, since they couldn’t shoot through the chains to the maindoor. The side door had a deadbolt, and someone had to rush and find bolt cutters (the five minute delay?).

OK, my question – how come they didn’t know about the auditorium entrance that some employees used to escape? Or about the basement entrance through which the police escorted others? Also, the construction area was left open by the gunman, it seems. The report also suggests that the police had already decided that the first shooting was an intentional distraction by Cho, who was waiting outside the dorm for Emily and didn’t follow her upstairs (?? – what does that mean?), but apparently shot her inside (on the fourth floor?)….this part is not clear to me. (more here: Jesse Paul, 20, of Warrenton said a friend who lives in the dorm told him she heard an argument, then shots, then saw a man run past along a hallway.That means, he DID go up.

Update: What happened to the second gun in this account? Cho is reported to have been holding one gun with both hands, dressed all in black (no tan vest here). The account also indicates that the auditorium was one way that people could escape. It places the gun fire in the German classroom as roughly 20 minutess after the first email at 9: 26 and close to the 911 call at 9:45 (and, of course, before the second email at 9:50). That means, the gunfire in the German classroom could not have started at 9:46 (as the 911 was called in before that) but must have started a bit earlier at 9:40 – confirmed here (the student counts about 15 shots, which is what the Glock would fire).

The gunfire probably started even earlier, as the chances are that the student was just estimating the 20 minute time frame. That means the shooting likely went on from 9:40-9:55 at least which is 15 minutes, not 9.

Update: More on the timeline. This states that firing in the German class began around 9:50, and that the doors were chained AND padlocked, but that a construction area was open. SWAT teams came in by other means than the door..

Update: use of stun grenades, more confirmation of hesitation by police, and the audibility of the gun fire.This report also shows that students in Torgerson Hall nearby could hear the gun shots. Why didnt the police and administration at Burrus (next to Norris) hear them too?

Update: Further report that the police hesitated outside and used tear gas or something similar to clear the area..

Update: This account says that Cho came back to the classroom where he was found, came right to the survivor, and then walked to the front of the room. Two shots were hears by the survivor and then silence, then the sound of the cops bursting in and saying the shooter was down. Very suggestive.

Update: This report suggests the cops came out of nowhere.. which supports the video evidence that they were hiding around the building and did not immediately rush to break in, as they now argue. There is a description of a man with a machine gun and someone being tackled by the police as well in this account.

Update: The Queen’s visit to V Tech – early May. Also the UK Home Minister visited V Tech recently. He used to be a student.

Update: OK – this new report says that police have cleared Thornhill of connection to the murder.

Highly relevant to the issue of V Tech’s responsibility is that the college defeated a recent state attempt to end its gun free zone school policy. V Tech thus has even greater responsibility and needs to show much more proof that it actually did what it took to protect its students.

V Tech had a 55 man (corrected from 28) police team – no lack of officers. Yet there does not appear to have been an armed security guard near the dorm room. And how did the police verify that the campus was gun free – were there periodic checks or metal detectors around campus?

How did Cho leave the campus and return that morning, while carrying weapons – or did he leave the weapons elsewhere?

The Official Time Line:

This NY Times article is very interesting to me on several counts. It reports the official timeline of what happened on 4/16:

Cho gets to Ambler Johnston Hall a bit before 7 am; he kills his first 2 victims with the Glock 9 mm with two rounds; his second bout of killing (30 people) at Norris Hall takes 9 minutes. Police take 3 minutes to get to the building and 5 minutes to get inside.

Student Recollections:

Now, here is an earlier NY Times article from April 22. It’s not exhaustive, but it quotes what student reported happened at Norris Hall. I am not suggesting that what they descibe happen could not have taken in place in 9 minutes, but it is certainly a tight fit. This article also suggests a longer time period and indicates that the shots were more methodical, with pauses in between and that only one gun was used to fire.

Bear in mind that witness accounts are often contradictory and mistaken and an intense situation can, in recollection, seem to have taken much longer than it actually did.

Notice that Cho is described in the student accounts as walking up and down the halls (2, 3 minutes, at least), poking his head into a few classrooms and leaving without doing anything, firing with pauses in between, methodically breaking through doors that have been barricaded (should take a minute each), shooting, leaving and returning at least two classrooms (another minute or so each), standing over shot students and firing individually at each (at least a minute?) in at least two classrooms.. Although the students are trapped inside, they are running away or jumping through windows, so they are moving targets requiring him to aim and move too.

If he fired 170 (or 255, some say) rounds in Norris Hall, as we have learned, we can infer that he fired almost 18 rounds per minute or .3 per second or a round roughly every 3 seconds (I made a mistake earlier and transposed seconds and rounds). I am not a marksman, so I don’t know if that is likely or very difficult. If you also take into account that he was also reloading (as he is described doing) and sometimes not firing, he must have been firing an even higher number of rounds per minute than that most of the time. In any case, would that kind of continuous firing be described as hammering?

I am not sure, and again I don’t doubt the descriptions, I am simply evaluating what is being said.

Here is a report describing the shooter as masked, by the way.

Media Framing:

Now going back to the first article, reporting the official time line . It contains some criticism by other police officers of the 5 minute delay and the significance of this in increasing the number of those killed.

There is also discussion in the report (for the first time in the media) of the ‘active shooter’ paradigm I talked about in my earlier posts on this blog (the post on police response). However, notice that ‘active shooter’ is referenced only in terms of the five minute delay – as though that delay were the dispositive element in the whole tragedy, instead of the previous two hour delay.

What the focus on the time of entry does, of course, is to introduce into the public debate the Immediate Action Rapid Deployment paradigm (which is a new, more aggressive style of tackling such crises that was developed in the nineties and came into prominence after Columbine) but to do that without blaming either the administration or the police for the delay.

IARD is very much a part of the increasing erasure of the boundaries between wartime military actions and domestic policing. Increasingly, domestic crises will be described and tackled in military terms, and conversely, foreign military actions will be described as policing.

Here is how the alleged 5 minute delay is referenced in the article: ”This is a seminal moment for law enforcement as far as I’m concerned because it proves that minutes are critical,” runs a quote in the article.

Now, the 2 hour delay (between the shootings) is subtly being framed too. The V-Tech review panel appointed by Governor Kaine today introduced this meme: that shutting down the campus would not have helped, because the shooter could have gone back into his dorm and shot the 900 or so people who lived there.

“On Thursday, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said that the massacre may not have been averted if the Virginia Tech campus had been locked down after the two shooting deaths at the dorm.

”Well, if the campus had been locked down — because the shooter lived on campus — I mean he could have gone into his dorm with 900 people instead of going into a classroom (and) he could have shot people there,” Kaine said in his monthly listener-question program on WRVA-AM and the Virginia News Network.”

My comment here is – surely this is a strawman? Locking down the campus was not the only option. They could also have made a PA announcement for students to lock themselves into their rooms or not enter campus. A siren could have gone off to alert people, not emails. There is also the matter of why, on a campus where the student population was disarmed by policy, there were no monitoring cameras or armed security guards near the dorms to stop the shooter in the first place. Or how Cho entered a dorm without a security card and why students were entering and leaving Ambler Johnston until 10 am (according to reports) after the shooting at 7:15. That sounds remarkably lax.

To add to this media framing of the timeline, notice this report on 4/27 in the NY Times about students standing behind the V-Tech President and administration on this matter. It contrasts strikingly with earlier reports about students vocally questioning the administration. It appears that this show of student confidence has emerged in reponse to strong alumni response.

“Johnson plans to present the university Board of Visitors on Thursday with an online petition with thousands of signatures of support for Steger and Flinchum.

Steger also received an endorsement from the governor.

”Charlie has been acting as a very, very good president,” Gov. Tim Kaine said this week. ”This kind of event could happen anywhere on any campus, and there has been an innocence taken away from the students. But the positive values, and academic tradition of this university will help the community stay strong, and keep this university attracting students.” (my emphasis).

I have addressed this kind of media framing at length in my writing. First, the media sensationalizes. This is what I call the pulp drama. They report excessively on human interest stories, personal accounts and so on.

