Signs Were There, Was Security In Place?
Almost as soon as the shooting stopped at Virginia Tech, the questions began. How could such a tragic crime have happened in a place where parents believed their children were safe?
Former professor of criminology Adam Thermos has made campus security his business — and his passion — for almost 20 years. He said it's difficult to judge the Virginia Tech administration until the investigation is completed.
"The reality is, a lot of the universities today are going to be looking into their mission statement and whether or not they can really fulfill this mission of providing a safe environment for their students," Thermos, who founded the campus security consulting group Strategic Technology Group, told The Early Show co-anchor Russ Mitchell.
Details on the life of 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, the student responsible for the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, are slowly emerging, as well as indications that there were warning signs of what was to come.
Cho, a senior majoring in English, arrived in the U.S. as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said. He was living on campus in a different dorm from the one where Monday's bloodbath began.Photos: Virginia Tech Mourns
Police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set him off.
"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
But Katherine Newman, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, said most school shooters are rarely loners, but rather failed joiners.
"People who continuously try to join social groups and are rebuffed," said Newman, the author of "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings." "And their daily experience is one of rejection and friction."
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."
"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."
She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.
The Chicago Tribune reported on its Web site that he left a note in his dorm room that included a rambling list of grievances. Citing unidentified sources, the Tribune said he had recently shown troubling signs, including setting a fire in a dorm room and stalking some women.
ABC, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the note, which is several pages long, explains Cho's actions and says, "You caused me to do this."
"Some of the other shooters I studied also wrote murderous essays, which they turned in to teachers, which shocked them," Newman said. "Virginia Tech was far more proactive than most schools I've studied. The other similarity I find eerie is he's the younger brother of a successful older sister — graduated from Princeton. One of the other cases I studied was very much like this. A younger brother who wasn't as successful as his valedictorian sister. In a high-achieving society, that can be difficult burden."Click here for an interactive gallery of the victims.
Newman said that most school shooters give warning signs, sometimes as much as nine months in advance. She thinks Cho was giving off those signals because many students at Virginia Tech were not shocked about who the shooter turned out to be. Nonetheless, Newman said it is difficult to discern the difference between someone who is depressed and someone who is going to snap and do something awful.
"All of us know many people who suffer from depression," she said. "Very few of them are going to become killers. So I think it's difficult to identify them in advance. It's much more likely that we can stop these events by listening to the warning signals that they send off and being alert to them. I think that's actually what Virginia Tech did do but a dedicated killer is difficult to stop."
Investigators believe Cho at some point had been taking medication for depression, the Tribune reported.
Classmates said that on the first day of an introduction to British literature class last year, the 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho's turn, he didn't speak.
The professor looked at the sign-in sheet and, where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. "Is your name, 'Question mark?' " classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.
Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous. "He didn't reach out to anyone. He never talked," Poole said.
"We just really knew him as the question mark kid," Poole said.
According to Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Finchum, in November 2005, Cho also made contact with a female student through telephone calls and in person. The student declined to press charges.
In December 2005, Cho sent instant messages to a second woman. He made no threats, Finchum said, but the student complained. Officers spoke to him at that time. Cho was evaluated by local mental health agency, not connected with the university, after the second incident.
While signs that Cho was a severely troubled young man were detected by some, Thermos said colleges and universities also have to take measures to improve security. Although campus safety has improved over the years, Thermos said it has a long way to go. Five fatal shootings and 50 events have occurred on campuses in the past decade.
"What stopped me dead in my tracks, it's not really the event itself, but the response immediately after the event and some of the assumptions made," he said. "Truth to be told, there are remarkable administrators around the country that are deploying surveillance systems, access control systems, so forth, since the early '90s. On the operational level this school, they have to make decision whether they're going to go to a full-blown professional police operation response or outsource this response to a state, city or county operations for that."
But many people wonder just what Cho was doing in the two hours between the first shooting and the second and more was not done to alert the entire university community.
The first attack happened at a dormitory, where two people were killed, then inside a classroom building, where 31 people, including Cho, died after being locked inside, Virginia State Police said. Cho committed suicide; two handguns — a 9 mm and a .22-caliber — were found in the classroom building.
Newman says she believes that during that time between the shootings, Cho was preparing for his onslaught.
"I think he was assembling the materials he needed. I think he was writing his letter," she said. "I think he was whipping himself to a fury and I think he probably realized he just stepped way over a line by shooting two people already and was putting himself in a position where either he would be killed by someone else or he would kill himself. But he would go out in a blaze of glory, which is, sadly, what most school shooters are looking to do. They want to be defined as anti-heroes, not as wimps who disappear from the scene. It's a sad comment on the culture that we live in that that seems more satisfying to them."
During that time, if he had been running security at Virginia Tech, Thermos said he would have shut down the campus and would have been checking surveillance videotapes to see who was where. He would also use whatever media was at his disposal to alert people, be it a mass email or a mass broadcast.
"Then I will decide whether or not this was a domestic event or whether or not I'm going to have to have a meeting with the president and what information I'm going to release to the media," he said.
Virginia Tech alerted the students about the first shooting via email and Thermos said there are about five or six options they could have used.
"Certainly the reaction is what stopped me," he said. "I'm a parent of two kids in college today. That's why it was a double-hit for me personally."
But one of the things that work against colleges in these kinds of catastrophes is the culture of openness that most universities promote. Thermos said that even though society is open, we still come home to "our gated communities for our safety at night." It might be time to tighten security on campus.
"When we're talking about universities, we're talking about an environment where anyone can come anytime they want, and this university had warning for a year," he said.
Parents should ask questions about the measures a university will take if a catastrophe like this occurs because there is no way these kind of threats can be completely prevented.
"Visit the campus and find out how security operations works," he said. "We have incidents back to the 1990s when entire campuses were designed, walking into the quad, through a central station, to prove to the parents your due diligence and your capability to protect kids."
Read an excerpt of Newman's book here.