February 4, 2009

Virginia Tech President Speaks Up for International Students in Response to Criticism

Weeks after the brutal slaying of a graduate student at Virginia Tech by another graduate student, the institution’s president, Charles W. Steger, sent an open letter to the campus this week to confront what he called “troubling” ethnically charged commentary about the suspected killer, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

The killing last month was the first at Virginia Tech since a massacre in 2007 in which the gunman, a student, was a South Korean immigrant. A university spokesman, Lawrence G. Hincker, told the Associated Press that the institution had recently received several dozen letters, e-mail messages, and calls attacking foreigners and questioning whether Virginia Tech should admit international students.

Mr. Steger strongly defended the university’s international students in his message this week. “Virginia Tech is an open and accepting community including many races, ethnicities, and cultures from around the world,” the letter states. “We believe firmly that this diversity enriches the educational experience of all of our students.” —Charles Huckabee

January 22, 2009

Graduate Student Is Brutally Slain in a Cafe at Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech was struck by another tragedy on its campus last night when a graduate student was slain in a brutal knife attack and another graduate student was charged with murder in her death, the university said in a report on its Web site.

The victim was identified as Xin Yang, a female accounting student from Beijing who had just arrived on the campus two weeks ago. The student accused of attacking her was identified as Haiyang Zhu, a male Ph.D. candidate in economics from Ningbo, China.

“The nature of the incident points to an isolated, very personal tragedy,” Virginia Tech’s president, Charles W. Steger, said today at a news conference. In 2007 a student at Virginia Tech fatally shot 32 students and professors in an apparently random attack.

Wednesday’s incident occurred shortly after 7 p.m. at the Au Bon Pain cafe in the university’s Graduate Life Center. Mr. Zhu and Ms. Yang had been having coffee there, and records indicated that they knew each other, university officials said. A minute after receiving a 911 call, campus police officers arrived at the cafe, said Wendell R. Flinchum, Virginia Tech’s chief of police. “It was a horrific crime scene,” he said. “The victim had been decapitated.”

Officers immediately apprehended Mr. Zhu, who was charged with first-degree murder and jailed without bond.

Virginia Tech has remained open while providing counseling to witnesses and first responders, as well as to other students and employees on the campus. The university’s international center is reaching out to Chinese students in particular, Mr. Steger said.

“Once again we are challenged as a community to offer support to one another as we process this recent event,” the president wrote in an open letter to the campus. —Sara Lipka

November 17, 2008

Virginia Tech Students Create Electronic Archive on Shootings

Students at Virginia Tech have posted online about 6,000 pages of documents related to the shootings on the campus last year.

The students created the Prevail Archive — which includes prior police reports on the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, and e-mail messages between university officials after the shootings — because they believed the documents “should be freely accessible to the public,” they said on the site.

Under a settlement between Virginia Tech and several families of victims of the attack, the university must share an electronic archive with them, but not necessarily make it available publicly.

Justin M. Harrison, a computer-engineering student, and about 10 volunteers worked in shifts for two days to scan thousands of pages from about 20,000 released by Virginia Tech after a Freedom of Information Act request by The Richmond Times-Dispatch, that newspaper reported.

“It won’t be done for me until I get all the information up there,” Mr. Harrison told the Times-Dispatch, “so people can see with their own eyes what happened.” —Sara Lipka

November 14, 2008

Virginia Tech's Text-Message Alert System Partly Failed During False Alarm

A report of what sounded like gunshots prompted Virginia Tech to use its text-message emergency-alert system on Thursday for the first time, but the system failed to deliver all of the messages.

The sounds turned out to have come from cartridges from a nail gun, which the campus police believe someone exploded manually by slamming a trash bin’s lid on them. Echoes of the explosions were amplified because the incident occurred between two high-rise dormitories. But until officials had determined the cause, the university police secured the entrances of the buildings and searched them extensively, even using a dog trained to sniff out explosives.

While that investigation was under way, the university used a multipronged emergency-alert system that it set up in the aftermath of a massacre on the campus in April 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people and then himself.

Officials say that most of the new alert systems worked well. Messages were successfully sent to students, professors, and staff members via university e-mail, on LED display boards in some classrooms, and on university Web sites. But a system designed to send messages to cellphones and other mobile devices, which relies on a product from a company called 3n, failed to deliver to all of the people who had signed up for it, according to university officials.

The 3n system, which is known on the campus as VT Alerts, is designed to send warnings by text message, by voice message, or to non-university e-mail accounts, depending on which method users have chosen. More than 30,000 people affiliated with Virginia Tech have signed up for VT Alerts.

“The system froze up,” Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech, said in an interview today. “We’re very disappointed, and I am not happy in the slightest at this level of service.” —Jeffrey R. Young

October 19, 2008

Virginia Tech Officials Meet With Families as New Details Emerge About Killings

As Virginia Tech officials met this weekend with the family members of people killed and injured in the April 2007 mass shootings, a report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch raises new questions about the chronology of some events on the morning of the attack.

Members of the Virginia Tech Policy Group, a panel of campus officials who played roles in responding to the crisis, spoke with families of the deceased today and met yesterday with people who were injured during the massacre. The meetings, both of which were closed to reporters, were among the terms of a settlement that the university reached this past summer with families of the students and employees shot by Seung-Hui Cho, a gunman who killed 32 people before taking his own life. Many victims and family members have said they believe the university should have done more to warn the campus after the first two shootings, in a dormitory, were discovered. About 2½ hours later, Mr. Cho killed 30 more people in a classroom building.

