A Question Regarding the Tragedy at Virginia Tech

[Octafish]

Why did the Virginia Tech authorities fail to secure the campus following the murders of two resident students?

The shootings at the dorm happened around 7:15 a.m. The shootings in the classrooms, around 9:40 a.m.

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=123283&ran=105465

What did the University president and police say was their reason for waiting so long before telling their students?

The points I heard repeated over the past four days have been the campus police believed the first shootings were the result of a "domestic disturbance" and they had reason to believe that the shooter was heading out of state.

So what? The guy was not in custody. For all the police and schoo president knew, the killer was still running around the campus.

ATF said the gunman fired between 175 and 225 rounds.

http://www.wnbc.com/news/12617657/detail.html

If the authorities had secured the campus, not just sealed the dormitory, those bullets might never have been fired.

Here's another question:

How is it that the gunman could manage to mail his video nutjob manifesto to NBC before VT could email a warning to its students that a multiple-murderer was loose on the campus?

[Miss Chybil]

1. I don't know all the answers to your questions, but the "manifesto" didn't

arrive at NBC until the next day, via Express mail.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. It was postmarked 9:01 the day of the shooting. There is evidence that it was mailed

in the two hours between the shootings.

He had time to do all that and the campus police did nothing.

[Octafish]

9. I haven't had the heart to watch the thing...

...It's just odd to me that the guy could find sufficient time to mail a package in the time it took the university to send an email warning. Like most people, I've hurt all week; yet my pain is nothing like what the people who were at the university and their families are suffering.

[bobthedrummer]

2. In the words of AGAG "I think those are fair questions Octafish, mistakes were made." n/t

[Octafish]

13. Bye bye, Fredo.

You're right, Bob. Gonzo or a Senator did bring up the tragedy. I can't seem to find a transcript, but he also said:

"It would be improper to remove a U.S. attorney to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for political gain. I did not do that. I would never do that."

Yeah. And I don't believe him there, either.

[EFerrari]

16. I heard that, too. It was just business. n/t

[bobthedrummer]

18. I should have said paraphrase.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. That is a VERY GOOD QUESTION. I have asked it a few times, and have never heard answer

that satisfies me. If it were a member of my family that was caught in that tragedy, I would be very, very pissed at the college authorities for not giving any warning at all to the rest of the campus that there had been some sort of incident and they should be aware of what was going on.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=701336&mesg_id=708434

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2814429&mesg_id=2814473

[Octafish]

14. Wish I'd seen those posts, BrklynLiberal. Thank you!

It's been gnawing at me all week. The least the school and cops could've done were to:

1.) stop incoming traffic and told students and faculty driving to campus that there was a police situation;

2.) warn the students using bullhorns on their cars for those walking on campus and in person at the entrances to campus buildings;

3.) put students already on campus into a guarded building, like the football stadium or basketball arena, and kept them protected until the campus had been checked or the gunman apprehended.

The above might take 20 or 30 minutes to accomplish. They had two hours.

[Honeycombe8]

5. It was the University's duty to warn or lock down the campus, wasn't it?

Not sure whose duty was what, but the way I see it, it was mainly the University's duty to send out a warning to students on campus, or to lock down the campus.

Maybe both?

[BrklynLiberal]

6. That would be how I see it. Those other students were left totally defenseless

and unaware of what might happen to them.

[jobycom]

10. I would think so. Does Virginia Tech have it's own police force?

U Texas does. I'm sure VT at least has an armed security force, if not a full police force. It would seem that either the head of security or the head of the university would have the authority to lock it down.

If they had, they would have been able to stop anyone walking across campus. They may have stopped Cho. Or he may have tried to lay low until the lockdown was over, giving the police time to realize their first suspect was innocent, and maybe get a lead on Cho from the many, many people who seemed to know how disturbed he was. Then again, maybe Cho would have just started shooting in his own dorm and still killed a lot of people. Who knows?

[Octafish]

19. The safety of the students precedes even the mission of education.

It is the university's job to maintain the safety of the campus. When two people are murdered, it is up to the administration to decide what course of action is necessary. Call in the state troopers, seal the campus and warn the students by whatever means necessary.

Even if the university believed that they had the perpetrator in custody, the boyfriend of the woman who was shot in the dormitory, they would still be derelict in their duty for not informing the rest of the student body that a heinous crime had occurred.

The only excuse I've seen are the size of the department and the size of the crime. The school police didn't immediately call in for major help, from what I've read and heard, because they could not imagine the second shootings could happen.

PS: Wish that it were under more pleasant circumstances, a most hearty welcome to DU, indie_ana_500.