Then, when administrative failures are being descibed, the focus shifts to broad questions of law and policy and everything is blamed on lack of proper policy or poor communication. Human error or neglience is minimized or overlooked. That tactic lets upper level officials escape scrutiny or blame.
Political Implications:

That’s exactly the MO that was followed in the media coverage of the torture debate. Questions about what actually happened were quickly framed out. The public debate became a debate about changing or adding to existing laws, and not looking at what top officials did.

In the case of V-Tech, notice how quickly the public debate moved toward advocating more federal laws, more regulation (gun control), and more militarization in the state’s response to any emergency. Of course, this fits in perfectly with the overall direction of the government’s policies.

(See James Bovard’s article on how new legislation has made the imposition of martial law much easier, from The American Conservative Magazine, posted earlier on this blog).

Difficulties with a Potential Lawsuit:

Letting the wider political debate take over also creates a problem for the victims.

Here is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the possibility of a lawsuit being filed, in which lawyers suggest that the university may have shown gross negligence in this case. That report got little play from the major media, which gave much more coverage to the official response and has spent so much time on intrusive coverage of the human interest angle. And the lack of coverage actually creates a serious problem for the victim. Here’s how:

Victims have a limited time to press claims

Please note that under the doctrine of sovereign immunity which holds good in Virginia, it is quite hard to sue the state. Any plaintiff would have to establish a case of gross negligence – a higher standard than usual – and would have only 6 months to press claims. That means any stalling by the university (or its reported withholding of documents) materially helps it to avert a lawsuit by reducing the amount of time victims have to collect information and prepare a case.

It’s very likely that victims are also unaware of this fact.

From the point of view of the dead and injured, a prolonged official investigation, which the media covers uncritically is not only not helpful, but a potential difficulty as is distracts or complicates independent inquiry.

Uncritical acceptance of the administrations’ explanations end up doing further injustice to the victims of the shooting.

Wiki Time line:

  • Around 9:05 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.: Cho is seen in Norris Hall, an Engineering building. Using the chains he had purchased at Home Depot, Cho chains the building’s entry doors shut from the inside in order to stop anyone from escaping. [53][39]
  • 9:26 a.m.: E-mails go out to campus staff, faculty, and students informing them of the dormitory shooting.[54]

     


     

    A French class takes cover in Holden Hall / photo by William Chase Damiano

  • Around 9:30 am: A female student walks into Norris 211 and alerts the occupants that a shooting occurred at West Ambler Johnston [10].
  • 9:42 a.m.: Students in the engineering building, Norris Hall, make a 9-1-1 emergency call to alert police that more shots have been fired. [55] [56] [57]
  • 9:45 a.m.: Police arrived three minutes later and found that Cho had chained all three entrances shut.[58]
  • Between 9:30 and 9:50 am: Using the .22 caliber Walther P22 and 9 millimeter Glock 19 handgun with 17 magazines of ammunition, Cho shoots 60 people, killing 30 of them. [39] Cho’s rampage lasts for approximately nine minutes [11]. A student in Room 205 noticed the time remaining in class shortly before the start of the shootings [12].
  • Around 9:40 a.m.: Students in Norris 205, while attending Haiyan Cheng’s [13] issues in scientific computing class, hear Cho’s gunshots. The students, including Zach Petkewicz, barricade the door and prevent Cho’s entry [14].
  • 9:50 a.m.: After arriving at Norris Hall, police took 5 minutes to assemble the proper team, clear the area and then break through the doors. [59] They use a shotgun to break through the chained entry doors. Investigators believe that the shotgun blast alerted the gunman to the arrival of the police.[39] The police hear gunshots as they enter the building. They follow the sounds to the second floor.
  • 9:50 a.m.: A second e-mail announcing: “A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows” is sent to all Virginia Tech email addresses. Loudspeakers broadcast a similar message.[56]
  • 9:51 a.m.: As the police reached the second floor, the gunshots stopped. Cho’s shooting spree in Norris Hall lasted 9 minutes. [60] Police officers discovered that after his second round of shooting the occupants of room 211 Norris, the gunman fatally shot himself in the temple. [15] [61]

The Original Time Line:

I still have some feelings that there was an accomplice or second gun man, who did the first killing and then helped with the second. If Cho wanted to massacre people, why not at Ambler Johnston? What, if any connection, has been shown between Hilscher’s boyfriend, who also frequented the fire range, and Cho? Is the boyfriend cleared in the first shooting? The last account on this post, from the LA times, has material related to these questions. Here is an Washington Post article from the 18th that shows that the boyfriend, Karl D. Thornhill, was not completely accurate in what he told police. Thornhill told them that his guns were at his parents’ house, but they were found elsewhere. My sense is that Thornhill indeed might have had something to do with the crime. He might, for instance, have helped Cho train at that firing range, without knowing what Cho planned. But we need more information to theorize any further. OK – this new report says that police have cleared Thornhill of connection to the murder.

Two points here interest me:

In an early account of the shootings, a student (see first post on this blog, Columbine in Virginia) noted that police entered Norris Hall at 10.32 AM.

The second point is that the original time line given by Virginia Tech showed that police took only a minute to break in, just after 9:45.

Both accounts seem very different from the latest account.

For comparison, here is the first time line put out by the administration, taken from Salem News archives:

Tragedy at Virginia Tech – [Original] Timeline of Events

7:15 AM

Virginia Tech Police Department (VT PD) receives a 911 call to respond to a dormitory room at West Ambler Johnston Residence Hall.

Within minutes, Virginia Tech Police and Virginia Tech Rescue Squad respond to find two gunshot victims, a male and a female, inside a dormitory room within the Hall. The residence hall was immediately secured by VT PD and students within the hall were notified and asked to remain in their rooms for their safety. VT PD immediately secured the room for evidence collection and began questioning dorm residents and identifying potential witnesses. In the preliminary stages of the investigation, it was believed the deaths were an isolated incident, domestic in nature.

Blacksburg Police Department were also on scene assisting VT PD with establishing a safety perimeter around the residence hall and securing Washington Street.

7:30 AM Investigators were following up on leads concerning a person of interest in relation to the double homicide. Investigators from VT PD and Blacksburg PD were actively following up on various leads.

8:25 AM

Virginia Tech Leadership Team, which includes the university president, executive vice president, and provost, assembled to begin assessing the developing situation at the residence hall and determining a means of notifying students of the homicide.

9:00 AM

Leadership Team was briefed on the situation by VT PD Chief W.R. Flechum [sic – his real name is Flinchum] on the latest developments in the ongoing investigation at the residence hall.

9:26 AM

The Virginia Tech community – all faculty and students – were notified by e-mail of the homicide investigation and scene at West Ambler Johnston Residence Hall, and asked to report any suspicious activity to. The Virginia Tech Emergency/Weather Line recordings were also transmitted and a broadcast telephone message was made to campus phones. A press release was drafted and posted on the Virginia Tech Website.

9:45 AM The VT PD received a 911 call of a shooting at Norris Hall, which contains faculty offices, classrooms and laboratories. VT PD and Blacksburg PD immediately responded to Norris Hall. Notice in leadership command center via our police rep of a shooting in Norris.

Upon arrival to Norris Hall, the officers found the front doors barricaded. Within a minute the officers breached the doors, which had been chained shut from the inside.

Once inside the building, the officers heard gunshots. They followed the succession of gunshots to the second floor. Just as the officers reached the second floor, the gunshots stopped.

The officers discovered the gunman, who had taken his own life. There was never any engagement between the responding officers and the gunman.

9:55 AM

By the same means as prior notice, Virginia Tech notified campus community of the second murder scene. Other notifications followed via other means.

*****************************************************

Salem-News.com will have more on this story as soon as it becomes available.

And here is CNN with an account from students:

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At about 7:15 this morning, a 911 call came to the university police department concerning an event in West Ambler Johnston Hall. There were multiple shooting victims.

O’BRIEN: Matt Lewis and Matt Green of the campus EMT service were on duty. Their unit was one of the first on the scene.

