SEUNG-HUI CHO’S sinister persona cast a shadow over a pretty campus on May 21. A distinguished group of panelists hand-picked by Governor Kaine would hear from the university’s upper administration. It would not be trial by media this time; it would be a methodical examination of the events of April 16. Some of the victims’ families and friends were in attendance, together with members of the campus community, all of them eager to discover the truth.
The meeting was reported by Michael Sluss and Greg Esposito in the May 22 issue of the Roanoke Times with a simple headline, “Panel convenes”:
By the end of the panel’s public meeting on the Tech campus, the group had been given a detailed timeline of the shooting deaths of two students in West Ambler Johnston Hall and the shootings 2½ hours later in Norris Hall.
They also heard Tech President Charles Steger and other university officials defend their decision to keep the campus open after the first shootings, saying that nothing about the two deaths in a dormitory suggested that a much larger crisis would unfold later that morning.
“It’s a judgment call, but we believe we did the right thing,” Steger told the panel.
What wasn’t reported in the Roanoke Times was that something very strange had occurred during that meeting. In fact, a very sketchy account had been provided by the president and the Policy Group to the panel review.1
In his introductory remarks, President Steger reminded the panel that the Virginia Tech attorney also serves as “Special Assistant Attorney General.” This implied that the Office of the Attorney General in Richmond was overseeing the entire procedure on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and reinforced the notion that whatever was said by university legal counsel had been approved by the state. In this tricky situation—i.e., a state-controlled system of education was being investigated by the state that controlled it—potential conflicts of interest should have been apparent. Not only was one arm investigating another arm, the two legal offices—the state’s and the university’s—were, all the while, shaking hands. Although a full list of Policy Group participants has not yet been made public, university legal counsel was present on April 16. This means that the office responsible for representing all the administrators, faculty members, and staff at Virginia Tech was placed in the unenviable position of having to defend itself and its clients at the same time. I can’t imagine how any attorneys, however dedicated they may be, could manage this task.
At the May 21 meeting, President Steger also announced that all communication between the university and the panel would be routed through Lenwood McCoy, a retired university controller and thirty-five-year veteran of Virginia Tech “who has agreed to serve as the liaison between the university and the Review Panel to ensure that the Panel receives a thorough response to all requests for information.” Lenwood McCoy’s role became very important. As the only conduit to the panel members, he was the person who was charged with contacting faculty and staff to let us know if the panel wanted to speak with us. Although, in theory, it was possible to submit an e-mail directly to the panel, if it were done on a university computer through the university’s server, the e-mail could easily be traced. In addition, because those involved in the case had been instructed by the administration to work exclusively through Lenwood McCoy, bypassing the administration in this way could be seen as disobeying the advice of university legal counsel and could therefore result in a loss of representation. The president ended his introductory remarks by saying that the university wanted to “learn from these events.”
President Steger relied upon university counsel Kay Heidbreder to explain why it would be so difficult for the university to comply with the request to share Seung-Hui Cho’s medical and academic records. This became the lynchpin of the administration’s argument, and it was to plague the panelists for some time.
Kay Heidbreder, like Charles Steger, also read from a prepared statement. By the time she had finished speaking, it was clear that the obstacles confronting the panel in their quest to uncover the truth would be significant. Her argument was one I had heard before at Virginia Tech—one that was respectful of the law, but it also meant that critical information could not be shared under any circumstances:
At any institution of higher education in Virginia, there are a number of laws protecting the privacy of students and student records. These laws include The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C.A. 31232g HIPAA 42 U.S.C. Section 1320, the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Section 2.2-3700, Code of Virginia, as amended, and the Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act, Section 32.2-3800, Code of Virginia, as amended. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (aka FERPA or Buckley Amendment) sets forth criteria for the dissemination of information to protect a student’s rights of privacy.
The University is restricted in its ability to share a student’s educational records with third parties, external to the University, absent a properly executed release or a court order. While it is debatable whether the FERPA protections end at the student’s death, the other laws contain no such limitation.2
As I look back on what occurred during that pivotal May 21 meeting, I am struck by the fact that it was a meeting at which the Virginia Tech administration explained, in some detail, why it couldn’t speak. This point is critical because, at the time, it was hard to be 100 percent certain that Cho had acted alone, nor were we any clearer about his motivations. For all we knew, he’d said something to counselors that could be helpful to the investigation. It was urgent that information be shared because otherwise the campus could still be in jeopardy. But five weeks after the shootings, there was no urgency on the part of the Virginia Tech administration. We still didn’t know whether Cho had even visited counseling services, and we weren’t about to find out anytime soon.
