At Va. Tech, Near Silence For a Student's Anguished Cry

A ll William Kim has left of his only son is a new kind of life after death: Daniel's electronic remains. A cellphone with its address book -- the father calls each number on the list, hoping to connect to someone who knows something. An instant-messaging account. Online game rooms, filled with Daniel's fellow World of Warcraft players.

So many people, so much life, yet Daniel Kim is dead, perhaps because somewhere in the blizzard of data that saturates our lives, his cries for help went unheard, unminded.

After April, after the shootings at Virginia Tech, this sort of thing should not happen anymore. So everyone thought. But Dan Kim, a 21-year-old Virginia Tech senior from Reston, shot himself in the head last month while he sat in his car in a Target parking lot in Christiansburg, Va. The suicide came after at least one and possibly two students at other colleges had contacted Virginia Tech to say their friend had bought a gun and was talking about killing himself.

"Daniel has been acting very suicidal recently, purchasing a $200 pistol and claiming he'll go through with it," wrote Shaun Pribush, a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in an e-mail to Virginia Tech's health center. "We are very concerned for his safety. . . . please forward this to who can give him the best care."

In addition to Pribush, a student at another Virginia college tells me he called Tech's switchboard in October seeking help for Daniel. A university operator's log shows that a man called expressing concern about a friend, but when the operator offered to transfer the call to the health center, the caller declined. Both Pribush and the other student knew Daniel from online games and IM-ing but had never met him face to face.

Despite promises after the April shootings that the college would be more responsive to warning signs, despite written protocols requiring that any student who makes "any gesture or reference to suicide . . . must be seen by the psychologist on call," no one from Tech's counseling center contacted Daniel.

Instead, the university referred the matter to police, who drove by his off-campus apartment, asked if he was okay and reported back that Daniel said he was fine.

"At that point, that was it," says Virginia Tech's associate vice president, Larry Hincker. "Daniel kind of blew off the Blacksburg police. This is an adult who lives off campus, so it's under the police jurisdiction."

Counselors would have intervened if police had said Daniel was a danger to himself or others, says Dean of Students Tom Brown.

Hincker says Kim "was not on the radar screen," and no faculty member or roommate had expressed concern about him.

Indeed, no adult seemed to notice that the math major had stopped attending classes in September. "Even learning one more thing like that would have changed things for us," Brown says.

After Pribush's e-mail was received by the university's Care Team -- counselors and administrators who meet weekly to discuss troubled students -- no one made any effort to get in touch with his parents.