MATT LEWIS, VIRGINIA TECH CAMPUS EMT: Well, the first call came out for a patient who had fallen out of a loft. And once they got on scene, they noticed that there were two patients with gunshot wounds.

O’BRIEN (on camera): At point, can you tell us if the victim was alive?

LEWIS: Both patients were at that time.

O’BRIEN (voice-over): Police began sweeping the dormitory. The gunman was still on the loose.

WENDELL FLINCHUM, VIRGINIA TECH POLICE CHIEF: It was an isolated event to that building and the decision was made not to cancel classes at that time.

O’BRIEN: Classes had been disrupted three days earlier after a bomb threat, but this time, no false alarm. The shooting left two students dead: 19-year-old Emily Hilscher, a freshman majoring in animal and poultry sciences, and 22-year-old Ryan Clark. His friends called him Stack. He was a resident adviser and played in the marching band. As an R.A., his job was to look at students and his friends speculate he may have been caught in the crossfire.

SHADIE TANIOUS, FRIEND: As an R.A., and a good person, he apparently was going to break up an argument or something like that and wrong place, wrong time. That’s kind of hard to think about.

O’BRIEN: At first, police believe the shooting was a domestic dispute, a romance gone horribly wrong. Their chief suspect, Emily’s boyfriend, Carl Thornhill who attended college nearby and was said to own guns. Investigators related all this to university administrators. By then, morning classes were underway, and Virginia Tech president Charles Steger saw no need to cancel them.

CHARLES STEGER, PRESIDENT, VIRGINIA TECH: The situation was characterized as being confined to that dormitory room. We thought we had it under control.

O’BRIEN: Thornhill would be held all day then released. So students and faculty weren’t told about the shootings. It was business as usual. Engineering student, Ryan Brody, had to be at work at 9:00 a.m.

RYAN BRODIE, ENGINEERING STUDENT, VIRGINIA TECH: I woke up and checked my e-mails because of the bomb threats that we had Friday and the buildings were being closed. So I checked the website and checked the e-mail and there was nothing in there. So I went to work.

O’BRIEN: Leslie Mel’s morning wasn’t off to a good start.

LESLIE MEL, STUDENT, VIRGINIA TECH: That morning I didn’t hear my alarm go off so I overslept.

O’BRIEN: And Laura Massey who lives off campus was facing an unusually chilly spring day.

LAURA MASSEY, STUDENT, VIRGINIA TECH: My roommate and I drive to campus. It was cold and we didn’t want to walk in the cold, so we decided to take the bus.

CLINT GRIFFON, STUDENT, VIRGINIA TECH: From even inside your room, you could hear it. Almost like in the movies, you know, you can tell something bad is going to happen.

O’BRIEN: Reama Samah (ph) and Erin Peterson (ph) bundled up and walked to class.

(on camera): Friends say that at about ten minutes of 9:00, Erin Peterson (ph) and Reama Samaha (ph) would be making their way out of their dorm room straight through this tunnel and off to French class in Norris Hall. The two are friends. They went to high school together and lived next door to each other in the dorm. And the fastest way to class was straight across the drill field.

(voice-over): 9:26 a.m., more than two hours after the shooting, a campus-wide e-mail was finally sent out notifying students and faculty. The e-mail urged caution, told students to call police with anything suspicious. But Reama (ph) and Erin (ph) French class was already under way. Was it too little too late?

STEGER: I don’t think anyone could have predicted that another event was going to take place.

O’BRIEN: But it did. By 9:46, there’s a hail of gunfire in Norris Hall. Coming up, the killer strikes again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O’BRIEN (voice-over): 9:45 a.m., more gunshots are heard.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How many shots do you exactly recall hearing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was at least 30 to 40.

O’BRIEN: This time the shots came from Norris Hall Engineering Building.

(on camera): The very first pictures we see come from right here where people are now diving behind these pillars to stay safe. Up on the second floor you could hear the gunfire. People are scrambling inside to get out any way they can. Those who try to get down the stairs discovered chained doors.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right after we got that e-mail, we heard five shots from campus. And we could hear the emergency speaker system.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is an emergency, this is an emergency.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So we all got down underneath the desks and moved away from the windows.

O’BRIEN: More images of the shooting captured by two Swedish exchange students who had just arrived the night before.

9:50 a.m., the university sends a second campus-wide e-mail warning of a gunman on the loose. Units from three police departments rush to Norris Hall.

NICK MALCO, WITNESSED SHOOTING: And we hear this loud sound out in the hallway. It was just bang, bang, bang, bang out in the hallway and you don’t really recognize what it is at all. It’s just kind out of place on campus.

ERIN SHEEHAN, WITNESSED SHOOTING: He just stepped in five feet from the door and started firing. He seemed very thorough about it.

MALCO: Not five, 10 seconds later, he tried to come into our room and tried to shove the door open. And at that point, we were like, OK, this is very, very serious, and he shot the door twice. We heard him reload outside and shot the door again and then just continued on.

O’BRIEN: 10:17, a third e-mail, this time ordering a campus lockdown.

BRODIE: They told us to stay inside. The gunman is on the loose on campus. He’s still at large and to stay in any buildings, or wherever you are, stay away from doors and windows, to try to keep everybody safe and to keep him from being attracted to other buildings.

REBECCA MACDANIEL, STUDENT, VIRGINIA TECH: They locked all of us in the bookstore and kept us in the center of the bookstore.

STEGER: Upon arrival to Norris, the officers found the front doors barricaded. Within a minute, the officers breached the doors which had been chained shut from the inside. Once inside the building, the officers heard gunshots. They followed the succession of gunshots to the second floor. Just as officers reached the second floor, the gunshots stopped. The officers discovered the gunman who had taken his own life.

O’BRIEN: Police discovered the gruesome crime scene, students and faculty, dead, in four classrooms and in a stairway. The wounded were carried outside to emergency medical teams.

SARAH WALKER, EMT: There were five very seriously injured people in front of me and they needed to get out and they were my priority.

O’BRIEN: One of the injured was Emily Haas. Two bullets grazed her head.

EMILY HAAS, SHOOTING VICTIM: When I got hit, I felt it, and I didn’t know if I was hurt, if I was shot, and I did try to keep really still and hoping that he would think I was already dead.

O’BRIEN: 12:22 p.m., university officials announce the campus was secured. But still the enormity of the tragedy was still not clear.

From the LA Times, an account of what happened:

April 18, 2007

As community mourns dead, details of gunman’s rampage, background emerge. A dark day: Sequence of events paints tragic picture

BLACKSBURG, Va. — It was still dark at 5:30 a.m. when Karan Grewal bumped into his roommate in the bathroom of their suite in Virginia Tech’s Harper Hall. Grewal had been up all night studying, but he knew better than to grumble to Cho Sueng-Hui.

None of the guys in the suite talked to Cho. They had tried, at first, but Cho never answered; he rarely responded even to a simple, “Hi.” His roommates figured he didn’t speak much English.

On this blustery Monday, Cho was in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, getting ready for the day. Grewal, 21, washed up and went back to his bedroom to get some rest. He fell asleep about 7 a.m.

Twelve hours later, police would come knocking.

The first shots

The 911 call came in at 7:15 a.m.: Gunshots at a college dorm.

Campus police rushed to West Ambler Johnston Hall, a century-old stone building on the east side of the expansive campus. On the fourth floor, officers found two bodies.

There was no weapon and no sign of the gunman. There was also little panic. Several of the nearly 900 students in the co-ed dorm said they slept through the gunfire. Some noticed police outside; a few heard ambulance sirens. But many went about their morning as usual, bundling in warm clothes as they headed off to class in the swirling snow.

Heather Haugh, who had been off campus for the weekend, walked up to the dorm shortly before 7:30 a.m. She was planning to meet her roommate, Emily Hilscher, so they could walk to chemistry class together. But police pulled her aside at the door.

Investigators told Haugh, 18, that her roommate had been shot. They began asking about Hilscher’s romances. Haugh told them what she knew: Her roommate had spent the weekend on another college campus with her boyfriend, Karl Thornhill.

The police asked about guns; Haugh told them Thornhill recently had taken both girls to a shooting range for fun. She told police she believed he kept the weapons at his home in Blacksburg.

