Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Diane Strickland served on the independent Virginia Tech Incident Review Panel.

Diane McQuade Strickland

• Mediator for the Richmond-based McGammon Group, a mediation and arbitration firm.
• First female circuit court judge in the Roanoke Valley, served from 1989 to 2003; General District Court judge from 1987-1989.
• Launched Virginia's first Drug Court program in 1995.
• Launched Virginia's first Youth Court in 2003.
• Founder of the Interfaith Coalition of Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a volunteer group that travels to help rebuild Gulf Coast communities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
• Founder of a nonprofit that funds tutoring and education expenses for street kids in Guadalajara, Mexico; her daughter, Danielle, runs a partnering program.
• Has served on many boards, including Gov. Mark Warner's Crime in Minority Communities Initiative Task Force and the Virginia Code Commission. Served last year as a commission member for the Virginia Supreme Court's study, ''Virginia Courts in the 21st Century.''

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Updated: 5:15 p.m.

Editor's note: After the panel report was released, reporter Beth Macy followed up with Diane Strickland. The additional replies follow Macy's initial conversation with Strickland.

She heard the screams from the 9-1-1 recordings.

She personally interviewed 44 witnesses, from the young woman who received unwanted text messages from Seung-Hui Cho, to the roommates who tried — and failed — to connect with him.

With 15 years as a Roanoke Valley circuit court judge behind her, jurist Diane Strickland had the experience Gov. Tim Kaine was looking for when he assembled the Virginia Tech Review Panel — the group commissioned to study the April 16 tragedy and to recommend ways to keep it from happening again.

Known in statewide legal circles for her innovation, persistence and analytical skills, Strickland, 59, had toiled in mental-health law for years, having regularly reviewed involuntary commitments at the state’s Catawba Hospital. She also co-chaired a statewide committee of lawyers examining the mental commitment process.

But that experience wasn’t nearly as close-up and heartrending as her work on the panel, she said, where the stakes were unprecedented and the scrutiny intense.

In a recent interview, she spoke about trying to understand the anguished mind of Seung-Hui Cho — and figuring out how to fix a system that couldn’t prevent it from spiraling out of control.

What was your role on the panel? 
Dr. Bela Sood, a psychiatrist from MCV, and I were charged with the mental health area, and we worked with a staffer, Hollis Stambaugh.

 The three of us were responsible for “Chapter IV: Mental Health History of Seung-Hui Cho.” I also served as one of two panel members charged to work with legal counsel and staff to edit a working draft of the entire report for consideration by the full panel in its closed sessions.

How did you gather the information you needed?
We interviewed faculty and counselors from Cho’s public school years.

We talked to many folks involved at Virginia Tech, three from the Cook Counseling Center, members of the CARE Team and administration including judicial affairs. We asked who knew what and when.

We spoke with roommates, suitemates and resident advisors.

We talked to many English department faculty members, some of whom are still wondering: ‘What could I have done differently?’

We interviewed all the folks involved with the commitment hearing, representatives from New River Valley CSB [Community Services Board] pertinent staff at [Carilion] Saint Albans Behavioral Health Center, the independent evaluator, the attorney and the special justice at the commitment hearing. 

And we reviewed hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents.

What efforts were made to get Cho into counseling?  
[Then-English department chair] Lucinda Roy really tried very, very hard to get Cho into counseling. She urged by e-mail and in person for him to go to counseling, and she even spoke with a counselor at Cook Counseling while he was [being taught by her in a private class after he had been asked to leave Nikki Giovanni’s class]. He was triaged by Cook Counseling Center by phone and scheduled an appointment, which he missed. But when he called back a second time, instead of rescheduling the appointment, they triaged him again. . . so he was questioned all over again about his immediate needs.

After the second triage came the commitment hearing. Then shortly afterwards, it was the end of the semester.

By the beginning of the spring semester in January of ‘06, everything had fallen through the cracks. There was no follow up.

In the fall of his senior year, another one of his English professors encouraged him on several occasions to get counseling.  She even offered to go with him. She also offered to connect him with the Disability Services Office.

How many interviews did you do? 
I was involved in 44 interviews, most of which were in person.  I did not record them but I took notes. I personally called the RA’s who’d had him, his roommates for his junior and senior years and one of his suitemates during 05-06, the one whom he’d told he was feeling suicidal. I also spoke by phone with the female student who received messages that led to a police visit, which led to the suicide threat. 