When it was time to describe what had happened on April 16, the presentation was not made by President Steger, who served as the head of the Policy Group. Instead, it was delegated to David Ford, vice provost for Academic Affairs, who was, quite possibly, the lowest-ranking faculty member of the Policy Group.∗
While the president sat and listened, Ford recounted the sequence of events:
Shortly after 8:00 A.M. on Monday, April 16, I was informed that there had been a shooting in West Ambler Johnston Hall and that President Steger was assembling the Policy Group immediately. By approximately 8:30 A.M., I and the other members of the group had arrived at the Burruss Hall Boardroom and Dr. Steger convened the meeting.
… In the preliminary stages of the investigation, it [the double homicide] appeared to be an isolated incident, possibly domestic in nature. The Policy Group learned that Blacksburg police and Virginia state police had been notified and were also on the scene.3
If this had been dialogue from a play I had assigned to my class, students might wonder why the main character isn’t speaking. What happened before this? What happened afterwards? Who was making calls to whom? Was the attorney general’s office in Richmond contacted, for example? What did the president want to do? If the president and the Policy Group are not one and the same thing, what was it that President Steger himself assumed? We don’t know for certain when he was first notified of the double homicide, nor do we know what his plan of action was, as one report after another came into Burruss Hall. We never find out who actually made the decision not to notify the campus, though we can assume it was the president because he had the responsibility to do so. Was a vote taken? Did the group reach a consensus? Were there any naysayers? What we get instead is a valiant attempt by the vice provost for Academic Affairs (wrongly identified in this instance in the Panel Report as “Vice Provost for Student Affairs” [my italics]) to summarize his impressions of what happened that morning.
I wish to add at this juncture that, having worked with David Ford, I think it is very likely that he was simply one of the only people (if not the only one) willing to take on the onerous duty of representing the group. In all the dealings I have had with Dr. Ford, I have found him to be an ethical person who is deeply committed to Virginia Tech—a kind and generous man. It was regrettable that the president asked him to speak on behalf of the group, especially as it seems Dr. Ford was on the margins of what occurred. There would be certain things he could not address, many issues he could not elaborate upon in any detail.
Dr. Ford’s role as spokesperson for the Policy Group—arguably the most powerful group on campus—is particularly puzzling when you look at the group’s makeup. According to the Emergency Plan 2005 (hereinafter referred to as ERP-2005), most of the other members of the Policy Group are vice presidents, with the exception of university legal counsel Kay Heidbreder, Associate Vice President for University Relations Larry Hincker, and some support staff.4 David Ford had been at Virginia Tech since 1998, and although his title as of this writing is vice president and dean of Undergraduate Education, Ford was not a vice president at the time of the tragedy. As I understand it, the Policy Group was set up to function like a presidential advisory group, which would mean that key advisers would likely hold the rank of vice president. In fact the “Vice President in Charge”—a position clearly spelled out in ERP-2005—is the person who is authorized to take a lead role in the Policy Group. (To date, his identity has not been publicly released.) The vice president in charge reports directly to President Steger, so his account of what happened would have been particularly helpful, if we were not permitted to hear the account of the president himself. In fact, when the Panel Report was published four months later in August 2007, it was surprising to see that the president’s name rarely appears.
Had the panelists been more firmly acquainted with university culture they might have asked why David Ford spoke for the Policy Group. One panelist, Gordon Davies, held a supervisory role in higher education as the head of the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV) prior to his retirement. The other panelists who worked in higher education—panel vice chair Dr. Marcus L. Martin, assistant dean of the School of Medicine and associate vice president for Diversity and Equity at the University of Virginia, and Dr. Aradhana A. “Bela” Sood, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center—are likely to have been more familiar with the culture that exists at medical schools. Panelists such as the Honorable Tom Ridge, former secretary of homeland security, would have been unfamiliar with Virginia Tech protocol, and so, like others on the panel, probably relied upon the Virginia Tech administration for their information.
Using the timeline included in the Panel Report and details from numerous articles, it is possible to piece together some of what happened on the morning of April 16.