Though Haugh described her roommate as having “a perfect relationship with her boyfriend,” investigators suspected the shooting was prompted by a lovers’ quarrel. They relayed their theory to university administrators at an 8:25 a.m. meeting. By then, classes were under way, and President Charles W. Steger saw no need to cancel them. “We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.

Investigators, meanwhile, had pulled Thornhill over as he was driving off campus. He raised their suspicion at once by contradicting Haugh’s account. His guns were not at his home, he said; he had taken them to his parents’ house in Boston, Va., about 370 miles away. He also denied that he and Hilscher had spent the weekend at Longwood University in Farmville, about 140 miles from Blacksburg.

Campus Police Det. Stephanie Henley requested a search warrant for a residence believed to be linked to Thornhill. She was looking, she wrote, for “firearms, ammunition, bloody clothing … ”

Authorities are as yet unwilling to clear Thornhill; he “remains a person of interest,” according to the state police superintendent, Col. Steven Flaherty.

But Flaherty also said it’s “reasonable to assume” that Cho committed the murders at Ambler Johnston Hall. Why he might have targeted that dorm, that room, is murky. There’s no evidence that he knew Hilscher. He was a 23-year-old English major, a taciturn loner; she was an upbeat 19-year-old studying animal sciences, so close to her family, she called her mom every day.

If Cho had planned a massacre, he had ample opportunity to shoot other victims; the dorm was filled with sleeping students. But only one other student, 22-year-old senior Ryan Clark, was shot in the dorm, known as AJ. Then the gunman fled.

Nearly 21/2 hours later, Cho turned up in Norris Hall, a science and engineering building a half-mile from AJ. ….

Cho bought a Glock 9 mm pistol here for $535, 30 rounds (other reports say 50?) of ammunition included…………

As required by law, he presented identification: A Virginia driver’s license, checks that matched the address on the license and a federal immigration card to prove he’s a legal U.S. resident. He passed a background check and left the store with his gun.
*********
At the end of the semester, Giovanni gave him an A- not for talent or effort, but because she feared angering him.
“I think he liked the idea that he was a scary guy,” Giovanni said…………..

…. Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site. He said he and other students “were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”

His five roommates found him hard to read. He worked out in the gym. He downloaded music. Other than that, they could identify few of his habits, except that he sometimes just sat in his room, staring vacantly ahead.

Norris Hall rampage

The shootings inside Norris Hall unfolded in fragments of sounds.

The clank of an empty ammunition clip falling to the floor. A scream. A siren. The scrape of a desk being pushed to barricade a classroom door.

And the shots, an unrelenting staccato. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

It started about 9:40 a.m., about 15 minutes after campus administrators sent a brief e-mail to all students and staff titled: “Shooting on campus.” The e-mail made note of “a shooting incident” in the AJ dorm and urged everyone “to be cautious.” But it raised no specific alarm.

The students in Herr Bishop’s German class, in Room 207, didn’t feel particularly concerned when a young man poked his head into their classroom. He took a look and left.

Moments later, he was back.

He shot the professor, Christopher James Bishop, in the head. Students screamed and hid under desks; Cho kept shooting. He said nothing. (LR: early account says he said “Hello, how are you?”) He did not appear to be looking for anyone in particular. He just fired and fired again.

***************
At 9:45 a.m., police responded to a 911 call from Norris Hall. Officers found the front doors blockaded. A second e-mail went out to students and staff: “A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows.”

Police began blaring warnings over loudspeakers: (Should have been done at 7:15) This is an emergency. Take shelter. Resident advisers went door to door in the dorms, pounding on walls, yelling at students to stay in their rooms — or in some cases, to come down to a common area where they could wait out the lockdown together.

The scene outside Norris was chaotic. Within moments of arriving, heavily armed officers had broken through the chained doors (LR – New reports say they took 5 minutes) and stormed up the stairs, following the sound of gunshots. Law-enforcement personnel lined the street outside, carrying rifles and assault weapons.

They screamed at any student who wandered close: “Get back! Get back!”

But from outside, the terror was not obvious. Chris Hinkel, 18, heard the bang-bang-bang and assumed the noise had something to do with the construction work going on nearby. “Nobody,” he said, “was as worried as they should’ve been.”

Students, escorted by officers, began fleeing Norris Hall, hands in the air. An ambulance was pulled up to the sidewalk and a still body, strapped to a gurney, was loaded.

Finally secure

The scale of the tragedy would not emerge for several hours.

At 10:16 a.m., students and staff got a third e-mail telling them that classes had been canceled. “Those on campus are asked to remain where they are, lock their doors and stay away from windows.”

At 10:52, a fourth e-mail described “multiple shooting with victims in Norris Hall.” Again, everyone was asked to stay inside.

It was not until shortly after 1 p.m. that Campus Police Chief Wendell R. Flinchum made this announcement: “We believe campus is secure.” Slowly, students came out of their rooms.

Some went to Norris Hall. The sidewalk outside was stained with blood. Others headed to counseling sessions held inside the AJ dorm. ROTC cadets gathered to pray at the War Memorial Chapel, on the vast green field at the heart of campus.

At 7 p.m., law-enforcement officers rapped on the door of Harper Hall 2121. (LR: Seems very late to get to Cho)

They went into Cho’s bedroom and began packing his belongings into brown bags.

According to the search warrant, police were seeking, “tools, documents, computer hardware … weapons, ammunition, explosives … instructional manuals for criminal acts of mass destruction and acts of terror.”

The police spent five hours examining Cho’s room and interviewing roommates. When they left at midnight, they told Grewal that Cho was suspected in the mass shooting. He had been found dead in Norris Hall, apparently of a self-inflicted wound, the guns at his side, a receipt for one still in his backpack.

 

 

V-Tech: Cho – Important early conflicts in reports- 5/1

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I am trying to keep track of early reporting.

Update: This article from April 17th night (the day after)

talks about the NY Times and Washington Post reporting on two notes – one next to the body and one in the dorm, but also says that the police so far have found no suicide note – after they just went through the dorm. Now, of course, there is a suicide note, only it’s not entirely sure where it was found. That’s besides the bomb threat note next to Cho. Quite the author. Video clips, photos, web posting, manifestos, 1 or more bomb threat notes, 8-page confessional, a suicide note…

Here is the most significant divergence I can find. Chen is the Chinese student whose interview seems to have been the source of the early report that the gunman had been shot in the back of the head which had blown apart his face and also of the report that the first killing had been sparked by jealousy. Here there is also Steger’s comment that two gunmen had been involved and that the two incidents were unrelated.

Here is a blog post that suggests evidence for a second shooter. The evidence that is cited could be interpreted otherwise. Some of the discrepancies are likely due to confusion. The only parts that are strong are the alleged statement of the last survivor in the room that the shooter ran away, the nature of the wounds Cho received (not confirmed), differences observed between the video Cho and the photo we have, the tightness of the schedule of events that day, and a statement that Cho was seen with 3 Americans in the days preceding (no confirming report). Also the killer was not descibed having a backpack. whereas Cho’s was found in the hall. This is easily explained. Cho simply put his book bag down before shooting. This Richmond Times article also contradicts the theory as it states that Cho was shot in the temple. Here is another report. This also describes a single shot to the head that left the face unrecognizable. But it says nothing about Cho bringing a book bag, whereas this one says he had a ruck sack with knives and the ammo as well as chains I suppose. Another report also contends that he did not have books with him. I don’t know if this was just the reporter’s inference or whether it was based on an eyewitness account.

In any case, Cho did not seem to have classes in Norris. The Richmond Times account also describes Cho having had two speeding tickets (not one, as later reports have stated) and photographing the women’s basketball team (he was reportedly an avid basketball player). It also describes his routine in the previous days — that he had been getting up earlier and earlier. I am not sure if it is Grewal who pulled the all-nighter that Sunday or Cho. Cho is descibed as taking his usual medication in the bathroom, though what medication is not specified. He is also described elsewhere as applying acne medicine. We learn from the report that according to the time stamp on the video, parts of it were shot (probably in his room) at around 7: 45 just after the shooting. Yet, his roommates do no recall him remembering to Harper. The packet was received at the post office just after 9 and he entered Norris at 9:15 it seems.

