www.roanoke.com

Updated: 2:30 p.m.

If anything could have averted the Virginia Tech tragedy altogether, it would have been the recognition of how troubled was Seung-Hui Cho, and what a threat he was to those around him, Gov. Tim Kaine said Thursday.

The statement came during a news conference Thursday morning about the release of the report by the independent panel he appointed four months ago to review the April 16 shootings at Tech. The panel’s intensive, 300-page report was released late Wednesday night after it was learned it had already been leaked to the New York Times.

Kaine said Cho’s family and the schools he attended in Northern Virginia knew well how troubled Cho was, but also that with the right kind of help, he could succeed.

It was “a huge missed opportunity” that such information wasn’t passed on to Tech.

Once Cho was in Blacksburg, however, there were clear indications of his problems, Kaine said. But Tech lacked an effective mechanism to pull that information together and do something about it.

Asked who should be responsible for seeing that such information is transmitted with a student, Kaine first suggested it should be part of the enrollment process.

"I think parents are responsible," he added. "If your child has challenges ... don't just take your child to the campus. Go by the campus counseling center or the [resident advisor's] room, and say, ‘Let me tell you about my precious child.’”

The university also has a responsibility, when problems are observed, to pick up the phone and call the parents, he said.

A different response by the Tech administration could not have averted the tragedy, Kaine said, echoing the report, but it could have reduced the loss of life.

“The broad Tech and Blacksburg community should have been notified that there was a fatal shooting and that the perpetrator or perpetrators were still at large,” he said.

The police had a good lead following the first killings in West Ambler Johnston Hall, Kaine said, and they moved quickly on it as they should have. But it should not have been at the expense of ignoring other possibilities.

But panel member Roger Depue, a former FBI agent, had praise for the Tech police and Chief Wendell Flinchum.

“This man had an active shooter response plan," Depue said. He said not many campus police departments like his have such a thing, yet the Tech police not only had one, but were well trained on it.

"Flinchum was on top of this thing. He made a few mistakes, but he's a chief I could work for," Depue said.

Kaine summarized the other key points and recommendations in his statement, and said the next step is to determine who is responsible for implementing each of the recommendations.

Asked if the report would lead to personnel changes at Tech, Kaine said, "I believe we can make efforts to fix these problems, and I needn't get involved with personnel decisions."

Kaine praised the panel for the thoroughness of the report.

Gerald Massengill, who chaired the review panel, in turn thanked the governor and the families of the Tech victims. "They kept us focused in a very appropriate and eloquent way."

Massengill noted the lack of dissenting opinions on the panel. There wasn't complete agreement on every item, he said, but everyone was comfortable with the report.

He also thanked the media for its role in keeping the process before the public.

The panel reviewed thousands of pages of documents and interviewed more than 200 people, including Cho’s family, who Massengill praised and thanked for their cooperation.

They were “very forthcoming," he said, and the family's release of information about Seung-Hui Cho's background and mental health allowed the level of detail found in the report.

"This report tells a comprehensive story, with detail, about this great tragedy," Massengill said. "Those findings are based on facts as they came to us. This panel had but one agenda, and that was discover the facts, and allow those facts to take us wherever it might lead."

He cited a statement made by panel member Diane Strickland of Roanoke: "We're not going to say we turned over every stone, but we turned over every one we found."

Speaking for herself, Strickland, a retired circuit court judge, said the panel’s work had a scope far broader than members initially recognized.

She and several panel members cited the report's value in propelling changes that could avert such a tragedy in the future, not only at Tech, but at colleges everywhere.

Her greatest honor, Strickland said, was getting to know some of the victims' families. They displayed "an incredible strength, and incredible dignity, and I hope the work we have done will aid them in finding some comfort," she said.

Updated: 1:07 p.m.

RICHMOND — The report of a state panel investigating the Virginia Tech shootings criticizes decisions made by university officials and law enforcement as the April 16 crisis unfolded and concludes that the university failed to provide needed help for troubled student Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people and himself on the Blacksburg campus.

The report — which the governor’s office posted online Wednesday ahead of schedule after The New York Times obtained a copy —  resulted from a four-month investigation by a panel that Gov. Tim Kaine appointed days after the shootings. The panel will formally deliver the report to the governor this morning in Richmond. Tech officials will hold a news  conference this afternoon to respond to the findings.

