VT: Are we able to stop campus killers?

By REX BOWMAN and MICHAEL MARTZ, Media General News Service

Published: April 12, 2008

BLACKSBURG—Sung-Tae and Hyang Im Cho had their luggage packed and waiting at the door of their Fairfax County home when police arrived. The couple had heard news of a mass shooting at Virginia Tech and were preparing to travel to Blacksburg to check on their son, Seung-Hui Cho.

Their travel plans ended abruptly, though, when police told them the mass murderer was in fact their son, and he had killed himself, according to former Virginia State Police Superintendent W. Gerald Massengill.

Only then, with 32 murdered and their son dead, did the Chos begin to learn how his life had unraveled on the Blacksburg campus over almost two years.

"They did not know their son had been committed for a psychiatric hearing," said Massengill, who led the state panel that investigated the massacre. "No one had ever told them."

What some people didn't tell and what others didn't know lies at the heart of what went wrong at Virginia Tech on April 16, when the worst mass killing on a college campus in U.S. history unfolded on a blustery day.

And for the past year, those scrambled communications—among Tech professors and administrators, between state and federal officials, between campus counselors and community health organizations—have been a major focus of an effort by Tech and the state to make fixes and to create a university environment that would better prevent a mentally disturbed student like Cho from killing again.

Since the massacre, state mental-health laws have been changed, state gun laws have been clarified, psychiatric-care providers in the Blacksburg area have become more diligent about monitoring the mentally ill, more counselors staff the school's health center, and Tech has created a team of officials to track students deemed potential threats.

Tech has spent $10 million on safety improvements so far. The school has expanded a text-messaging and e-mail alert system that now has more than 20,000 subscribers among students, faculty and administrators. It has hired nine more police officers, replaced all push bars on campus building exits and put locks on classroom doors.

And yet, Tech President Charles W. Steger conceded

recently, "the bottom line is, and you hate to come to this conclusion, but if you have a student who is willing to take their own life, I don't know what defense you can have."

Officials have tried to reduce the odds that a gunman bent on killing could succeed, and Tech has become a re-source, as well as a source of hard lessons learned, for other colleges and universities. Northern Illinois State Uni-versity, where a gunman killed five students and himself on Valentine's Day, had bolstered its emergency-response planning in the aftermath of the Tech killings, as have colleges and universities across the country.

Retired Lt. Gen. Bruce M. Lawlor, director of Tech's new Center for Technology, Security, and Policy in Northern Virginia, said law enforcement and universities have to find ways to identify potential mass killers through their behavior and what they tell others of their plans.

"Two things have to be focused on: One is communication and the second is behavior," he said shortly after the Illinois shootings. "Universities have got to start looking at those two issues very care-fully."

A review of Cho's behavior and the communications among those who tried to deal with it, meticulously detailed in the Massengill Report, explains why some measures have been taken since April 16, while suggesting that some avenues to violence may never be closed.

Though he was an inordinately shy child, it was not until 1999, when he was in eighth grade, that Cho's mental problems began to surface. Cho had

immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea with his parents in 1992 and moved to Fairfax the following year, when he was 9.

His middle school teachers in Fairfax noticed suicidal and homicidal thoughts in his school papers, and he was briefly prescribed antidepressant medication. In high school he underwent therapy for a social-anxiety disorder known as selective mutism. He had made a slight improvement when he insisted on ending the treatments in 11th grade.

When he arrived at Tech in 2003, he told no one of his past mental troubles. The Fairfax school system, restrained by federal privacy laws, sent Tech no paperwork on Cho's treatment. Those privacy laws have remained unchanged since April 16.

At first, Cho's parents visited him every weekend, but he seemed to settle in, was excited about college and received good grades.

In the fall of 2005, Cho's troubles became noticeable. Visiting a woman's dorm room with his suite-mates, he took out a knife and began stabbing at the carpet. They stopped taking him out after that. Professor Nikki

Giovanni, his poetry teacher, grew concerned about the violence in his writings. She warned the young English major to stop taking pictures of his classmates with a camera he held beneath his desk.

English department Chairwoman Lucinda Roy removed Cho from Giovanni's class and began tutoring him. Cho refused to get counseling, so Roy notified Tech's division of student affairs, Tech's Cook Coun-seling Center and campus police, among others. Tech's Care Team, composed of the dean of student affairs, director of resident life and legal counsel, among others, discussed Cho's problems. With situation apparent-tly settled, the team took no action.

Today, Tech has a Threat Assessment Team, led by the campus police chief, Wendell Flinchum. The team meets weekly to discuss students brought to its attention by professors or others. And because Flinchum has the power to bar students from campus, the team has leverage to compel students to seek help.

Campus police were never told that Cho was ordered into outpatient treatment. The Cook Counseling Center, not knowing of the special justice's order, eventually forgot about Cho. Since April 16, the counseling center has added the equivalent of five full-time positions, said director Chris Flynn, giving it a total of 19 counselors, psychia-trists and nurses in addition to three interns and three graduate students.

"I hope Cho was a once-in-a-lifetime" student, Flynn said, "but we've worked hard to be more capable of dealing with students with significant emotional disturbances."

Rex Bowman and Michael Marts are staff writers at Media General's Richmond Times-Dispatch.