At this point, it just seems like the usual confusion when a story breaks, but I am keeping note of the changes.

1. Cho was first reported as being Chinese and here is a report that he was 6 ft and in a boy scout outfit – tan vest and black jacket. No book bag carried. This report also says 6 ft. Cho was actually 5 ft. 8″ – much smaller. That could be confusion of course.Here’s an article in the Chicago Sun Times with hat information. This is reportedly the google cache of the original story which is now off the web. It appears to have caused a flurry in the Chinese media and some speculation on how or why the mistake was made. There is also a theory that I saw posted on a Korean blog, which includes more details of the crime scene, and speculates that Cho was killed himself and had an accomplice. It says he was killed with 1 shot to the back of the head and 2 to the chest (haven’t seen this elsewhere), that the real killer was 6 ft and was seen running away (that is supported by other early reports that describe 2 shooters either running away or being apprehended. It also compares Columbine where 3 guns, 2 shooters and 900 bullets were involved in the death of 13 people and notes Cho’s remarkable performance as incompatible with what we know of his firearm skill.

2. He was first reported as having had a relationship with Emily Hilscher, later denied.

3. There was also the early report about his obsession with Counterstrike, subsequently denied by a suite mate.

4. A report on the package – clarifies what the number 43 referred to – the photos. 28 (or 29) seems to be the number of the video clips.

It contained an 1,800-word diatribe and 43 photos, 11 of them showing Cho aiming handguns at the camera. He also sent 28 video clips.

5. Cho described in later reports as laughing after each shot…but early witness reports that he was impassive.

6. The chains with which he locked three entrances to Norris Hall (the number was from later reports) are not from Home Depot has reported.

7. I haven’t seen any correction of the reporting of this as the worst school shooting, which it is not.

8. This is a report of the second time CIA recruiters visited the campus in 2005, Nov 16. Students were planning a teach in to protest the visit because of the news of the CIA torture policies just then published in the Washington Post (including the outsourcing of torture). No evidence linking Cho to the visit or the teach in though. Cho’s behavior however had been sullen and/or mean prior to the recruitment visit, from the testimony of teachers that fall.

Just in case, it’s pulled, here it is:

CIA recruiting at Virginia Tech

The Truth Will Set You Free
Tuesday April 17, 2007

“The single shooter was unusally effective at killing, almost as if he had been trained to do so.” –mparent7777

From November 2005 . . .
For the second time this year, the Central Intelligence Agency will be coming to Virginia Tech to recruit students.

And for the second time this year, they will be met with protests from students who view the CIA as an immoral organization that engages in torture and murder.

Nicholas Kiersey organized a protest last spring when the CIA came to campus. He released the following statement Monday about the CIA’s trip to Torgeson 3100 Thursday at 7 p.m.:

“Blacksburg, VA November 13, 2005 – A coalition of concerned graduate students and campus organizations at Virginia Tech are this Thursday staging a ‘teach in’ to protest CIA recruitment on campus. Planned events also include the protest of a ‘career information’ session to be held by the CIA later that evening.

On November 2nd, 2005 the Washington Post published an article entitled “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons”. The article reported that the CIA has set up a covert network of secret prisons and interrogation centers, known as “black sites”, in several countries around the world, including several democracies in Eastern Europe and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Prisoners at these facilities are held indefinitely and often in isolation, without due process of the law. Moreover, CIA interrogators working at these sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. Among the tactics approved for use are “waterboarding”, intended to induce in prisoners the idea that they are drowning.

While intelligence officials defend the unrestricted operation of these sites as necessary for the successful defense of the country, it should be noted that both the sites and the suspected practices carried out at them would be illegal if operated within the USA, which is a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Importantly, the same is true for the democratic host states in Eastern Europe where some of these sites are located.

The ‘Teach In’ will take place on Thursday, Nov. 17, 5-6.30pm, in Torgerson 3100. The event will feature talks by Virginia Tech instructors and the presentation of a draft letter to President Steger’s office, signed by a number of concerned Virginia Tech faculty and students.

The letter will request that Virginia Tech place a moratorium on all CIA activities on Virginia Tech’s campus until such time as a thorough and independent investigation certifies that the organization has been thoroughly reformed and no longer engages in practices that contravene international law and basic standards of human rights.

The CIA’s scheduled ‘career information’ session will take place at 7pm in the same location.

Sponsoring campus organizations include: The International Club and Amnesty International at Virginia Tech.”

Lucinda Roy, a co-director of the creative writing program at Virginia Tech, taught Cho in a poetry class in fall of 2005 and later worked with him one-on-one after she became concerned about his behavior and themes in his writings.

Roy spoke outside her home Tuesday afternoon, saying that there was nothing explicit in Cho’s writings, but that threats were there under the surface.

Roy told ABC News that Cho seemed “extraordinarily lonely–the loneliest person I have ever met in my life.” She said he wore sunglasses indoors, with a cap pulled low over his eyes. He whispered, took 20 seconds to answer questions, and took cellphone pictures of her in class. Roy said she was concerned for her safety when she met with him.”

Note that Cho accordint to this never spoke above whispers..many of his suite mates had never heard him speak. He is said to have had a form of autism or speech impediment. But yet, he spoke clearly on the videotape and the psychologist made no mention on his evaluation of a speech problem.

Here are the plays that Cho wrote in ?? that were posted

One play attributed to him, called “Richard McBeef,” describes a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia, and ends with the boy’s death.

In another, called “Mr. Brownstone,” three high-school students face an abusive teacher.

“I wanna kill him,” says one character.

“I wanna watch him bleed like the way he made us kids bleed,” says another.

The two plays were posted on AOL after a staffer named Ian MacFarlane, a December 2006 graduate of Virginia Tech, brought them to his editors’ attention.

MacFarlane said he was in a class with Cho in which students were required to post their plays online for peer review and comment.” ( so that places the plays also in the fall of 2005)

My Comment: If something caused this much rage (assuming this is not just imagination or fantasy at work)

why were Cho’s earlier creative efforts (he must have taken creative writing in high school or something earlier in college) not filled with stuff like this? Could the triggering event have occurred in 2005?

Under Virginia law, state residents can only buy one handgun in any 30-day period, suggesting Cho bought his second weapon after April 13 or sometime over the weekend.

“He clearly spent some time figuring out how he was going to take care of business once classes began on Monday morning,” said Garrett.

The date of the first gun purchase will likely serve as the time of “some triggering mechanism that was very important” to Cho said Garrett, an expert on profiling murderers. http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/04/massacre_gun_57.html

http://blogs.roanoke.com/campuswatch/archives/cia_recruiting.html

Also, information that Cho’s uncle was a contractor to the state department.

More contradictions in the archives of the Salem news
http://salem-news.com/articles/april162007/shooting_update_41607.php

Here’s the original explanation:

When he was asked why students weren’t alerted to the imminent danger from a man with a gun, he said, “They had reason to believe the shooter had left the campus.”

Now, they say, the campus was too big, they were afraid people would run into the shooter and what if he had gone into his dorm room anyway.

Sadly, many of the students failed to see the email and as a consequence, walked into the gunman’s line of fire. Many are saying that the school should have closed immediately, and that they were far from prepared for this kind of a situation. That, in spite of a shooting on the campus on the first day of the school year and the recent bomb threats.

These are the emails that were sent to student from the University:

E-MAIL 1
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 9:26 AM
To: Multiple recipients
Subject: Shooting on campus.

A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning.

Police are on the scene and are investigating.

The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case. Contact Virginia Tech Police at XXX – XXXX

Stay attuned to the www.vt.edu. We will post as soon as we have more information.

E-MAIL 2
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 9:50 AM
To: Multiple recipients
Subject: PLease stay put

A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows

Subject: PLease stay put

A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows

E-MAIL 3
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:17 AM
To: Multiple recipients
Subject: All Classes Canceled; Stay where you are

Virginia Tech has canceled all classes. Those on campus are asked to remain where there are, lock their doors and stay away from windows. Persons off campus are asked not to come to campus.

