Tech report slams delay

RICHMOND — A report into the Virginia Tech rampage concludes that school authorities should not have waited two hours to notify students about the first shooting on campus, said a student who was briefed on the report last night.

Police also should have broadened their search for suspects after they discovered the bodies of two students in a dormitory on April 16, said Derek O’Dell, one of the 23 wounded in the shootings that left 33 dead, including the gunman.

The report, however, concludes that while the notification may have saved lives, a campuswide lockdown probably would not have stopped gunman Seung-hui Cho’s rampage, the New York Times reported last night, quoting the document.

“There does not seem to be a plausible scenario of a university response to the double homicide that could have prevented the tragedy of considerable magnitude on April 16,” the newspaper quoted the report as saying. “Cho had started on a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge.”

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday that he is troubled that Virginia Tech student Seung-hui Cho’s violent class essays, including one with a narrative similar to the massacre he carried out, were not widely shared with law-enforcement and university officials.

Mr. Kaine said the issue is “a significant feature” in the report due for release today by the panel he appointed to review the April 16 shootings.

“I think there’s a lot of instances where information was out there or different people had information where it needed to be put together,” Mr. Kaine said.

Mr. Kaine said it was hard to understand why more was not done about a student who once showed a fascination with the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and considered the two students who committed them martyrs.

“Look, I’m troubled that a student who had talked about Columbine at an earlier point in his life, that that information was unknown to anybody on the Tech campus,” said Mr. Kaine, who read about the writings in a draft of the report.

The report also says that when Cho was choosing a college, advisers counseled him against a large university because of concerns he would be unable to communicate and function socially, a student who survived his rampage said last night.

“It was recommended that he not apply to school as big as Virginia Tech because he had selective mutism and also ongoing psychiatric needs that a big university probably wouldn’t address as well,” Mr. O’Dell said.

Selective mutism is a mental disorder that leaves a person unable to speak in certain social settings.

Some of the families of those killed and injured have demanded frank answers to questions about failures that allowed Cho to commit the worst mass shooting on an American college campus, despite behavior that alarmed students, faculty and police.

“I know that some parents of the deceased are focusing on the mental health aspect of how Cho through all his life slipped through the cracks and I understand that,” said Suzanne Grimes, of Eighty Four, Pa., whose son Kevin Sterne was wounded in the leg.

“My focus is why they didn’t cancel the classes that day.”

Her son, 22, was shot in Norris Hall, where 30 of the 32 persons slain by Cho were killed. He has returned to Virginia Tech to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering, but a bullet remains in his body and he still receives physical therapy.

“I think overall if the panel report does contain some accountability in it, it will offer some closure to the families,” Mrs. Grimes said.

Virginia Tech turned over a compilation of Cho’s violent writings to Virginia State Police soon after the shootings, police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said.

Plays and other writings were so bloody that they horrified some teachers and fellow students. They included a 2006 fictional account of a campus shooting that previewed his deadly attack in Blacksburg, The Washington Post reported.

But the state police did not turn Cho’s violent screed over to the eight-member review panel, Miss Geller said. It was part of a criminal investigation and the agency was forbidden under the state Freedom of Information Act from giving the material to the panel, she said.

n AP reporters Bob Lewis and Vicki Smith in Richmond contributed to this report.