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This week a commission investigating the campus shootings that killed more than 30 people in April 2007 at Virginia Tech released an addendum updating an earlier report to the state's governor. The findings reported in the 210-page document are disturbing. In the three hours between the initial killing by Seung-Hui Cho of two students in a dorm and his massacre of 30 more people in a classroom building, campus administrators made several errors that resulted in the additional fatalies.
The initial report focused on the campus's failure to recognize the danger posed by Cho's mental illness. The new report looks at the response of administrators and campus security to the campus emergency, as well as state and federal laws that allowed a mentally ill person who posed a danger to himself and others to purchase firearms. Among the report's findings are:
- "Cho was not legally authorized to purchase his guns but was easily able to do so," even though under federal law he was disqualified from purchasing firearms; Virginia law is less clear. Federal law also prohibited him from purchasing ammunition; Virginia law offered no such restrictions.
- "Virginia universities and colleges do not seem to be adequately versed in what they can do about banning guns on campus under existing interpretations of state laws."
- The probability was very low that a double-murder on campus would be followed by a massacre; the only campus mass murder in the U.S. in the preceding 40 years was the sniper attack from a tower at the University of Texas. That said, the report's authors write that "the VTPD had the probabilities correct, but needed to consider the low-probability side as well as the most likely situation." Furthermore, "The police did not tell the Policy Group that there was a chance the gunman was loose on campus or advise the university of any immediate action that should be taken such as canceling classes or closing the university. Also, the police did not give any direction as to an emergency message to be sent to the students."
- Most police chiefs consulted by the new report's authors agreed that locking down a campus of 35,000 people is not feasible.
- At least two administrators informed family members about the shooting before alerting faculty, students, and staff on campus.
- After he first heard about the shootings, the chief of the Virginia Tech police department was unable to reach the executive vice president's office for 17 minutes.
- The office of the university president was locked down 48 minutes before the massacre in the classroom building occurred; the classroom building in question was not locked down.
- One of the students shot in the dorm survived for several hours following the shooting, but her family was not notified of her injuries until after she died.
- Administrators cancelled the collection of campus trash 21 minutes before students and faculty were warned about a gunman on campus.
On the possibility of lockdowns, from the report:
A building can be locked down in the sense of locking the exterior doors, barring anyone from coming or going. Elementary schools practice that regularly, and so do some intermediate and high schools. At least some schools in Blacksburg were locked down for a while after the first shootings. Usually, a lockdown also implies locking individual classrooms. Virginia Tech does not have locks on the inside of classroom doors, as is the case for most universities and many high schools.
A message could theoretically be sent to all buildings on campus to lock their doors, but there was no efficient way to do this at Virginia Tech. It would have required calls or e-mails to individuals who had the ability to lock the doors for at least 131 buildings or sending people on foot to each building.
I am not an expert in campus security, but I do know from working on a campus that most students and faculty have phones with text messaging enabled. The university could have made better use of a subscription service that allows it to send blasts to all cell phone users, or even begun text-messaging those who had opted in to such messages. As it was, the emergency alert system was in the midst of a major upgrade that April. However—and this is really startling—even if the messaging system had been fully enabled, campus police did not have direct access to it; they would have had to request that an emergency alert message be sent from University Relations or the campus's policy group that handles campus emergencies. Regardless, if a message had been sent,