E-MAIL 4
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:53 AM
To: Multiple recipients
Subject: Second Shooting Reported; Police have one gunman in custody

In addition to an earlier shooting today in West Ambler Johnston, there has been a multiple shooting with multiple victims in Norris Hall.

Police and EMS are on the scene.

Police have one shooter in custody and as part of routine police procedure, they continue to search for a second shooter.

All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until further notice.

All entrances to campus are closed.

They first thought it was Morva:

Media outlets are reporting the name of the accused gunman as William Morva. Again, there are conflicting reports at this time, but most indicate that the gunman is dead.

Oddities in Cho’s Psychiatric Confinement

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Here is a Salon piece by Bonnie Goldstein with the relevant documents. I had posted it last night, with detailed commentary and then deleted it this morning – darn!

So – here goes again:

First, the Salon piece:

In December 2005, two undergraduate women at Virginia Tech complained about inappropriate messages they’d received from fellow student Cho Seung-Hui. A licensed social worker, Kathy Godbey, assessed Cho’s behavior and petitioned a Virginia magistrate for Cho’s “involuntary admission” to a mental-health facility (see below). The magistrate found “probable cause” to believe the young man was “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization” and issued a temporary detention order.

Cho was taken to the Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health facility in New River Valley, Va. Using the four-page involuntary admission form provided by Virginia’s Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services, psychologist Roy Crouse observed that, although the patient’s affect was “flat” and his mood “depressed,” he “denie[d] suicidal ideations” (see Page 3). Crouse (a Ph.D., though not a physician as state law requires) wrote that Cho did not “acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder.” Cho’s “insight and judgment [were] normal.” Also noted in the exam: Cho had no previous psychiatric care and was not on medication.

The patient exercised his right to counsel by court-appointed attorney Terry W. Teel (see Page 2), and his case was considered and decided by Special Justice and Guardian Ad Litem Paul M. Barnett. Justice Barnett found that although Cho presented “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness,” there were suitable “alternatives to involuntary hospitalization” available. Cho was ordered instead to get outpatient treatments (see Page 5). No record has been found to confirm whether Cho, who killed 32 people and himself on April 16, ever sought or received the court-ordered treatment.

Also, in this regard, here is what we know about the possibility that he was taking drugs:

“Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of him in the governments files on controlled substances. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in computer databases, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search. (NOTE: Some readers may have inferred from an earlier edition of this story that the federal government keeps a comprehensive record of all prescriptions. The Drug Enforcement Agency says it does track prescriptions of so-called controlled substances — including some mood-altering medications — but not all prescriptions made in the United States.)”

My Analysis:

1. It looks like Cho was never seen at any point in all this by a medical MD.

2. He was assessed by a licensed social worker, a magistrate, a special justice and guardian ad litem, and a PhD psychologist whose evaluation of his mental state ranged from finding him mentally ill and a threat to society and finding him largely normal and just depressed.

3. He clearly was not evaluated for any extended length of time – hardly a day at best.

4. No records were retained (perhaps not even kept) of his subsequent treatment.

5. No one followed up or monitored his treatment, or if they did, we have no records of it now.

6. No one informed the university or his parents. The argument is that privacy laws prevented the health system from doing so.
7. Cho went voluntarily to the police, and they referred him which posed a problem under Virginia law, since, as I said the Chris Wallace post, the form that Virginia courts use to notify the state police about a mental health disqualification only addresses the state criteria, which lists two potential categories that would warrant notification to the state police – someone who was “involuntarily committed” or ruled mentally “incapacitated,” neither of which ended up applying to Cho.

So, the problem was that Cho went “voluntarily” and wasn’t ruled incapacitated. From my earlier post:
“But didn’t anyone realize the potential danger here. OK. the two V-Tech students didn’t press stalking charges, but what happened to the arson charge? How does that not pose a threat to anyone else? Didn’t any of the teachers, like Nikki Giovanni, who found him so intimidating in class, want to find out where he was with his treatment?

Here’s a comment from one of the students (I think he was in Edward Falco’s class):

“Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.

After hearing about the mass shootings, I sent one of my friends a Facebook message asking him if he knew anything about Seung Cho and if he could have been involved. He replied: “dude that’s EXACTLY what I was thinking! No, I haven’t heard anything, but seriously, that was the first thing I thought when I heard he was Asian.”

While I “knew” Cho, I always wished there was something I could do for him, but I couldn’t think of anything. As far as notifying authorities, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any system set up that lets people say “Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this guy!” If there were, I definitely would have tried to get the kid some help. I think that could have had a good chance of averting yesterday’s tragedy more than anything.”

So, as I argued from the beginning, there is a clear case of negligence here, and indeed that is what experts are saying now:

“So here was a man who was actively intimidating other students and who had inappropriately and repeatedly photographed and contacted female students. His own suite mates say he was a stalker. That the university did not suspend Cho for such violations makes a solid case for negligence.

In a rational legal system, the school would be held accountable for its errors. But Virginia Tech is a state institution, and Virginia is a state where the doctrine of sovereign immunity remains quite robust. That doctrine, a relic of English common law, essentially says the state can do no wrong because the state creates the law and thus cannot be subject to it. Many states have relaxed sovereign immunity and made it possible for victims of, say, botched operations to sue state hospitals. But Krauss of George Mason University says the Virginia Tech victims’ families would probably have to seek an exception to sovereign immunity from the Supreme Court of Virginia in order to sue the school.

There’s a simpler way: Steger, the university president, should stop withholding documents on how the university mishandled Cho and take responsibility for his school’s lax approach. And then he should resign.”

More on V-Tech response and crime-scene details

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This from an upcoming Newsweek report (4/30) posted online gives some insight into how the university administration operates:

“Virginia Tech’s president, Charles Steger, had been through campus emergencies before. Early last fall, a prison convict had escaped near the university’s sprawling, 2,600-acre campus in rural Virginia, and gunned down a hospital guard and a sheriff’s deputy. Steger had ordered some students to evacuate their classroom building. But as he discussed what to do this time around with other top university officials, he recalled having some second thoughts about that earlier decision. What if an evacuation meant sending the students right into the cross hairs of the shooter? Maybe it was better to keep them where they were and not arouse panic.

(LR: I will go back and find Steger’s earlier excuse about why he did not shut down the campus – which was that it was too large, almost like a town. He didn’t say anything about sending people running into the shooter earlier.

No explanation why the PA system was not used either or a radio announcement made.)

As Steger and his lieutenants debated in the University Board Room in Burress Hall at around 9:45 a.m., a police report came in: there had been another shooting. Steger thought he heard something that sounded like gunshots. He looked up, he recalled to NEWSWEEK. He wondered if the noise was coming from a nearby construction site. Then he noticed police running toward Norris Hall. Steger ordered security to lock the doors to the president’s office. “I thought it could be a target,” he says.

LR: Yes – they had time to do that. No comment needed I think. Steger refused to step down despite requests.
Here’s more. As you can see, they don’t mention anything about student being sent into the arms of the shooter:

“Steger emphasized that the university closed off the dorm after the first attack and decided to rely on e-mail and other electronic means to notify members of the university, but with 11,000 people driving onto campus first thing in the morning, it was difficult to get the word out. He said that before the e-mail went out, the university began telephoning resident advisers in the dorms to notify them and sent people to knock on doors to spread the word. ”

Let’ see that the students thought of that:

Some students bitterly questioned why the gunman was able to strike a second time. “What happened today, this was ridiculous,” student Jason Piatt told CNN. “While they send out that e-mail, 20 more people got killed.”

Students and Laura Wedin, a student programs manager at Virginia Tech, said the first notification they got of the shootings came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m., more than two hours after the first shooting.

The e-mail had few details. It read: “A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.” The message warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.

Student Maurice Hiller said he went to a 9 a.m. class two buildings away from the engineering building, and no warnings were coming over the outdoor public address system on campus at the time.

Everett Good, junior, said of the lack of warning: “I’m trying to figure that out. Someone’s head is definitely going to roll over that.”