[REACTIVATED IN CT]

35. Yes it was their duty

Per the Clery Act
schools have a duty to make a timely warning

http://www.securityoncampus.org/schools/cleryact/index.html

[jobycom]

7. It was a mistake, no doubt. They thought they knew who the shooter was.

Apparently, the first victim had a boyfriend who was a gun nut and had several registered guns at his residence near campus. So they latched on to him as their primary suspect. Since the shooter had vanished, they assumed the shooter had finished what he planned to do, and fled campus. They also knew where the boyfriend was, and went to interview him. When they asked him for his guns, he told them he had brought them to his mother's house the week before. In other words, he was acting guilty, and no one else was shooting up the campus, so they figured they had him. As they were interrogating him, the second attack began.

Realize, too, that this went against all their profiles and ideas of a mass shooter, and fit their profiles of a domestic violence situation. The shooter went into the dorm, he killed one woman and a man in her room (there was suspicion that the shooter thought his girlfriend was having an affair with the RA--in fact, that was one of the early stories that came out). The victim had a boyfriend (they learned from her roommate) who was into guns. And the shooter had left, not attacking anyone else in the dorm. So it didn't look like a mass shooter.

Obviously, bad, bad decision to not lockdown. Certainly it was influenced by the general policy of universities to hide any crimes committed on campus. Most of the time the decision would have caused no problems. This was that one in a million time, though.

I don't know why they waited so long and chose such an ineffectual method of informing the students. A genuine heightened awareness might have warned someone to be suspicious of the man with a hunting vest chaining the doors of the building.

[Octafish]

34. Didn't know all the details. Thanks, jobycom!

Thank you for the information and analysis. I was unaware that the woman who lost her life after being shot in the dorm was rumored to have been having an affair with the slain R.A. You are spot-on in regards to the typical organizational response to tragedy or emergency: Keep a lid on things.

Here's what I'm stuck with:

A person or persons unkwown committed a double homicide.

Students were locked-down in the domoritory that was the site of the crime, meaning the administration feared the gunman could still be in the building.

The police thought the perpetrator fled.

The police had suspect and a motive.

The kids in the dorm were still locked down, then told it was OK. Then were locked down.

To an armchair detective like me, it isn't good procedure to focus all efforts on one person. A case can be made that the suspect might not be the shooter. As the police and university discovered later, the guilty was roaming free to kill again.

The university president should have seized the first opportunity to warn all the students, faculty and staff that there was a crime on campus. They didn't have to say they had or had not a suspect, but they should have given the university community a warning. They had plenty of time between the two shootings: two hours of silence.

[EFerrari]

8. It looks like they didn't have a plan to secure the whole campus

except in the case of nukalar war. It's probable that there were people tasked with securing individual buildings but it looks like they really didn't have a plan to lock down the whole place over a "domestic dispute".

Did they have an email system set up to notify students of bad weather, let alone something like this? I haven't heard, one way or the other.

[progdonkey]

11. domestic disturbances are far more common than murderous rampages...

Earlier this week, I was asking the same questions as you, but I've been relatively satisfied with the answers. From the point of view of the campus authorities, you had a double murder, male and female, and the apparent boyfriend of the female owned several guns and went to the shooting ranges. Sadly, a double murder is not all that shocking, especially when it's a male and female together--murder-suicides, double murder by jealous boyfriend (or girlfriend), etc.

The last thing that the police would ever have suspected--or really have any reason to suspect--was that this was a totally random killing by a deranged lunatic, who had calmly returned to his room on campus, and was preparing to go out again in a rampage through one of the classroom buildings.

Certainly, had they gone into lockdown mode, the rampage would not have happened--or at the very least, Cho wouldn't have gotten very far along in it--but was there really any reason to suspect that the person who killed two people and then disappeared was going to reappear a few hours later with greater fury? I might be mistaken, but I think Clark and Hilscher were the only people who were shot--let alone died--in the dorms, so there was no reason to believe that their killer was an immediate danger to the school at large, and that those two were killed for a specific reason. Ironically, if Cho had shot more people in the dorms (which, unless I'm mistaken, he didn't), I think the police would have realized they had a rampage on their hands and went into lockdown mode, because it would then have been clear that the targets weren't limited to Clark and Hilscher, and the scope of the entire situation would've widened.

But when you have "just" two shot and dead in a single location, there's really little reason to presume that it's just the start of a massacre, as it's far more likely (and, frankly, much less frightening) that there was some underlying reason for the murder.

