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The 'Toll Would Have Been Less'
Gov. Timothy Kaine, front, accepts the report of the Virginia Tech panel, which included Gordon Davies, left, Roger Depue, Tom Ridge and Diane Strickland.
(By Steve Earley -- The Virginian-pilot)
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The report concluded that "one could argue the total toll would have been less" had Steger and administrators alerted students and faculty members sooner after Cho shot and killed two people about 7:20 a.m. in West Ambler Johnston Hall. Two-and-a-half hours later, Cho killed 30 people in Norris Hall before taking his own life.
One victim's mother, Celeste Peterson, has called for Steger's firing. Another, Suzanne Grimes, mother of wounded student Kevin Sterne, said: "I can't understand why the alarm to students wasn't sent out at 7:20. The president of the college still states that there is a misconception about the two-hour gap. I'm not sure what planet the president is on. There was a two-hour gap. If there's any misconception, it's in the president's own mind. . . . He still hasn't acknowledged responsibility for what happened, and that's why we're so angry."
Peter Read's daughter Mary, an Annandale High graduate, was killed in Norris Hall. "It's hard for us to believe that anybody could . . . read this report and not believe that key people should be held accountable," he said.
Read stopped short of calling for the ouster of the university's president.
At a news conference at Virginia Tech on Thursday, Steger defended his actions and said he wouldn't resign. "We believe that our people acted quickly and to the best of our abilities, based on what we knew at the time," he said. Steger said the school administration did not have all the facts about the first shooting and did not want to spread partial or incorrect information to students.
Kaine said: "I want to fix this problem so I can reduce the chance of anything like this ever happening again. If I thought firings would be the way to do that, then that would be what I would focus on."
Cho, the report said, was to blame for the rampage. He was on "a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge."
The report cited a major breakdown in communication and treatment in 2005 after a judge ordered Cho to receive outpatient care. He was suicidal after police interviewed him when female students complained that he was stalking them, according to the report.
The judge ordered Cho to go to the university's Cook Counseling Center, but health-care professionals there never treated him, and the center lost many of his records. The school never told Cho's parents in Centreville about his condition.
Roger L. Depue, a panel member and former FBI profiler, said there were lots of "warning signs, red flags and indicators" that Cho was in trouble.
But "it takes people who are trained to pick up on it," Depue said, and that became difficult once Cho was in college because Virginia Tech officials didn't know about his history of mental health problems as a student in Fairfax County schools.
"All those people who tried to help him earlier in life, now they were gone, and he began to degenerate," Depue said. "No one was putting it all together."
