Va. Tech report cites 90-minute alert lapse

Some Virginia Tech officials notified their own families and locked down their buildings almost 90 minutes before issuing a campus wide alert during the 2007 massacre, according to a revised state report released Friday.

The corrected report also said that two students initially locked down in a residence hall were later sent to class and killed during the morning rampage of April 16, 2007.

Revisions to the report were released by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine in response to questions from victims' families and Virginia Tech.

Many of the revisions correct the timeline and add information about the events that transpired when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 faculty members and students, including two from the Hampton Roads area, before shooting himself. The shooting was the worst on a college campus in the nation's history.

Families of shooting victims and survivors received copies of the report Thursday. Andrew Goddard of Richmond, whose son Colin was shot four times, said he welcomed the corrections to the timeline, which he had been demanding. Colin Goddard was the last person shot before Cho killed himself.

"My son is probably alive because of 10 seconds, five seconds," Goddard said. "Times like this were lost in that morning, when seconds count."

Victims' families had pushed for corrections to the Virginia Tech Review Panel's original study, which started soon after the shooting and was released in August 2007.

The families' drive grew stronger after some of Cho's missing mental health records were found in the home of the former director of the university's counseling clinic.

The revisions to the report included these findings:

n At least two university officials notified family members at 8:05 a.m. that there had been a double shooting on campus. At 8:45 a.m., a university official e-mailed a colleague in Richmond, saying one student was dead and another critically wounded. "Gunman on the loose," he said, adding that "this is not releasable yet." Minutes later, he reminded the colleague, "just try to make sure it doesn't get out."

n At 9:26 a.m., Virginia Tech administrators sent the first e-mail to faculty, students and staff about the dormitory shooting. About 9:40, Cho began shooting in Norris Hall and killed 30 teachers and classmates and injured 17 others before killing himself, in about 11 minutes.

n Students initially locked down at West Ambler Johnston residence hall, where the first two victims were shot, later were released by the police and allowed to attend classes. "The shooter was unknown and possibly still present," the new report stated. Two of those students went to class and were killed.

n University and hospital officials failed to contact the family of the first victim, Emily Hilscher, for more than three hours - until after she had died. Hilscher survived for some time and had been taken to two hospitals. "The family lived about a 3-1/2 hour drive from campus," the report said, "but had the family received a timely call and been told where Emily was being treated they would have had a chance to at least place a call and talk to Emily's doctors and to her even if she could not respond." The report added that notifying families should have been a priority that day.

Kaine told The Associated Press that the findings that some school officials had called family members before issuing a warning were "inexcusable."

"There is almost never a reason not to provide immediate notification," Kaine told the AP. "If university officials thought it was important enough to notify their own families, they should have let everyone know."

Mark Owczarski, the university's director of news and information, took issue with parts of the revised report, particularly that university employees called their families before the campus was alerted.

He said in one case, a Tech employee called to wake up her son for class and informed him that there had been a shooting on campus.

Another staffer, Owczarski said, received a phone call from the university while she was dropping her children off with her mother. She then told her mother she had to leave because there had been a shooting.

"If these are the two notifications that the amended report alludes to in its findings, clearly they do not comprise a concerted effort by University staff to notify their own families of danger in advance of notifying the campus community," Owczarski said.

Owczarski said that Tech was thankful to the original panel review and the changes in policy and safety that have resulted.

The corrected report does not change the conclusions and recommendations set forth by the panel's first report. Those recommendations, approved by the General Assembly in 2008, included the clarification of information-sharing procedures, mandatory creation of emergency plans for colleges and universities, and the investment of $41 million in the state's mental health operations.

Denise Watson Batts, (757)446-2504 or denise.batts@pilotonline.com