I talked to his roommate John Eide, who was with him 05-06, and he was so helpful to me. He connected me with other students who had contact with Cho.

How do these former acquaintances of Cho seem to be doing?
They seem to be doing pretty well. I have some question about his senior year roommate. He was the least communicative.

He told me: “I didn’t even know the guy. We just shared a room.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how he felt about that. I got the sense that he tried to get to know him, as other roommates had tried, but couldn’t break through.

You’re confident that Cho truly had no friends at all?
None that we could find. His roommates and suitemates took him to parties and he’d sit in a corner. They finally gave up and stopped asking him. They also invited him to eat with them but he would never speak to them.

His roommate from his junior year told me that he asked Cho, “Who do you hang out with?”

Cho replied, “Nobody.” 

The only acquaintance reported by his family was a boy who he would swim with sometimes at his apartment pool when he was 9.

When was he diagnosed with selective mutism?
 The diagnosis of “selective mutism” was made in his last year of middle school. He had counseling then for approximately three years.  He was on medication [antidepressants] for the first year.

Did Cho’s parents know he was still having trouble?
They knew that he continued to be uncommunicative, but they thought that all was going well at college. They would call him every Sunday night and he would assure them that he was “fine.”

Bela [Dr. Sood] and the staff person talked to his parents. They’re struggling with tremendous sorrow and an inability to address the loss of the families of the victims.

They’re very, very remorseful about all of this and they’re questioning: What were the signs and what should have been done? They apparently speak no English or at least did not attempt to do so during the interview; the interview was done with their daughter serving as the interpreter.

Was Cho smart?
He was above average in intelligence. But we learned that all the way through high school he was in an “independent education program” to address his special needs.

He took some honors courses, but he didn’t have to speak in class. He graduated with a 3.5, but he was not evaluated on the same scale as other students, because he got the special dispensation of not having to participate in class.

Was he a good writer?
Some of his professors praised his work, but most characterized it as average or below average.  His grades were much better when he took math and science courses his first two years at Tech than when he switched to English.

Our sense was that the female faculty members were more impressed with his writings than the male professors. We wondered if it wasn’t their mothering instincts for this quiet kid and perhaps some of that went on in high school, too.

So he had no friends?
No. Nobody. According to everybody we talked to, nobody ever saw him with anybody at Tech. His roommates used to try to take him to meals in the cafeteria. He would say nothing. Eventually they stopped asking. He took food to the lounge and ate by himself.

Even in high school, special arrangements were made for him to eat by himself rather than in the cafeteria.

When he was home in the summer, his family said he didn’t do anything. He never had a job, never went out.

Did he talk to people on the Internet?
His hard drive has not been recovered. We know that he posted to other peoples’ FaceBook sites anonymously or under “Question Mark” or another name. He would occasionally text message a roommate or suitemate but other than that, we have found no evidence of talking on the Internet.

Did you read these postings?
Of the students that I talked to, only one had saved a posting. It didn’t reveal much of anything.

One female student received a message on the dry-erase board outside of her room.

She’d been part of the crowd that invited him out, and she got communications in fall 05-06 that she thought were from him. They were very self-deprecating. She’d write back positive, encouraging things to him. “Is this you, Cho?” she’d ask.

He’d respond: “I don’t know who I am.”

What was the quote on the board?
It was a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

[Strickland reads from a draft of the panel report]
I know not how to tell thee who I am:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee:
Had I it written, I would tear the word. 

What did they think of each other?
His writings to her were self-deprecating. She mentioned it to her father, who spoke to a friend in another police department, who advised: “You ought to call the Virginia Tech police.” She did, and told them about the other messages she’d gotten. So the police went over and talked to him, and he acknowledged that he’d written it.

At that point, she didn’t want him to write to her.

After police left, he text-messaged his suite mate: “I might as well kill myself.” I found it interesting that at this point he was communicating with someone about his personal feelings.

The suitemate told his father, who advised him to also call the police, and the police went back to speak with Cho again.

That was December 13, 2005. He spent one night in Saint Albans as the result.

Did his parents know about Saint Albans?
His parents never knew. When you’re dealing with an adult, the health care providers must request permission to communicate with family or friends. That’s part of the problem ‑ Cho refused to grant permission.

