Report criticizes Virginia Tech response
RICHMOND, Va. -- A report into the Virginia Tech rampage concludes that school authorities should not have waited two hours to notify students about the first shooting on campus, said a student who was briefed on the report Wednesday.
Police also should have broadened their search for suspects after they discovered the bodies of two students in a dormitory on April 16, said Derek O'Dell, one of the 23 wounded in the shootings that left 33 dead, including the gunman.
"They said they should have sent out an earlier notice and that it should have been more detailed," O'Dell said, referring to a private teleconference to brief injured students and their families on the report.
The report however concludes that while the notification may have saved lived, a campuswide lockdown probably would not have stopped gunman Seung-Hui Cho's rampage, the New York Times reported Wednesday night, quoting the document.
"There does not seem to be a plausible scenario of a university response to the double homicide that could have prevented the tragedy of considerable magnitude on April 16," the newspaper quoted the report as saying. "Cho had started on a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge."
State officials planned to make the document public Thursday morning and did not immediately comment on the report.
Cho killed the first two students just after 7 a.m., more than two hours before his deadly rampage in classroom building across campus. It wasn't until 9:26 a.m. that the school sent the first e-mail to students and faculty.
The subject line read, "Shooting on campus." The message read: "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."
No further action was ordered.
Cho began shooting inside Norris Hall about 20 minutes later.
O'Dell said discussion of an alert or lockdown was brief during the teleconference, but "they said that they definitely waited a while, that the notification could have come earlier."
O'Dell also said advisers had counseled Cho against going to a large university because of concerns he would be unable to communicate and function socially.
"It was recommended that he not apply to school as big as Virginia Tech because he had selective mutism and also ongoing psychiatric needs that a big university probably wouldn't address as well," O'Dell said.
Kim Yang-soon, Cho's great aunt, said in April that the family was told Cho suffered from autism -- but no records show such a diagnosis. Selective mutism is a mental disorder that leaves a person unable to speak in certain social settings.
O'Dell said the conference call with Larry Roberts, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's chief counsel, was fairly generalized with some specifics O'Dell declined to reveal.
Kaine, who has read a draft of the report, said Wednesday he did not conclude from it that either Virginia Tech President Charles Steger or campus police Chief Wendell Flinchum should resign.
"The points that I will raise tomorrow, I don't view that they would be solved by taking that step," Kaine said.
Some of the families of those killed and injured have demanded frank answers about how Cho was able to commit the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history despite behavior that had alarmed fellow students, faculty and police.
Among those questions: Why wasn't Cho monitored more closely after a judge deemed him a threat to himself more than a year before the shootings? And why didn't Virginia Tech alert the campus more quickly and cancel classes after the first two shootings in a dormitory, two hours before the main massacre in a classroom building?
"I know that some parents of the deceased are focusing on the mental health aspect of how Cho through all his life slipped through the cracks, and I understand that," said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was shot in the leg and survived, earlier. "My focus is why they didn't cancel the classes that day."