The members of the group began to gather at 8:00 A.M. in the President’s Boardroom (referred to in Ford’s account as the “Burruss Hall Boardroom,” but more commonly known by the name I am using here). According to Ford’s first-person account, President Steger had been in constant contact with the VTPD:
I learned subsequently that as he awaited the arrival of other group members, President Steger had been in regular communication with the police, had given direction to have the governor’s office notified of the shooting, and had called the head of University Relations to his office to begin planning to activate the emergency communication systems.5
The President’s Boardroom is situated on the second floor of Burruss Hall. You get to it by walking through the president’s and the provost’s suite of offices, or you can approach it from a corridor that runs between the presidential suite and Burruss auditorium. It is an imposing room filled with oil portraits of past presidents, and you are struck by the weight of Virginia Tech’s history. You would think from this opening statement that the emergency communication systems would be activated any minute now. But that’s not what happened.
The Policy Group convened shortly after 8:00 A.M. The double homicide had been discovered at 7:24 A.M. after a student who was nearby heard a noise coming from room 4040 in West Ambler Johnston Residence Hall and suspected that someone had fallen out of bed. The investigating officer had requested additional resources and those had been provided by the Blacksburg Police Department.
According to the Panel Report, the Office of the Executive Vice President—a title held at that time by James A. Hyatt, who has since left Virginia Tech—had been notified of the shootings at 7:57 A.M.6 While the investigation was under way, classes commenced as scheduled at 8:00 A.M.
President Steger would have been under tremendous pressure. It’s likely that the president behaved as he usually did in meetings, listening carefully first, mulling things over, and then responding, usually erring on the side of caution. Sometimes it could be difficult to know what conclusion he had come to because he is a guarded person. There is nothing excitable about Virginia Tech’s fifteenth president. Introverted, perspicacious, and discreet, he manages to convey an air of authority. He tends to be ill at ease in a crisis situation and most at home when surrounded by the familiar. He relies heavily on his advisers, especially those in his inner circle.
Across the Drillfield in West Ambler Johnston, the double homicide was being investigated by Chief Flinchum and the Virginia Tech police. The Blacksburg Police Department was also on the scene. The police chief did not have the capability to send out an alert to the community because the order had to go through the prescribed chain of command first. According to ERP-2005, the police chief’s reporting line was through the emergency response coordinator, who would then report to the vice president in charge, who would then report to President Steger. In an article by David Ress that appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on September 13, 2008, a parent of one of the victims claimed that Chief Flinchum had said he wanted to close the campus but that it wasn’t his call—a claim that was immediately refuted by university spokesperson Larry Hincker. In a September 25, 2008, article by Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos, Hincker’s assertion is corroborated by some newly released documents, including notes from Ralph Byers, director of government relations for Virginia Tech. Byers wrote in a note he took while in the meeting that morning: “Police don’t believe lock down is necessary or advisable.” What is most surprising in Ress’s article, however, is the revelation that Chief Flinchum does not appear to have been questioned about this himself by the panel. Therefore, it is still unclear what exactly was conveyed to the group:
Former State Police Superintendent Gerald Massengill, who led the state’s April 16 review panel, said he didn’t remember Flinchum saying he had recommended closing the school. But Massengill added that he didn’t recall anyone on the panel asking, either.7
I found it regrettable that President Steger (to my knowledge at least) did not convey to people that it was he who was empowered to make the decision about the lockdown, empowered to make the decision about notification, empowered to run the university, and that Chief Flinchum’s role was marginalized by the cumbersome hierarchy that existed at Virginia Tech. There are still people out there who believe that Chief Flinchum had the capability to close the campus and notify the community. He did not. The VTPD chief was not empowered in this situation, though in the news conferences that followed, given the prominence afforded to Chief Flinchum, it was easy to forget this fact.8
As Ford revealed in his prepared statement, the president and the Policy Group were advised by the police that a suspect was being tracked—slain student Emily Hilscher’s boyfriend.
Information continued to be received through frequent telephone conversations with Virginia Tech police on the scene. The Policy Group was informed that the residence hall was being secured by Virginia Tech police, and students within the hall were notified and asked to remain in their rooms for their safety. We were further informed that the room containing the gunshot victims was immediately secured for evidence collection, and Virginia Tech police began questioning hall residents and identifying potential witnesses. In the preliminary stages of the investigation, it appeared to be an isolated incident, possibly domestic in nature.9
It’s difficult to know why this last assumption was made, though there is little doubt that the term domestic violence has connotations which can lead people to assume that the violence has somehow been contained within the domestic sphere and is therefore less likely to be visited upon those outside it.