One of the things that I found interesting is that there’s an exception in federal health and education privacy laws: If the person poses a danger to himself or is a threat to others, then certain communication is permitted. For example, the folks involved with the commitment process could have communicated with other health care providers and with Cook Counseling Center.  

Why didn’t the mental health workers know that?
The privacy laws are not well understood, even by the clinicians. 

Other than the transmittal of a few medical records, there was no communication between Saint Albans and Cook Counseling Center. The hospital asked Cho for permission to tell his parents, and he turned them down.

The folks at Saint Albans were concerned about how far they were permitted to go in communicating with folks at Virginia Tech and vice versa.

People are just unclear about the privacy laws.  There needs to be more education in this area.

The panel investigated this angle? 
I never had much involvement with health privacy laws when I was on the bench. But the panel had the pro bono assistance of Skaaden Arps law firm from their D.C. office. It seems clear from the research they conducted that: If it’s an emergency situation, there is no confidentiality.

 Whether it’s an emergency is a matter of interpretation, of course.

Did they think it was an emergency situation?
Two people found that he was not a danger: the treating psychiatrist at St. Albans and the independent evaluator.

And two people found that he was a danger, including the pre-screener for St. Albans — before the magistrate issued the detention order — and the special justice.

Special Justice Paul Barnett found that he was a danger to himself.  Nobody thought he was a threat to others. Just himself.

How was he behaving at this point?
He was mumbling in a low voice, not very responsive, but cooperative.

The pre-screener talked to his roommate and suitemate. She didn’t talk to his family.

The independent evaluator, the treating psychiatrist and the special justice spoke only to Cho. 

How did the commitment process work with Cho?
First, a pre-screener from New River Valley CSB was called in. That person found that he posed a threat to himself.

She then requested that the magistrate issue a TDO [temporary detention order], then he was transported to the hospital.

Next, at Saint Albans, he was evaluated by the independent evaluator in preparation for the commitment hearing. The independent evaluator found that he was not a threat. He was also screened by the treating psychiatrist, who also found that he was not a threat. 

But both of those reports were very minimal: They didn’t talk to his roommates or suitemates or gather information from any other collateral source including prior counseling records. 

At the commitment hearing, the special justice had the three reports to review, but no hospital data or prior history due to the short time allowed by law to prepare for the hearing. Cho did not speak much during the hearing. Cho’s lack of response, combined with the report from the pre-screener, caused Barnett to find that he was a threat to himself.  But he ruled that he could be handled with outpatient treatment, which was what had been recommended by the treating psychiatrist.

What was the time frame? How did the time frame interfere with his treatment?
The initial emergency commitment order is only good for four hours. During this time the patient needs to be pre-screened and if found to be a threat or unable to care for self a psychiatric bed must be found before a magistrate issues the TDO.

Finding a bed is a real challenge, especially in four hours.

You can only keep a person on a TDO for 48 hours. In Cho’s case they were able to meet all of the guidelines. However, there was very little collateral information gathered and there were no witnesses at his hearing except for Cho.

One of our recommendations is that mental health practitioners be allowed more time to complete more comprehensive evaluations and collect more collateral information before the commitment hearing.

You don’t want people to be held unnecessarily long, perhaps six hours for the emergency commitment order and one 48-hour extension of the TDO for good cause.
Virginia has one of the most restrictive laws in the country. Our recommendation will require legislative action by the General Assembly.

Cho’s commitment was Dec. 13, 2005. He was taken to the Virginia Tech police department between 8 and 9 and at night for prescreening. He was at Saint Albans by 11. He stayed overnight. He was seen by the independent evaluator at 7 the next morning. The treating psychologist saw him immediately before the hearing which was held shortly after 11 am on Dec. 14.  He was discharged from Saint Albans by 2 pm.  It all happened in the time allowed by law, but we know that the available information was limited by the time constraints.

How long did it take for them to determine that he didn’t need to stay in the hospital? 
12 hours. That’s just not enough time to get the collateral information they needed to make a good decision. They had no idea he’d ever been treated before and had little information from those in his dorm about his bizarre behavior.

What was the extent of his middle-high school treatment?
He was in counseling for approximately three years.

