Va. Tech president defends response

RICHMOND, Va. -- With anguished parents demanding his firing, Virginia Tech's president bristled at suggestions Thursday he bears responsibility for the bloodbath on campus, calling it a crime "unprecedented in its cunning and murderous results."

At a news conference where he was grilled about an independent panel's conclusion that lives could have been saved had the school warned the campus sooner a killer was on the loose, Charles Steger suggested there may have been nothing anyone could have done to stop the April 16 rampage by a gunman that left 33 people dead.

"No plausible scenario was made for how this horror could have been prevented once he began that morning," Steger said.

He said he will neither resign nor ask the Virginia Tech police chief to quit, despite bitter demands by some of the victims' families he and others be held accountable for the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

"In my view of the world, the buck stops at the top," said William O'Neil, whose son Daniel was among the students slain. "I think that in this case, his lack of leadership and his lack of compassion for the families is just astounding."

It took administrators more than two hours to get the first e-mail warning out after the gunman killed two people in a dormitory. In the interim, he mailed off a video confession to NBC and then made his way across the Blacksburg campus to a classroom building, where he killed 30 more victims and committed suicide.

Steger said that during those two hours, administrators carefully considered how to deal with the first burst of gunfire, including a warning or a complete campus lockdown.

In the end, according to the report, administrators concluded the shooting was a boyfriend-girlfriend dispute and that the gunman had probably left the campus. Also, the report noted, they were afraid of causing panic, as happened at the start of the school year, when the first day of classes was called off because an escaped murder suspect was on the loose near campus.

Asked whether he would have done anything differently that day, Steger said no.

"I am not aware of anything the police learned that would have indicated that a mass murder was imminent," he said at the news conference in Blacksburg. "The panel researched reports of multiple shootings on campuses for the past 40 years and no scenario was found in which the first murder was followed by a second elsewhere on campus. Nowhere."

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said Thursday the report bolsters his proposal to step up campus security.

Durbin said the report confirms many of the security changes he included in his plan, including the need for clear emergency notification procedures.

His proposed Campus Law Enforcement Emergency Response Act of 2007 calls for notifying the campus community no later than 30 minutes after the discovery of a law enforcement emergency through the notification procedures the institution has established.

"It's a sad reflection on our day and age. But we have to be ready for these possibilities and protect innocent people from harm," Durbin said.

The panel, appointed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, released its report late Wednesday, and Kaine said he was standing by Steger and other top administrators and not pressing for their firing because they have suffered enough.

"This is not something where the university officials, faculty, administrators have just been very blithe," Kaine said. "There has been deep grieving about this, and it's torn the campus up."

Instead, he said he would focus on preventive measures, such as better communication between the parents of troubled children and the colleges they are planning to attend.

"The information needs to flow both ways," the governor said.

The governor's panel, which spent four months investigating the massacre, said the two-hour gap could have been used to craft potentially lifesaving text or phone messages warning students of the gunman.

"Nearly everyone at Virginia Tech is an adult and capable of making decisions about potentially dangerous situations to safeguard themselves," the report said. "So the earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving."

"The alert should have been issued and classes should have been closed," panel Chairman Gerald Massengill said Thursday.

But Steger and at least nine other officials were wrestling with questions that had no easy answers: What's the best way to relay a message? What information would create mass panic? Which buildings should be notified? Was the gunman still on campus?

In retrospect, most of their decisions proved wrong, and the e-mail alert they finally sent arrived too late to do any good -- about 15 minutes before the gunman started killing students and faculty locked inside Norris Hall.

At the time, however, only two administrators had the ability to send campuswide e-mail, and the message first had to be formulated by the Policy Group, a body that includes nine vice presidents and several vice provosts and is chaired by Steger. It took a half-hour just to assemble the group.

The delays in assembling that group and reaching consensus, combined with repeated missed opportunities to share information about the gunman's mental health problems, suggest "a failure of leadership at the very top levels of the university," said Cathy Read, stepmother of slain freshman Mary Karen Read.

"It's hard to believe that this happened and the university made all these mistakes, and the university missed all these opportunities, and that nobody will be held accountable," she said.

Celeste Peterson, whose freshman daughter Erin was killed, said the governor and the Tech Board of Visitors should "show some leadership" and oust Steger and campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum.

In Virginia, university presidents serve at the pleasure of the Board of Visitors, which is appointed by the governor. Campus police chiefs are accountable to the university president.

But Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin survived four gunshot wounds, is "adamantly opposed" to pinning blame on individuals. "I think everybody who didn't do enough knows who they are," Goddard said. "And they're going to have to live with that."

Steger initially seemed to accept the criticism during an afternoon news conference.

"We asked for this review. We asked that it be direct and objective," he said. "It is painful to hear the blunt, and in some cases, critical findings."

But moments later, he said there was no guarantee that different decisions would have changed the outcome.

"The crime was unprecedented in its cunning and murderous results. And yet it happened here," he said. "To say that something could have been prevented is certainly not to say that it would have been. Moreover, it's entirely possible that this tragedy, horrific as it is, could have been worse."

Massengill, the chairman of the investigating panel, said it is up to others to determine who should be held accountable and how.

The governor agreed with Massengill that notification should have come much sooner.

"There is no downside to providing prompt and accurate information to a community of adults who have the capacity to make decisions to keep themselves safe," he said.

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Associated Press writers Bob Lewis, Kristen Gelineau and Larry O'Dell in Richmond, Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., and Sue Lindsey in Blacksburg contributed to this report.