That's not to say that the administration is totally without blame, especially when it comes to the e-mailed warnings. I think a better solution (based on my understanding of the facts) would've been to have informed the teachers of the shooting earlier, telling them they believe there's nothing to worry about, but they can cancel their classes if they wish, and to inform their students about what happened. Cho's greatest asset was the element of surprise--I'm sure many of the victims turned to stone out of complete shock at what was going on. Had there been an awareness that a violent double murder had occurred in the morning, perhaps when Cho walked into some of the classes, there would've been quicker recognition about what was going on and that it was actually happening. "Oh shit, that must be the shooter they mentioned!" instead of "What the fuck is going on; is this really happening?!"

So, I don't think the cops were wrong in not ordering a lockdown, but there should've definitely been much more information distributed much more quickly to the student body and faculty about the situation. That would place everyone on alert, ie. it would already be understood by everyone that "today is not a normal day" much earlier than the moment Cho walked into the classrooms.

[EFerrari]

12. I agree. The picture that the cops thought they recognized

turned out to be only the first act.

That department must be in bad shape right now. :(

[progdonkey]

15. like with most serial killers...

When a serial killer's first victim is found, no one has any clue that it's the first of many. It's a woman's body found by the side of the road. Who was she? Was she reported missing? Is she married? Where's her husband/boyfriend? Did she owe anybody money? Until the second, third, fourth victims are found, the police will only be able to understand and consider it as a single murder--"nothing special." Individuals murder individuals all the time, so that's the reasonable conclusion when you have a single murder or single crime scene.

There are plenty of cases where it turns out that the police actually interviewed the serial killer early in the investigation, but because it was maybe "only" one victim at that time, the police were focused on the relationships that the victim had with others, etc., because 99% of the time, that's the correct avenue of investigation. If they had assumed it was a serial killer, even with just one victim, perhaps they would've recognized the killer when they interviewed him, but it would be even more unreasonable for the police to investigate every single murder as though it's the work of a serial killer or the beginning of a rampage, when there's no evidence of it. Sadly, the only way you can really have evidence of a serial killer or rampage killer and adjust the investigation accordingly is for more victims to turn up--and almost by definition with rampage killings, the next victims are the last victims, as it's over just as quickly as it began.

[EFerrari]

17. Exactly. And in this case, they had two hours to find a pattern

that didn't exist because the hallmark of these mass shootings is that they happen in "safe" places like schools and they happen fast.

[marions ghost]

25. well said --

while there is an obvious need to make changes in security policy as a result of this, I am inclined to think that the police were operating under a reasonable assumption that the killer had left the scene. Since these kind of personal grievance shooting incidents are not uncommon, they had no reason to imagine that a mass-murderer was on the loose. It sounds like Cho was able to casually walk around town and mail his package, blending in with other students while police went with the only clues they had about the shooting in the dorm.

The mistakes in this case were made BEFORE the shooting spree IMO. Why Cho was untreated for his condition earlier in life, why he fell through the cracks at Va Tech, despite clear warnings from teachers and students, why he was sold guns without adequate background check--these are the bigger questions.

Y'know people are going to be looking for a place to put the blame. But this could have happened on ANY campus anywhere in this country. That's what people don't want to face. To think that you can instantly secure a large campus and keep everyone safe is a big delusion.

[merh]

40. College campuses, just like cities and towns, cannot go into

lock down mode for every shooting or domestic incident. As you said, this looked like a domestic incident, dead woman, dead man - boyfriend was tracked down and was being questioned.

The campus police could not have imagined that this apparent domestic was just the beginning of a mass murder incident.

[Threedifferentones]

45. As I have been saying every day since the massacre, if they had locked down

the campus I could foresee two results. The first is that Cho finds out about the lockdown before mailing his manifesto and just waits. Since he was not even suspected in the first two killings they would have judged things safe the next day or whenever and he executes his plan nonetheless. The other possibility is that he finds out after mailing and so he finds some other location to attack. In that case the deathtoll might have been lowered. Any way you look at it though there was no realistic way to stop Cho from carrying out what he had been planning once he got his guns.

[AZBlue]

20. I see your points but hindsight is 20/20.

Most who commit domestic violence, even those who have shot someone, don't go on a murderous rampage. The violence is usually only focused on those who are familiar with the shooter. If they thought it really was just a domestic situation, I can see why they thought no harm would come to other students.

That's not to say I don't wish it hadn't happened a different way. If only...

[shance]

21. There is word they were issued a "stand down" by those who were on campus

Seems like things don't add up.

