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PDF:TECH A Handwritten notes of Larry Hincker, Virginia Tech's associate vice president of university relations, from the April 16, 2007, meeting of the school's executive Policy Group, which convened in response to the shootings of two students in West Ambler Johnson dormitory. PDF:TECH B E-mail alerts Virginia Tech sent on April 16, 2007. PDF:TECH C Police incident report from a Nov. 27, 2005, harrassment incident involing Seung-Hui Cho. PDF:TECH D Police incident report from a Dec. 12, 2005, harrassment incident involving Seung-Hui Cho. PDF:TECH E Police incident report from Dec, 13, 2005, when Seung-Hui Cho's roommate reported Cho had sent an instant message stating he was thinking of killing himself. PDF:TECH F May 22, 2007, letter from Virginia Tech employee Lynn Nystrom to Gerald Massengill, chairman of the task force investigating the Virginia Tech massacre. Nystrom was in Norris Hall when gunman Seung-Hui Cho fatally shot 32 students and faculty before killing himself. |
• COMMENTARY: Reporters Dig Deep into Tech Massacre
BLACKSBURG -- Some of the deepest secrets about Seung-Hui Cho's killing rampage at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, may never be made public.
Disclosure of the essential facts of the tragedy in a public archive was a key part of a settlement last month with victims' families, reached after the university released thousands of pages of internal documents to their lawyers.
But a Richmond Times-Dispatch review of an estimated 20,000 pages of those documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, found almost nothing about key issues the families wanted to be made public. Tech withheld from the newspaper some of the documents it released to the families.
The university will keep secret key material the families wanted to become public, including notes of the university's most senior officials from the emergency meeting of the Policy Group that morning, spokesman Larry Hincker said. Virginia Tech also will not release a cardboard box's worth of records about Cho, including his professors' notes and e-mails expressing concerns about him and seeking help for him.
However, Hincker said e-mails to and from 150 university administrators and faculty will for the first time be disclosed in the archive, giving the public a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how Tech officials responded to the unfolding crisis.
The documents Virginia Tech released to The Times-Dispatch that will eventually be part of its archive on April 16 include a suggestion of a connection Cho had with West Ambler Johnston Hall, the site of the first two killings. Police have said they knew of no reason why he picked the dorm for his first attack.
The documents also included a report that there were unlocked entrances to Norris Hall on April 16 as Cho carried out his murderous attack. Police were delayed precious minutes trying to break open three doors Cho chained shut. They entered after shooting out the lock of another door.
"The families expect that Virginia Tech will make full disclosure so that people presently and future generations can understand in full the circumstances surrounding what is the largest massacre on a campus in U.S. history," said Douglas E. Fierberg, one of the lawyers who negotiated the settlement.
The first document on top of the first box of documents released by Tech last week was a letter from Fierberg listing 21 categories of documents to be produced.
The families wanted to know what the university's Policy Group -- its top officials, including president Charles W. Steger -- discussed and decided in the critical hours after Cho killed his first two victims and while he was on his way to kill 30 people and then himself in Norris Hall.
They wanted to know what university officials, faculty, police and counselors did to help Cho as he fell deeper and deeper into mental illness. They wanted to know why, with a double murder occurring hours before the normal school day started and no killer in custody, university officials allowed people to proceed to vulnerable public spaces and classrooms.
Asked if the families expect the archive to include Cho's own records and the Policy Group deliberations, Fierberg said, "absolutely," adding that the families believe Virginia Tech had waived its right to keep records confidential, except for medical records of the victims and the settlement negotiations themselves.
Asked if that included police records such as tapes or transcripts of police radio calls on April 16 -- calls cited in one administrator's e-mails contained in the released documents explaining that she had locked down her offices -- Fierberg said the university refused to release those to the families, even though they had been broadcast over public airways at the time.
The state's investigation concluded in August 2007, even though members of the panel knew they didn't have all the information about the tragedy, said retired Virginia State Police Superintendent Gerald Massengill, who led the effort.
"We really didn't have the resources or time to look at everything involved in this tragedy," Massengill said. "We did try to get the information we needed to arrive at well-informed conclusions. I think we did that."
Massengill said the investigators focused on the two hours between Cho's first two murders and the massacre at Norris Hall. Cho was in Norris Hall and shooting people when university officials issued their first alert that a gunman was loose on the campus.
Massengill said the Policy Group made 25 or more major decisions over that time and that he believes he saw most of the group's e-mails from that time.
His panel's report, however, doesn't mention what appears to be a handwritten draft of the first alert to campus -- included in the documents The Times-Dispatch reviewed -- that suggests the officials withheld news that a student had died and another was injured in the first shootings.
The draft included a crossed-out line that suggested police were searching for the shooter, though the handwriting isn't clear.
The alert, mentioning only a "shooting incident," was issued at 9:26 a.m., nearly two hours after Cho's first attack and about 15 minutes before he started shooting in Norris Hall.
The draft was part of a set of handwritten notes -- the only documents from the Policy Group the university released -- that included the notation "so there a manhunt on the campus" and a follow-up comment "What is our policy on that." That was followed on the next page with: "945. Active shooting N. Hall. Rm 211 Norris Hall." The last four words were urgently underlined.