“We were kept in the dark a lot about exactly what was going on,” said Andrew Capers Thompson, a 22-year-old graduate student from Walhalla, S.C.

Some students bitterly questioned why the gunman was able to strike a second time. “What happened today, this was ridiculous,” student Jason Piatt told CNN. “While they send out that e-mail, 20 more people got killed.”

Students and Laura Wedin, a student programs manager at Virginia Tech, said the first notification they got of the shootings came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m., more than two hours after the first shooting.

The e-mail had few details. It read: “A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.” The message warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.

Student Maurice Hiller said he went to a 9 a.m. class two buildings away from the engineering building, and no warnings were coming over the outdoor public address system on campus at the time.

Everett Good, junior, said of the lack of warning: “I’m trying to figure that out. Someone’s head is definitely going to roll over that.”

“We were kept in the dark a lot about exactly what was going on,” said Andrew Capers Thompson, a 22-year-old graduate student from Walhalla, S.C.

*************

And then some details I missed about the crime scene:

The gunman found dead yesterday by authorities from apparently self-inflicted wounds had been described to MSNBC by an injured student as a college-aged Asian with a maroon hat and black leather jacket.

Authorities found a cellphone at the scene that initially led them to believe the killer was a Virginia Tech student from China.

VTech Response Did Not Conform Even to Recent VTech Guidelines

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TheOnlineBarAssociation:

 

There was a time gap of almost two hours between the first two murders at West Ambler-Johnston and the 30 deaths at Norris Hall in Virginia Tech. In the two hour gap, Cho Seung-Hui gathered a 23-page manifesto, 27 videos, and photos; sent the package to NBC as a press release; and then
returned to Virginia Tech to finish his heinous agenda.

 

During that two hour break, authorities never thought of alerting students about the two on-campus homicides. They assumed that there was no further threat to other students. When asked about their failure to take precautionary measures, authorities answered that random acts of violence cannot be prevented. They also noted that it’s hard to warn 26,000 students at the same time.

 

Their explanation is unacceptable. As pointed out by concerned organizations, if a simple text messaging system had been in place, and a message had been sent from the authorities, preventive measures could have been taken. At the very least, classes could have been conducted inside closed doors. If precautionary measures were taken, many of those slaughtered students would still be attending class today.

 

Institutions of higher education have their own policies for handling mentally ill or suicidal students. Recently, the state of Virginia felt compelled to change the law. The Act, H 3064 of Virginia, approved by the Governor on March 21, 2007, reads:

 

“The governing boards of each public institution of higher education shall develop and implement policies that advise students, faculty, and staff, including residence hall staff, of the proper procedures for identifying and addressing the needs of students exhibiting suicidal tendencies or behavior. The policies shall ensure that no student is penalized or expelled solely for attempting to commit suicide or seeking mental health treatment for suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Nothing in this section shall preclude any public institution of higher education from establishing policies and procedures for appropriately dealing with students who are a danger to themselves, or to others, and whose behavior is disruptive to the academic community.”

 

A temporary detention order of the court, like that obtained for Cho in 2005, means that under Virginia law, the magistrate found Cho to be both “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment.” It also found Cho to be “an imminent danger to himself or others, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for himself.”

 

The fact that Nikki Giovanni had Cho removed from her class shows that Cho was disruptive to the academic community.

 

H 3064 clearly stated that it did not preclude those governing the institution from establishing policies and procedures for appropriately dealing with students who are a danger to themselves or to others, and whose behavior is disruptive to the academic community.

VTech – Psychiatric Drugs in Past School Shootings

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Here is a partial list of recent school shootings caused by or linked to the use of psychiatric drugs:

“In eight recent school shootings, psychiatric drugs were the common factor, in other instances, the shooter’s medical records were never made public and their psychiatric drug use remains in question.

September 28, 2006: Bailey, Colorado: Duane Morrison, 53, entered Platte Canyon High School and shot and killed one girl, and sexually assaulted 6 others. Antidepressants were found in his vehicle.

March 21, 2005: Red Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota: 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac when he shot and killed nine people and wounding five before committing suicide.

April 10, 2001: Wahluke, Washington: 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage while on a high dose of the antidepressant Effexor.

March 22, 2001: El Cajon, California: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants, Effexor and Celexa, when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five.

March 7, 2000: Williamsport, Pennsylvania: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on the antidepressant Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.

May 20, 1999: Conyers, Georgia: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with a mix of antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded 6 of his classmates.

April 20, 1999: Columbine, Colorado: 18-year-old Eric Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox when he and his partner Dylan Klebold killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 23 others before taking their own lives in the bloodiest school massacre to date. The coroner confirmed that the antidepressant was in his system through toxicology reports while Dylan Klebold’s autopsy was never made public.

April 16, 1999: Notus, Idaho: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school narrowly missing students; he was taking a mix of antidepressants.

May 21, 1998: Springfield, Oregon: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his own parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Kinkel had been on Prozac.”

Here is the link to the report, “Psychiatric Drugs And Anger Management Curricula – A Perspective on School Violence,” by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. (I should point out something I didn’t realize at the time I posted, which is that the CCHR is connected to Scientology. I think the statistics are fairly reliable though. I will add another link to back this material from another source.

The report notes the following interesting statistics about the rise of school shooting.
1991-1996: FDA approval of selected SSI drugs (a class of antidepressants including Prozac and Zoloft) for adult use only.

1990-2005: 38% increase in pediatric use of stimulants that FDA claims cause psychosis, mania, aggression and (on withdrawal) suicidal ideation

1987-2002: 50o% under-18 use of anti-depressants

1974-2000 (1.4 school shootings a year, on average)

1988-2006 (2.5 school shootings a year, on average).

The rise in school shootings has been the rationale for the introduction of Immediate Action Rapid Deployment tactics into the police, especially after the 1999 Columbine shootings).

In turn, that coincides with the increasing militarization of the police in response to terror threats, most noticeably, of course, after 9/11.

The CCHR report above is especially persuasive when it argues that so-called anger-management and counseling approaches are fairly useless, distract from real problems and are mosly nothing more than an excuse for school administrators to claim that they are doing everything they can.

Indeed, at V-Tech we now have cries for further laws, policies and programs, even though it’s pretty clear that the laws and programs already in place have either not been implemented at all or have been implemented so poorly and without common sense that we might as well not have had them.

A plethora of laws also lets everone follow the rules (trivially) without paying attention to what those rules are supposed to foster.

In this case university administration, the mental health system and the police all, in effect, operated on their own, claiming to be responsible “thus far and no further,” and ultimately leaving absolutely no one responsible for seeing the whole process through, treating Cho, or – most importantly – protecting the students he lived with.

A legal and bureaucratic apparatus, in other words, can just as well let everyone off the hook as hold people accountable.

Actually, it seems that Virginia state has been zealous enough, turning in some 80,000 names of people who shouldn’t own guns to the FBI – it’s just that Cho’s was not on them. Why? Because Viriginia law denies guns to the “mentally defective” and those committed to a psychiatric institution – neither of which describes Cho.

So, the problem wasn’t any lack of laws. It was the lack of a common sense application of the law – charges not being pressed, records not being kept, lack of communication between various departments. There’s not much question to my mind that human error or negligence caused this disaster.

http://www.nbc4.com/news/12716444/detail.html

A further thought: even if drugs don’t show up in the blood, this report suggests that withdrawal from drugs could cause similar aggressive moods.

Another thought: in a manic mood, people do a number of things that would be implausible in a normal person. I am noting this since some bloggers are suggesting that the scenario of Cho killing 2 people, walking a couple of miles, and then killing 30 others all in about 2-21/2 hours is improbable.

Live Journal has a comment on the “More Gun Laws or Fewer Idiots,” piece, on which I have some dissenting thoughts, related to the drug issue:

” I think the gendered violence angle has so far been under-explored. This man was a documented stalker, and, at least at first, only targeted women. The perpetrators of all spree school shootings I’m aware of have been angry young men, more often than not targeting young women. In my opinion, the popular press chronically ignores this truism in favor of low-hanging culture targets. Male aggression and male socialization is probably the real issue here.”

I will comment on this later. It’s too far afield for me right now.