[fujiyama]

22. It's unacceptable on the part of the university and security not to lock it doiwn immeduately

But unfortunately many universities would have done the same thing. Universities want to keep many crimes hush-hush and as internal as possible, as they are weary of losing alumni donations and not creating a media event - which also hurts applicants, grants, etc. Universities are a business and safety at most (especially large state universities) is an afterthought. In that way, a "domestic killing" sounds like an isolated incident, and can be made to disappear into the headlines - the victim had "relationship troubles" and it's "not so big a deal".

It's frustrating that it takes something so senseless to get people responsible for students' safety to think outside of the box a little. You have a community like a college campus, and a double-murder takes place - and that should raise a lot of red flags. After all, it may take two cops to go investigate the boyfriend of the first victim. But you should send in a SWAT team immediately and have a lock down. The campus is large and sprawling, but something more had to have been done.

Sure, part of this is hindsight, but in an age where we've seen too many mass shootings and hear frequently about "terrorist threats", it shows how poor planning for disasters is.

[H2O Man]

23. There was a

"person of interest" who was indeed in the custody of the police at that time. Circumstances from that first shooting had the police believing that it was a "domestic" dispute that became violent. They pulled the person who would be considered among the top suspects over on a highway. A short time later, the second round of violence began.

[KharmaTrain]

24. They Thought They Had The Situation Isolated

Securing a campus is not like locking down a high school. Sadly, incidents happen all the time on campus that involve violence that possibly could have lowered the threshold here...especially in light of the false bomb alerts Cho had called in...maybe even a bit of "chicken little syndrome"...don't disrupt the community again had settled in.

Yes, there was the person of interest...IRC, a boyfriend who was on his way back to another campus. As you state, so much violence is considered domestic that he drew the interest, but that still doesn't really answer the question. As others have stated, as I have, as long as the weapon remained at loose (along with the killer), why wasn't some type of advisory sent out...an email around the campus, report on the local radio stations, et al that would alert people to what happened. Also, it appears that the focus of the campus and local police was so focused on both the murder site and the tracking down of their person of interest, they were caught blindsided by the second shooting...not uncommon when dealing with small police departments that were barely suited to handle this homicide, yet could have anticipated what was to come.

There's gonna be a lot of glaring holes in the system here and investigations should answer the big questions about this time gap and how could someone with a detected mental illness be allowed to buy a gun and wasn't expelled or suspended from school for his past antics. As they say...stay tuned.

Cheers...

:hi:

[merh]

42. Exactly.

The police were doing their job, they were acting upon the information they had at hand and investigating it as was appropriate from that evidence. It appeared to be a domestic incident and they had the boyfriend in custody interrogating him about his whereabouts and his relationship with the victims.

This appeared to be a domestic incident and there is no way an entire campus (or city/town) can be locked down each time a domestic incident occurs. The police don't have the resources and individual rights still exist in this nation.

I wish folks would stop faulting those who did do their jobs. The only one to blame for this is Cho and Cho is dead.

[dsc]

26. apparently the guy they thought did it was being questioned

[earthlover]

27. a correlary to your question

The way the administration tried to "inform" the students was by EMAIL. Seems to not occur to folks that not everyone is hooked up to their puters 24 hours a day...so if you werent on line, you would not get the message!

Bigger question for me is....since just about everyone knew this guy was wacked and a danger to himself or others, and had given every indication of this, what does it take to be expelled from a campus?

[LisaL]

28. It's a huge campus. I can't even envision how it could have

been done even if they wanted to. Where do you lock students? Inside? Outside? How do you know where there shooter is so you don't lock him up with the students? How is it physically done?
It's like if a murder happens down the street police doesn't lock up the whole city.

[FloridaJudy]

33. Some one on this board suggested a simple security measure

Have classrooms that you can lock from the inside. A simple dead-bolt would do it - the kind you lock with a twist. Campus security and faculty would have the keys, in case of emergency (say a hostage situation, or someone hiding in a classroom).

Probably many lives could have been saved by this measure. A number of students were saved by earnest efforts to block the doors. No one could have anticipated this, but any campus that doesn't have dead bolts by the end of this month could be considered negligent.

[Holly_Hobby]

29. And where is the surveillance video of him at the post office?

All of the post offices in my city have surveillances cameras. They've shown everything else over and over.

