Va. Tech president defends school’s response

RICHMOND, Va. - Virginia Tech’s president, facing calls for his ouster, defended his university’s response to the nation’s deadliest school shooting, saying Thursday that officials couldn’t have known the gunman would attack twice.

“Nobody can say for certain what would have happened if different decisions were made,” President Charles Steger told a news conference.

“The crime was unprecedented in its cunning and murderous results,” he said.

A governor-appointed panel that investigated the April 16 massacre at the Blacksburg campus released a report late Wednesday criticizing Virginia Tech officials, saying they could have saved lives if they had acted more quickly to warn students about the first shootings that morning at a dormitory and that a killer was on the loose.

Instead, it took administrators more than two hours to send students and staff an e-mail warning. The shooter had time to leave the dormitory, mail a videotaped confession and manifesto to NBC News, then return to campus and enter a classroom building, chain the doors shut and kill 31 more people, including himself.

“Warning the students, faculty and staff might have made a difference,” the panel in its report. “The earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving.”

President defends the school's actions
Steger said the administration was responding during the hours that passed after the first two students were slain in the dormitory.

“The notion that there was a two-hour gap is a great misconception,” Steger said. “There was continuous action and deliberations from the first event until the second, and they made a material difference in the results of the second event.”

“Cho is responsible for the carnage,” he said. “In respect to suggested changes, we recognize, as does the panel, that no plausible scenario was made for how this horror could have been prevent once he began that morning.

“I am not aware of anything the police learned that would have indicated that a mass murder was imminent.”

One victim’s mother urged the governor to “show some leadership” and fire Steger, and other parents demanded accountability for the errors.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, however, said the school’s officials had suffered enough without losing their jobs.

“I want to fix this problem so I can reduce the chance of anything like this ever happening again,” the governor said. “If I thought firings would be the way to do that, then that would be what I would focus on.”

Kaine said instead that parents of troubled children who are starting college should alert university officials, and those officials should “pick up the phone and call the parent” if they become aware of unusual behavior.

“The information needs to flow both ways,” the governor said.

Missed signals
The eight-member panel appointed by Kaine spent four months investigating the attacks.

It found that even before the killings, the university had failed to properly care for the mentally troubled student gunman, Seung-Hui Cho. On April 16, a quick warning could have made a difference in 31 lives.

“The alert should have been issued and classes should have been closed,” the panel’s chairman, Gerald Massengill, told the AP Thursday.

The missed signals make the Virginia Tech case similar to other school shootings. The U.S. Secret Service, which studied 37 school attacks, found that most attackers had engaged in behavior that caused others concern.

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