The eight-member panel cites errors made by Tech police on April 16 after the early-morning shooting deaths of two students in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a campus dormitory. Police initially identified a man other than Cho as a suspect, and “did not take sufficient action to deal with what might happen if the initial lead proved erroneous.”

Police further erred by not advising university administrators to send out a campuswide  alert that two students had been killed and urging caution. More than  two hours elapsed before any notice of the initial shooting was sent to students and employees.

About 2 1/2 hours after the first shooting incident, Cho killed 25 students, five faculty members and himself in Norris Hall.

“Warning the students, faculty, and staff might have made a difference,” the report states. “Putting more people on guard could have resulted in quicker recognition of a problem or suspicious activity, quicker reporting to police, and quicker response of police.”

Tech administrators should have considered canceling classes and closing the campus after the initial  shootings, the panel concluded. Tech officials have said that a lockdown would have been impractical because of the number of students and workers already on their way to campus when the first shooting occurred.

“Even if it only partially reduced the university population on campus, it might have done some good,” the report states. “It is the panel’s judgment that, all things considered, the toll could have been reduced had these actions been taken. But none of these measures would likely have averted a mass shooting altogether.”

The panel found the police and emergency services response at Norris Hall to be effective and also gave high marks to area hospitals that treated the wounded.

The report offers less flattering assessments of how Cho was handled by Tech and the state’s mental health system. Cho was temporarily detained in a behavioral health facility after  a December 2005 complaint that he had talked of suicide. A Montgomery County special justice ordered him to seek outpatient treatment after his release.

Professors also had raised concerns about Cho’s behavior and the dark and violent nature of his writings for an English assignment.

The panel concluded that Tech’s “care team,” which is designed to help students with problems, “was ineffective in connecting the dots or heeding the red flags that were so apparent with Cho.”

Among other things, the team interpreted federal privacy laws too narrowly, limiting the amount of information that was shared about Cho’s mental health problems.

In addition, the team was further hampered by “a decentralized corporate university structure, and the absence of someone on the team who was experienced in threat assessment and knew to investigate the situation more broadly, checking for collateral information that would help determine if this individual truly posed a risk or not.”

The panel recommends that universities “recognize their responsibility to a young, vulnerable population and promote the sharing of information internally, and with parents, when significant circumstances pertaining to health and safety arise.”

It also recommends that universities have systems to link troubled students to counseling services and balance the individual’s rights with the rights of all others for safety.”

Families of the victims received a briefing on the report’s findings in a conference call  Wednesday night with Larry Roberts, the governor’s counsel.

“It doesn’t place blame or point fingers, but it does say where things might be done better,” said Roger O’Dell of Roanoke County, whose son Derek was wounded in Norris Hall.

Kaine said Wednesday that the report shows “a lot of instances” where information about the troubling behavior of the gunman was not shared with key officials before the April 16 rampage.

“I think a fair reading of this report by anyone will quickly conclude that it is extremely thorough and fair, that it was done with great seriousness and with a tremendous amount of information and that the recommendations are very searching,” said Kaine, who appointed the eight-member panel. Panel members at times expressed dismay that privacy laws governing health and academic records restricted exchanges of information abut Cho’s troubling behavior.

“I think there’s a lot of instances where information was out there, or that different people had information where it needed to be put together, and I think that is obviously going to be a significant feature of the report,” Kaine said.

Kaine’s panel faced its own obstacles gaining access to information about Cho’s background, particularly his mental health records.

Kaine issued an executive order in June giving the panel greater authority to access health and academic records that are protected by privacy laws. Only then was the panel able to obtain records stemming Cho’s temporary detainment at Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health.

The panel just last weekend obtained a copy of a fictional account of a campus shooting that Cho penned for a Tech English class. Kaine said the panel’s draft report already contained plenty of information about Cho’s writings, so the late release of another dark story did not  affect the report.

“Even prior to receiving that particular writing, the panel members had enough knowledge of the character of those writings to have described them in the draft,” Kaine said. “So receiving this particular writing I don’t think would have changed any of the recommendations of the panel.”

Kaine said he believes the panel received all of the information it sought from Tech and other sources.

“I certainly do not know of any information that the panel has sought or that they believe relevant that has not been turned over,” he said.

Staff writer Amanda Codispoti contributed to this report.

The report is available in the box on the left, or on the governor's office Web site, linked here.