When the passive voice is used in sentence construction it is hard to pin down who the subject is. In the first sentence of the above quote, for example, we would normally say “So-and-so continued to receive information,” but instead we have “Information continued to be received,” which makes it hard to know who was actually receiving it. Although this description begins as what appears to be a first-person, eyewitness narrative, it seems to dissolve into an account of an event viewed at a considerable distance. The phrase “The Policy Group was informed,” for example, begs the question of who did the informing. It seems by the end of the paragraph as though everyone is receiving all the information at the same time, but given how chaotic the situation must have been, this seems somewhat unlikely. Usually teachers of writing try to dissuade students from using the passive voice construction because it tends to result in accounts that lack specificity and removes a subject from his or her own actions, as it does in this case.
One of the things the Policy Group discussed was how to break the news to the campus that two students had been killed. The president wanted to make sure that he didn’t compound an already difficult situation by making matters worse.
Although the administrators in the room would have had limited experience dealing with a shooting, they would have been able to draw upon the experience of the Morva incident. When William Morva—the gunman who killed security guard Derrick McFarland and Deputy Sheriff Eric Sutphin—had been on the loose in August 2006, a SWAT team responded to an erroneous report of a possible hostage situation in Squires Student Center. According to Ford’s account, this episode had influenced the Policy Group’s decision. The members therefore decided not to alarm anyone by issuing an alert.
The Policy Group was further informed by the police that they were following up on leads concerning a person of interest in relation to the shooting. During this 30-minute period of time between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m., the Policy Group processed the factual information it had in the context of many questions we asked ourselves. For instance, what information do we release without causing a panic? We learned from the Morva incident last August that speculation and misinformation spread by individuals who do not have the facts cause panic.10
It is true that the campus was somewhat on edge on April 16. Bomb threats had been left in Torgersen, Durham, and Whittemore Halls on April 13, all of which had turned out to be hoaxes. But the notion that the Policy Group would cause panic if it issued a warning is unwarranted. In fact, when warnings had been issued during the Morva incident, no one panicked. Although there had been some confusion in Squires, no one was hurt. Similarly, when notified of the bomb threats three days earlier, the campus responded calmly— which is not to say that there had not been some disruption. As Virginia Tech visiting professor Patricia Mooney Nickel pointed out in her insightful essay “There Is an Unknown on Campus,” classes had been canceled on three prior Mondays in the 2006-7 academic year “due to the threat of violence on campus.”11
It is quite possible that the administration was aware, as it tried to think about how to proceed, that classes had frequently been disrupted. Had there been a nonadministrative member of the teaching faculty present, or indeed a member of the VTPD, the Policy Group could have been reassured that, though it would indeed be yet another disruption in what was already a difficult year, panic would not ensue. A barrage of information would have been received by the Policy Group by now. The members needed to decide what to do with it, but they had numerous questions. They began to draft an e-mail:
Beyond the two gunshot victims found by police, was there a possibility that another person might be involved (i.e., a shooter), and if so, where is that person, what does that person look like, and is that person armed? At that time of the morning, when thousands are in transit, what is the most effective and efficient way to convey the information to all faculty, staff, and students? If we decided to close the campus at that point, what would be the most effective process given the openness of a campus the size of Virginia Tech? How much time do we have until the next class change?12
The question about whether or not there was another person involved—“(i.e., a shooter)”—is, quite frankly, absurd. Of course there is “a possibility” that someone else could be involved. What is most distressing about what comes next is the list of questions: “and if so, where is that person, what does that person look like, and is that person armed?” These questions appear to have been asked between 8:30 and 9:00 A.M., well before any kind of notification was issued to the community. So well before the first e-mail alert was sent the Policy Group and/or the president had determined that it was quite possible that an armed gunman could be on the campus, someone who had already killed two students.
At 9:01 A.M., while the Policy Group was trying to decide whether or not to notify the campus, Seung-Hui Cho was mailing his crazed, misanthropic video missive to NBC. He was also mailing a rambling, rage-filled letter to the English department at Virginia Tech.
The second class period of the day began on time at 9:05 A.M. Thus far, no warnings had been issued.
At 9:24 A.M., Emily Hilscher’s boyfriend was apprehended off campus by police who proceeded to question him. The poor young man must have been devastated when he realized that he not only had lost his girlfriend but also was suspected of having been involved in her murder. A seasoned officer would have suspected as soon as he questioned the young man that something wasn’t right—that perhaps they had been tracking the wrong person all along. But not until 9:48, following a gunpowder residue test, was it confirmed that Emily Hilscher’s boyfriend was not the perpetrator.
At 9:25 A.M., a VTPD captain joins the Policy Group “as a liaison,” and within a minute an e-mail is sent at last to campus staff, faculty, and students to notify them of the shooting in the dorm room. But it is too late to prevent people from coming to campus for the second class period of the day13 The captain’s arrival is absent from the Ford statement and is found instead in the meticulous timeline provided in the Panel Report.