The Times-Dispatch review also found:
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.
The documents include hundreds of pages of printouts of news stories from newspapers and television stations and hundreds more detailing the university's efforts to keep media and public attention focused on its efforts to heal.
Among other information in the released documents:
Norris Hall that day
A letter from Lynn Nystrom, who worked in the engineering dean's offices on the third floor of Norris Hall, reported her colleagues closed their office suite's doors sometime after 9:30 on the morning of April 16. The letter doesn't say why. Cho started shooting on the second floor at about 9:40. Nystrom could not be reached immediately to explain.
She said a police officer made it onto the third floor at about 9:50, ordering the 15 people in her office suite to leave. They ran down the stairs to the second floor, where a chain blocked the exit.
"I felt like we were incredibly vulnerable," she wrote. "We were standing in the hallway with no place to go."
But the group eventually found an auditorium entrance with an unlocked door. They made their way there, unescorted, about 20 minutes before police were certain the gunman was dead.
Nystrom said a student who thought she'd be safer inside Norris Hall was pulled in by her classmates through a ground floor window, suggesting yet another way in.
The state investigation noted that the ground floor windows were narrow and that armed officers in protective vests couldn't get through. It did not comment on why the police did not try the auditorium entrance, which appeared to be in another building that is connected to Norris Hall. It did not report how long it took for police to try opening the three chained doors or to shoot out the lock on the fourth door.
A West Ambler Johnston Hall link
A police report disclosed that one of the women who complained about Cho stalking her in 2005 lived on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall, the floor where Cho killed his first two victims.
The woman didn't know Cho, but he had been instant messaging her through an online Facebook listing.
Cho telephoned her at 11:15 p.m. Nov. 27, 2005. At 11:30, he knocked on her door. He was wearing a hood and sunglasses, and when her roommate asked him who he was, he replied only: "The question mark kid."
Although the victim didn't know Cho's name, police tracked him down through a Facebook account. Cho said he knew the woman from a class and that he had meant no harm -- "It was a like ha-ha, a joke," he told police.
Professors' worries
E-mails three months before the massacre show the English Department arranged a seminar on dealing with troubled students, with one e-mail noting "a number of us have been struggling lately with students in the throes of some kind of crisis or mental illness. . . . What should we do when a student's written texts seem to hint at violence or suicide?"
The documents included a mention that one unnamed professor was concerned enough about Cho's behavior to ask for police coverage of the classroom.
They reported that one unnamed professor asked the university's Judicial Affairs department to review a paper Cho wrote to see if it violated an unspecified university policy.
A memo for a news briefing two days after the massacre included a typed note -- which someone had crossed out -- that Cho had been removed from an English class. That same memo had a handwritten note, also crossed out, that the teacher refused to let him in, but included a handwritten note the Cho was invited to do independent study.
Cho was removed from poet Nikki Giovanni's class in the fall of 2005 and given an independent study course instead. That spring, his fiction workshop professor decided to keep Cho in his class despite concerns about the content of his writing and his silence in class, and he dropped a technical writing course after a loud argument with the professor over the quality of his work. Students in his playwriting class in the fall of 2006 -- the semester before the massacre -- remarked, often jokingly, about the violence in his work.
Dorm problems
One report noted that at least one student in Cho's dorm during the 2005-2006 school year asked to move to another building to get away from him.
Students who lived near Cho took it upon themselves to warn other students about his behavior. Dorm staff talked to Cho several times that year about complaints they'd received, the report said.
Security, afterward
An e-mail from a member of the state panel investigating the massacre noted he was able to get into the dorm where Cho shot his first two victims through an unlocked door, four months after the massacre.
The man walked around for 45 minutes without being challenged.
"That is not going to be in the report, but y'all should know. People do not learn swiftly," the e-mail noted.
PR efforts
A note about interviews of students and staff the university arranged on the first day of classes after the massacre noted, "If we had scripted this entire event, we could not have done a better job . . . [an unnamed professor] made a comment that if we got our participants from central casting, we would not have had better players."
The families
Notes from a university official attending a meeting of the state panel that investigated the massacre quoted one parent whose child was killed that "someone needs to be responsible and apologize." His last name was misspelled.
The notes of that meeting quoted the father of an injured student asking why the university didn't send an e-mail after the first shootings.
Those notes also quoted the father of another injured student saying "need answers, someone needs to take the heat." The author of the note added, "This guy appeared a bit strange to me."
An e-mail from the parents of a faculty member who died in the shootings said Tech "seemed to my entire family to go into damage-control mode rather than to reach out to those on its staff and faculty most affected by the murders and woundings. . . . I know for a fact that President Steger himself has never once had a face-to face meeting with our daughter-in-law."
Aftermath
An internal report noted that 5.4 percent of nearly 5,000 Virginia Tech students participating in a mental-health survey last summer showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, with another 21 percent possibly meeting criteria for the diagnosis. About 3.7 percent of 1,700 faculty and staff met criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, the report noted.
Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051or dress@timesdispatch.com.
Contact Carlos Santos at (434) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com.
Contact Rex Bowman at (540) 344-3612 or dress@timesdispatch.com.
