Investigative Panel Criticizes Virginia Tech's Response to Mentally Ill Student and His Murderous Rampage

By ROBIN WILSON

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A state panel that investigated the massacre at Virginia Tech last spring issued a harshly worded report today that said the university had erred in several ways, both in handling a mentally disabled student who became a killer and in dealing with the immediate aftermath of the shootings.

Despite complaints from professors and students that Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman, was unstable and threatening, no one at Virginia Tech "connected all the dots" and adequately dealt with his problems, the panel found. The report also said university offices -- including the counseling center and the dean of students -- had misinterpreted federal privacy laws in refusing to share information about Mr. Cho's behavior with one another and with Mr. Cho's parents. The university never informed his parents that Mr. Cho had been referred to a psychiatric facility, the report said.

The panel found that the Virginia Tech police had made a mistake in "prematurely concluding" that the first two murders on April 16, which occurred in a dormitory room on the campus, resulted from a domestic dispute and that the killer had probably left the campus. And the report said the university had waited much too long -- about two hours -- to issue a campuswide alert about those murders.

But while it made many findings that found fault with the response to the attack, and many more recommendations for improvements, the panel did not call for the firing of any officials.

A spokesman for Virginia Tech said the university would not comment on the report until a news conference at 2:30 this afternoon. The university issued its own report on the shootings, with its own set of recommendations, last week.

The eight-member review panel was appointed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia in response to the killings, which amounted to the largest mass murder by an individual in modern American history. Mr. Cho, an undergraduate at the university, shot dead 32 students and faculty members, and wounded 17 more, before killing himself. The panel was charged with reviewing the life and mental-health history of Mr. Cho, as well as examining the responses of the university and the police to the murders. It was also asked to interpret the effectiveness of both federal and state privacy and gun laws. The panel held four public meetings and conducted 200 interviews.

Gordon K. Davies, who for 20 years directed the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, was a member of the panel. In an interview this morning, he said the panel's work was "very intense, arduous, and emotional." While panel members had several debates and discussions, he said, they all strongly agreed with the report's findings. A retired Virginia State Police superintendent, a child psychiatrist, and a circuit-court judge were also on the panel.

In its findings, the panel said that since Mr. Cho had been declared a danger to himself and ordered to seek outpatient treatment in 2005, he should have been ineligible to purchase a gun and violated federal law when he did so. The report did applaud the police for responding quickly to both the shootings in the dormitory and later at Norris Hall, the academic building where most of the victims were killed. But it said that while the university wisely established an assistance center for families of the victims, the help "fell short" because of a lack of leadership and a lack of coordination among those providing services.

The families of those killed and injured have criticized Virginia Tech for not issuing a campuswide alert immediately after the first two murders, to try to prevent further violence. Vincent J. Bove, who runs a company that trains security personnel on college campuses, represents the families of seven people who were killed or injured at Virginia Tech. He said this morning that they are "extremely disturbed" by the review panel's report because it does not say who specifically is to blame for the university's failure to act quickly.

"There is not direct responsibility attributed to the leadership team or the president," he said in an interview. "The families believe that the 30 lives that were taken in the second shooting incident were all preventable. The university failed."

Mr. Davies said he hoped other universities would take a lesson from what happened at Virginia Tech and review their own procedures. "There is no one-size-fits-all security system that will be usable by everyone," he said. "At the same time, every college and university needs to be aware of this potential -- not only for shootings, but for other kinds of critical incidents -- and it needs to plan for it."