What comes next in Ford’s account is, perhaps, the most distressing passage of all:
And so with the information the Policy Group had at approximately 9 A.M., we drafted and edited a communication to be released to the university community via e-mail and to be placed on the university web site. We made the best decision we could based upon the information we had at the time. Shortly before 9:30 A.M., the Virginia Tech community—faculty, staff, and students—were notified by e-mail as follows:
“A shooting incident occurred at West Ambler Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating. 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. Contact Virginia Tech Police at 231-6411. Stay tuned to the www.vt.edu. We will post as soon as we have more information.”14
The message was carefully worded, but it was not nearly as direct as it could have been. The “shooting incident” was really a double homicide. Even though the Policy Group now suspected that the shooter could be on the loose, the e-mail did not make it clear to the community that this was the case.
Between 9:15 and 9:30 A.M., Seung-Hui Cho chained the doors of three of the main entrances to Norris Hall from the inside. He left notes on the chained doors that bombs would be detonated if anyone tried to remove the chains. A faculty member saw one of the notes and took it to the Office of the Dean of Engineering on the third floor of Norris Hall.
Around 9:40 A.M., Seung-Hui Cho entered the second-floor classrooms of Norris Hall.
Just as someone in the dean’s office was about to call in the bomb threat, the shootings began.
Shots were heard in the President’s Boardroom in Burruss, a stone’s throw from Norris Hall.
The police responded to a 911 call from students in Norris. They reached Norris Hall in a mere three minutes. By 9:50 A.M., they had shot open a lock on an unchained door and entered the building to search for the shooter.
At roughly 9:51 A.M., Seung-Hui Cho committed suicide.
IT IS quite possible that, had a warning been issued, it would have resulted in a similarly tragic outcome. Seung-Hui Cho was determined to kill as many people as he could that morning. But when President Steger told the media that it could have turned out much worse than it did I can’t help thinking about those who lost loved ones on April 16.15 For them, the horror is superlative not comparative. There is no “worse” scenario than the one they are living inside because the worst has already happened to them. Their beloved children or husbands, brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, students or teachers, wives or friends are dead. In light of this, whatever explanation was provided for what happened needed to be as forthright and as honest as possible.
Families are still struggling to get access to critical papers. Some have been provided but there are others that have been omitted. There is no explanation as to how or why Cho’s counseling records were “inadvertently destroyed.” University spokesperson Larry Hincker defends the university’s right not to share all the documents pertaining to the case in this way:
Hincker, who wrote the notes from the Policy Group meeting, said last week that he couldn’t remember enough about that time to put them into context.
He said some documents the family lawyers obtained were removed by Virginia Tech lawyers before allowing The Times-Dispatch review.
Hincker said documents not released were not public records because they were Steger’s working papers, covered by attorney-client privilege, or Cho’s student records.16
Although more material has been recently released in accordance with the settlement between the victims’ families and the public, and it’s possible that other documents will be released in the future, it would seem that those lobbying for full disclosure still have a long battle ahead of them.
Some years ago, a friend gave me a quote by the late Audre Lorde, an African American poet who fought a courageous battle with cancer. On the top and bottom of the thin strip of blue paper are pinholes where I stuck it up on a notice board in my studio. When times get tough, I recite Audre Lorde’s words: “When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” I like the idea that fear diminishes when we focus on serving our visions; I like to think that there is a type of empowerment we can cultivate within ourselves that is nurturing rather than acquisitive or destructive.
We all make errors in judgment. Sometimes these errors result in tragedy. It must have been an agonizing morning for the Policy Group, unaccustomed as it was to dealing with security issues of this magnitude. In all likelihood members relied upon those with longer tenure for guidance.
Many of us under the same circumstances could have made some of the same mistakes the Virginia Tech administration may have made on the morning of April 16. I, like others, was willing to accept that the president had done the best he could. I thought that, within a few weeks, after the university had time to digest the horror of what had happened, the president and his advisers would understand that there was an urgent need for open communication. So far, this has not happened. One result is that the most insistent narrative has become Seung-Hui Cho’s. Because it was the most dramatic, it was the one to which the media responded. But there should have been a counterpoint to that narrative provided by the Virginia Tech leadership.
Sadly, the president ended up silencing himself at a time when everyone desperately needed to hear him speak.
∗ It is hard to know for sure if Ford was the lowest-ranking faculty member because, as of this writing, it is not entirely clear who was present at the Policy Group meeting on April 16.