August 30, 2007
Report Faults Va. Tech In Shootings
Four months after Cho Seung-Hui's deadly shooting spree at Virginia Tech, a new report from an eight-member panel appointed by Gov. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) concludes that university officials could have taken steps to prevent the killings.
The school's failure to issue an alert immediately after Cho shot his first two victims in a campus dormitory, the report suggests, could have impacted the second round of shootings in a classroom building. Two hours elapsed between the two rounds of shootings, but the campus-wide email alert wasn't issued until just before Cho killed 30 more people and himself in Norris Hall.
Moreover, multiple warning signals about Cho went unheeded. A paper about school shootings he'd written for a fiction class, a lack of communication between mental health professionals and school officials because of privacy laws and continued complaints from other students about his behavior, the report concludes, all contributed to the problem.
But the report does not call for action against Virginia Tech or lay all the blame at the university's feet. As the Washington Post notes, the report "does not assert that Virginia Tech officials should have locked down the campus, and it specifically concludes that doing so could not have stopped the rampage."
Kaine said yesterday that top officials at Virginia Tech -- namely, its president and police chief -- should not be fired because of the panel's findings and suggested that the problems outlined in the report "would not be solved" by their ouster.
The report is available online and set to be released formally later this morning.