Keep and Bear Arms – VT Shooting & Guns on Campus

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Some comments from Keep and Bear Arms on my article, “More Guns Laws or Fewer Idiots”.
I am posting them, because I want to comment on my implied support for gun-free zones on campus:

QUOTE:

“Taking a momentary aside from the point;- I’ve yet to know any person having undergone the extensive formalities involved with securing for themselves a State-required permit for lawful carry of a concealed weapon as ‘packing heat’. In stark contrast, what is realized by persons who are permitted and other Moral and Conscionable persons, permit required or not–but having assumed their Duty as an American Citizen to provide themselves with Arms for their own Defense is the solemn and additional weight of responsibility for protection of other persons. Forgive my uneducated instinct, but a measure of transparency is indicated within the wording used by an ex-English teacher Lila Rajiva, suggestive that she herself does not ’pack heat’.

Comment by: Slowburn 2 (4/19/2007)
The Crucial Understanding.At the risk of insulting the intelligence of Lila Rajiva, my impression is such and open to any necessary correction; that specific decisions were in fact made by at least two ‘authorities’, Faculty and State legislators–the former prohibiting the carrying of a personal defense weapon even by ‘qualified’ individuals under the penalty of expulsion, and the latter failing to Secure the “Right” of individuals to carry a firearm for defensive purposes on campus. Regardless of their intent–such persons have in fact committed Immoral Offenses.
(Cont’d)


Comment by: Slowburn 3 (4/19/2007)
For certain ‘authorities’ to intentionally and knowingly establish laws, prohibitions or penalties depriving only those who would abide by such laws and prohibitions from possessing an implement which another person could readily use against them in a “Rights”-Violating Act is Immoral.
This primary and most fundamental principle is
EXACTLY WHAT MUST BE UNDERSTOOD or NOTHING HAS BEEN UNDERSTOOD AT ALL.

My Comment:

My position on the bearing of arms on campus has not been extensively thought out, and I admit that I did not know that on many campuses (including that of George Washington University – see the posts on legal issues raised on Chris Wallace’s show), security personnel do not (or can not) carry weapons. That – to me – is amazing, considering the very open nature of many campuses.

I don’t actually object to guns on campuses (which are often sprawling, dangerous places), but then, what happens in a classroom? Are we going to have metal detectors and frisking before each class, or is the teacher supposed to be able to deliver herself of a lecture on Rousseau and a few rounds from a firearm with equal aplomb should she become the target of, say, a student irate about his grades?

That goes a shade beyond the traditional requirement of faculty to maintain discipline, it seems to me….

In a confined space, as in a lab or a classroom or a plane, the same rules should not obtain – since people are not equally able to protect themselves or move out of danger. At least, that’s my intuitive thought on this.
There ought to be an argument here that by-passes the “rights” language altogether, thereby leaving the second amendment substantively uninfringed.

I need to think about this a lot more, though, before I feel I can stake out a position one way or other. In any case, I admit the use of the phrase “packing heat” was intended to load an argument I made on intuitive grounds that the classroom situation is analytically different.

One way to go is suggested by Alexander Cockburn in a recent Counterpunch article:

“A better idea would be for appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to carry weapons. A quarter of a century ago students doing military ROTC training regularly carried rifles around campus. US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently recalled regularly traveling on the New York subway system as a student with his rife. Perhaps there should be guns in wall cases, behind glass, at strategic points around campuses, like those fire axes, usually with menacing signs about improper use.”

Get rid of psychiatric drugs, not guns he said. And then bring in the posse.

About time, probably.

Chris Wallace – Psychiatric/legal issues at V. Tech

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Chris Wallace on FOX this morning ( 9 AM) on how universities are ham strung with regard to psychiatric illness and privacy laws.

Lt Gov. Bill Bolling is talking about Va. law and how it conflicts with federal law on guns. Bolling has previously supported concealed weapons on campus and Wallace asks if that would have prevented the V. Tech shooting.

Bolling replies that he is unwilling – probably wisely – to take on the gun debate at this point.

The George Washington University (in Washington, DC) president is on. Notes that GW security police is unarmed (??).

Arlen Specter (Republican Senator from Pennsylvania) suggests that state law should be brought into conformity with federal law and that a national repository of information should exist. He admits there was a definite failure of communication between state and federal agents. He proposed national legislation to this end. (Needs further clarification)

Charles Schumer (Democrat Senator from New York) is on. He has legislation in the works to give money to states to update their registry to fit federal requirements. NRA advocates have teamed up with Democrats on this previously.

Chris Wallace asks why not push for a renewal of the assault weapons ban which expired. Asks if Schumer hasn’t done so because it is a political loser.

Again, here is the review panel appointed to study what happened at V Tech:

Independent review panel (appointed by Governor Timothy Kaine of Virginia)

1.Headed by Retired Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. Gerald Massengill.Massengill, 64, led the state’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the 2002 sniper attacks in the Washington area, says this Washington Post story.

2. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge

3. Gordon Davies, Director for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for 20 years.

4. Diane Strickland, who served as a judge of the 23rd Judicial Circuit Court in Roanoke County, Roanoke and Salem between 1989 and 2003 and a victim assistance expert from Fairfax county5. Carroll Ann Ellis, director of the Fairfax County Police Department’s Victim Services Division on the review panel.

6. FBI retiree Roger L. Depue, former administrator of the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

7. Child and adolescent psychiatrist Aradhana A. “Bela” Sood. 

8. Dr. Marcus L. Martin of the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/breaking/wb/113294

On Friday, Richard Bonnie, chairman of the Virginia Supreme Court’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, stated that a special justice’s order in late 2005 that directed Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him.

Currently, only 22 states submit any mental health records to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the FBI said in a statement on Thursday. Virginia is the leading state in reporting disqualifications based on mental health criteria for the NICS system, the statement said.

But Virginia state law on mental health disqualifications to firearms purchases is worded slightly differently from the federal statute. So the form that Virginia courts use to notify the state police about a mental health disqualification only addresses the state criteria, which lists two potential categories that would warrant notification to the state police – someone who was “involuntarily committed” or ruled mentally “incapacitated.”

My Comment:

So, the problem was that Cho went “voluntarily” and wasn’t ruled incapacitated.

But didn’t anyone realize the potential danger here. OK. the two VTech students didn’t press stalking charges, but what happened to the arson charge? How does that not pose a threat to anyone else? Didn’t any of the teachers, like Nikki Giovanni, who found him so intimidating in class, want to find out where he was with his treatment?

Here’s a comment from one of the students (I think he was in Edward Falco’s class):

“Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.

After hearing about the mass shootings, I sent one of my friends a Facebook message asking him if he knew anything about Seung Cho and if he could have been involved. He replied: “dude that’s EXACTLY what I was thinking! No, I haven’t heard anything, but seriously, that was the first thing I thought when I heard he was Asian.”

While I “knew” Cho, I always wished there was something I could do for him, but I couldn’t think of anything. As far as notifying authorities, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any system set up that lets people say “Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this guy!” If there were, I definitely would have tried to get the kid some help. I think that could have had a good chance of averting yesterday’s tragedy more than anything.”

My Comment:

Cho went voluntarily to police, and they referred him to a mental health agency off campus, Flinchum said. A counselor recommended involuntary commitment, and a judge signed an order saying he “presents an imminent danger to self or others” and sent him to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.


Sounds like bureaucratic confusion and disconnect.

More in this Time article about the responsibility of the University and possible questions with Virginia state law:

“But Virginia Tech is a state institution, and Virginia is a state where the doctrine of sovereign immunity remains quite robust. That doctrine, a relic of English common law, essentially says the state can do no wrong because the state creates the law and thus cannot be subject to it. Many states have relaxed sovereign immunity and made it possible for victims of, say, botched operations to sue state hospitals. But Krauss of George Mason University says the Virginia Tech victims’ families would probably have to seek an exception to sovereign immunity from the Supreme Court of Virginia in order to sue the school. There’s a simpler way: Steger, the university president, should stop withholding documents on how the university mishandled Cho and take responsibility for his school’s lax approach. And then he should resign.”