[LisaL]

30. What post office? I think he send it by fedex.

[Holly_Hobby]

36. He sent it Priority mail via USPS

There was a picture of the post office on MSNBC. It was an older brown brick building. It was a red, white and blue priority mail envelope, which usually arrives in 3 days, like this one:



"NBC News President Steve Capus said the package arrived in New York late Tuesday night and was delivered about 11 a.m. Wednesday to NBC headquarters, where, like all packages, it was screened through a metal detector before it was opened. The letter carrier noticed that it bore a return address from Blacksburg and alerted NBC security officers."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18195423/

[Nikki Stone1]

31. The cops thought the dead co-ed's boyfriend (a student at Radford U) had done the crime

Someone in the dorm told the police that the dead girl (Emily)'s boyfriend at Radford owned guns and the cops jumped to the conclusion that the shooter was this boyfriend, hence the "domestic" angle. The cops were actually interviewing the boyfriend when Cho was going off on his murderous rampage at Norris.

I would say that the cops let their theory of the crime dictate their actions. They didn't have any evidence of their theory--other than that it was a female who was shot. Murdered female=sexual/domestic dispute in their minds. The idea that there might be an entirely different motive to the killings didn't cross their minds until Cho was gunning down random students at Norris Hall.

These cops need to learn that, in the absence of hard evidence, that all motives are possible and that the students need to be protected. In my opinion, it was their own knee-jerk sexism that led to the murders of the Tech students. Had it been only a dead male, they might have taken more precautions for the campus because the motive would have been less "clear" to their sterotype-ridden minds.

[LisaL]

32. How often do incidents like Cho's happen? And how

often jealous boyfriends hurt or kill their girlfriends? You do the math. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I think it's extremely rare for somebody to kill a woman, then go on a murderous rampage and kill 30 people. I doubt that scenario would even occur to cops or anybody else for that matter.

[Octafish]

37. Thanks, everyone! Another question...

Thank you all for the input.

I had no idea about the boyfriend with all the guns. That explains why the police thought they had their man. It doesn't explain why they didn't warn the campus that a double homicide had taken place that morning, just in case they were wrong.

A new question based on the information you all kindly provided:

Did Cho search for the young woman in the dorm because he knew investigators would search for her boyfriend as a likely suspect?

If so, how did he get his information? Was he a friend of the boyfriend?

[aikoaiko]

43. I don't think investigators know yet,

Or at least they haven't reported the link between the shooter and the first shooting victims.

[merh]

38. Because it appeared to be a domestic incident, girl dead

other man dead, and that evidence led to the suspicion of the girl's boyfriend. They had him in their custody and were questioning him when the other students were shot and killed in the engineering building.

They investigated the scene and acted as any other cops would act, they hunted down the boyfriend.

[Rex]

39. First question I asked too. A two hour delay after a multipule murder?

On campus? With thousands of students and staff walking around? Like I said before, VT dropped the ball on this one, bigtime.

[TahitiNut]

41. Isn't it nice that such incidents are so rare that University Security didn't have practice?

After all, isn't it reasonable that rapes and assaults and other crimes were worthy of their attention?

Have people in Missouri safeguarded their houses against earthquakes? (After all, it's the site of one of the largest to occur in North America.)

[Threedifferentones]

44. IMO alot of the criticisms being thrown at VTPD are unfair. I have posted this on many threads

There are thousands of murders each year in this country. If the cops assumed the perp every one was a potential mass murderer who has to be caught before normal life can resume it would make our lives hell. As far as I know none of the other "mass-shooters" in our history preceded their rampage with a smaller murder on the same day; nothing about the first two murders suggested the killer had completely lost his mind.

How could the cops have "secured" an area the size of VT? Cancelled classes and imposed a constant curfew? They had no evidence pointing to Cho, they probably were not even aware he had been pronounced a danger to himself at one time. They would have had to cancel then for days weeks or months before he was found out, and if classes were started again before that the massacre would have taken place nonetheless. I suppose they might have gotten lucky and cancelled classes while Cho was mailing his "manifesto," in which case Cho would have given himself away by the next day. But he would have realized that and started killing somewhere else, though possibly the body count would have been lowered. Barring sheer dumb luck Cho's rampage was inevitable, as he was not even suspected in the first two murders and had clearly decided to commit more.

Alot of DUers are upset that the students were not warned of the danger that might be on campus. Well, what would that have accomplished? Some of them might have gotten scared and not gone to class, so the death count might have been lower. But it doesn't take any knowledge or intelligence to figure out that a building where gunfire is occuring is not a place to stay, the students' reactions to the shooting would have been the same with prior knowledge of a gunman on campus, if they decided to go to class. And the students, like the cops, would have had no reason to think the murderer was about to begin killing them at random.

In short, expecting cops to be clairvoyant is not fair. A far as I can tell the VTPD handled it like any other PD would have, and if cops treated every murder or serious violent crime as a prelude to a shooting spree this country would suck to live in.