Virginia Tech may have been slower to ascertain the whereabouts of an initial “person of interest” in the first two shootings than university officials had previously said, according to records obtained by the Times-Dispatch. After the early-morning shootings, the campus police identified a possible suspect and determined that he was not on the campus. (That student was later cleared of any involvement in the massacre.)

The police interview that led to that identification, however, apparently took place later than was previously reported. University officials told a state investigative panel last year that the campus police began that interview at 7:30 a.m., and that Virginia Tech officials were told the student was off campus by 8:10 a.m.

Earlier this month, Virginia Tech’s police chief, Wendell Flinchum, told families of the deceased that there was no mention of a possible suspect at 8:10 a.m. because the interview leading to that person did not start until 8:16 a.m. Mr. Flinchum’s comments — which the Times-Dispatch obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests — suggest that Virginia Tech officials may not have known about the person of interest until 9:25 a.m., just one minute before the university issued its first notice to students and staff members that there had been a shooting on the campus. That notification was issued 10 minutes after Mr. Cho began his rampage in Norris Hall.

“To know that this time line has been so off for so long, we feel that we’ve been misled,” Michael Pohle, whose son Michael was killed in Norris Hall, told the Times-Dispatch. “This just calls anything we have been told by them into question.” —Brock Read

March 25, 2008

State Offers $100,000 Settlements to Families of Victims at Virginia Tech

A proposed state settlement would offer the families of the 32 people killed last April at Virginia Tech about $100,000 each, The Virginian-Pilot reported. The newspaper said that the proposal, which is intended to head off lawsuits and is still being negotiated, would also pay medical and counseling expenses for the families and surviving victims of the tragedy, in which a gunman killed two students in a dormitory and 30 students and professors in a classroom building.

The families have until Monday to decide whether to accept the settlement, the newspaper reported. In exchange, they would give up the right to sue the state, the university, the City of Blacksburg, Va., and other entities. —Charles Huckabee

March 7, 2008

U. of Nebraska at Lincoln Bans 'Assassin' Game

In these violent and panicked times, airline passengers who utter the word “bomb” risk being arrested, and college students who carry toy guns may be disciplined by campus officials.

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has banned the game Assassin, in which participants “kill” one another until one survivor triumphs, usually winning a pot of money, the Associated Press reported today. The game, borrowing from tag and hide-and-seek, typically involves stakeouts and chases with, for example, foam-dart guns.

“While this may be a game that is fun to play, it is extremely inappropriate in this day and age in which we are all too familiar with the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shootings,” Nebraska’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Juan Franco, wrote in a e-mail message to students, according to the AP. “I am asking student organizations to … make it clear that it will not be tolerated on campus,” Mr. Franco said.

Officials at Indiana University at Bloomington have also expressed concern about the game, the Indiana Daily Student reported today. Several campuses, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have student groups known as “assassins’ guilds.”

Last year students at Hampden-Sydney College, which is not far from Virginia Tech, canceled their annual game, USA Today reported. —Sara Lipka

February 18, 2008

Tale of Campus Violence Will Make Delayed Big-Screen Debut This Spring

A movie about a disgruntled graduate student who turns violent at an American university will be released in April, its distributor told the Associated Press on Friday, a day after a former student killed five and wounded 16 in a shooting spree at Northern Illinois University.

The film, titled Dark Matter and starring Meryl Streep, was put on hold last year, “out of respect” for the Virginia Tech shootings, said the official, Gary Rubin of First Independent Pictures. According to the AP, the movie depicts a Chinese graduate student in science who becomes violent in dealing with academic politics at an American university. Ms. Streep plays a university benefactor who befriends him. —Andrew Mytelka

December 12, 2007

Faculty Hero in Virginia Tech Shootings Is Named 'Most Inspiring Person' of 2007

Beliefnet, a Web site devoted to spiritual issues, announced today that its most inspiring person of the year was Liviu Librescu, the Romanian-born Holocaust survivor who as an engineering professor at Virginia Tech saved the lives of many of his students by barricading the door of his classroom against the gunman who killed more than 30 people on a terrible day last spring. Mr. Librescu, who was 76 years old, received 81 percent of votes from visitors to the Web site. The other nominees received, at most, 4 percent. Beliefnet said it would make a donation to the Liviu Librescu Memorial Fellowship at Virginia Tech. —Andrew Mytelka

December 11, 2007

Virginia Tech Professor Leads in Vote for 'Most Inspiring Person of the Year'

Beliefnet is asking its readers to choose the most inspirational person of the year. They’ve narrowed it down to 10 people. At this moment, the leader in the voting, with 81 percent, is Liviu Librescu, a Virginia Tech professor who saved many of his students by barricading the door to his classroom during the shooting there that claimed more than 30 lives last April.

Mr. Librescu, 76, was shot to death by the deranged assailant, Cho Seung-Hui. The professor of engineering science and mechanics was a Holocaust survivor.

It appears that Mr. Librescu will win the contest by a large margin. His closest competitor, with just 4 percent of the vote, is Wesley Autrey, who saved a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York City. In third place is Angelina Jolie, who is known for her humanitarian work, and for being very pretty. —Thomas Bartlett