Was he ever on medication?
He was only on an antidepressant for one year in middle school and not at all in high school. At Saint Albans they gave him one dose of Ativan, an anti-anxiety medication.

How did the people at the hospital describe him?
As calm, cooperative, polite.

Did they remember him?
Nobody remembers him. [Strickland recalled in a followup interview that one school psychologist from Cho’s middle school days remembered him. “Everybody I interviewed did not remember him, with the exception of the pre-screener at the Community Services Board. Others thought they recalled him after the fact but some weren’t sure.”] 

What about the other evaluators?
Barnett didn’t either.. . . .  In Montgomery County they do more than 50 commitment hearings per month. The shootings happened 15 months later, and in the meantime they’d seen 600-700 people. Not surprising, given that the only thing remarkable about him was how quiet he was.

Did he communicate with his family much?
They spoke on the phone every Sunday night. They called him. They apparently spoke no English so Cho must have spoken to them in Korean.

How did they think he was doing in college?
They thought he was doing just fine. But if you have a child who every summer and every break does nothing, you have to wonder. He never had a summer job, he never went out with friends to the movies or sports events. He read and he wrote. He played movies on his computer, according to his roommates, but they said that he didn’t even play video games.

What did he read?
The only book he had in his room other than textbooks was a Bible, and that may have been for his religious studies class. His room was clean, straight and neat all the time.

What were the largest hurdles the panel faced?
It took a while to get to interview the Chos. They were being protected by the FBI. And we had problems getting records. The governor had to enter an executive order giving us authority to get his mental health and school records.

Isn’t it frowned upon in the Korean culture to seek mental health treatment?
I’ve heard that. But his mom took him, when the middle school said he needed to see a counselor.

Was his family culturally isolated?
His parents work at a dry cleaner, it’s Korean-owned, and apparently they speak Korean at work. And they went to a Korean church. Maybe part of the isolation of Cho was due to the fact that his family never fully integrated into American culture.

What has the panel experience been like for you?
Hard. It has been very, very stressful and emotionally draining. I had an email this morning [from an acquaintance asking about her daughter, Danielle, a children’s-rights worker in Mexico], and I wrote him back, “Thank you for reminding me of the bright lights in my life.” I need reminding these days.

Have you struggled with the huge charge given to the panel, the expectation that somehow this report might help ‘make it all better’? 
It’s an incredible responsibility, yes. You read and listen to reports about Cho’s life, the shootings at West Ambler Johnston and Norris Hall, the reports of the police and the emergency responders. . . the families and their struggles in the immediate aftermath — all the waiting, the unknown, being at the Inn at Virginia Tech and having no idea what’s going on with your child. . . and then having to wait so long for reports from the medical examiner’s office, which was totally overwhelmed.

Most of the female students were brought in apart from their backpacks and had no personal ID. Some of the male students had wallets, but the medical examiners confirmed all victims with dental records and fingerprints before the families were informed. All of the stories are so distressing.

Have you met the families?
I’ve met with several families. We made ourselves available at each of the panel hearings.

Each family is suffering in different ways. Grieving is a very individualized process, but many are struggling with other burdens as well. I met with one single mother who is concerned about how she will pay her rent without the contributions that were made by her son who was killed. I met with a wife from a foreign country who now believes that she will have to return to her country as she has no family support here. I met with a father who is concerned about how his teenage daughter will cope with the loss of her mother. The stories are so varied and so sad.
   
What was the hardest part of being on the panel?
Just seeing the families’ pain. In my experience of being on the bench, I have seen a lot of sadness, but I was somewhat removed because in court everything is done according to procedures and rules of the court.

That’s just not the same as a parent or a spouse talking about the loss of a loved one. It was mainly a matter of listening. I communicated the issues that families shared with me to the Tech administration. They had appointed liaisons to assist each family.

The families were frustrated early on with the panel, right? 
One group asked the governor to put a family representative on the panel. Ultimately, it worked out well with Caroll Ann [Ellis, a victim-witness coordinator in Fairfax County] being the liaison between the panel and the families. Part of the difficulty early on was that we weren’t getting any information, either.

We couldn’t get the documents we needed or access to the people that we needed to talk to. When we did speak to faculty at the university, they were not sure what they were permitted to say due to concerns about the privacy laws. As a result, we didn’t have much information to share with the families.

I read where Mary Read’s stepmother told the panel that she hoped the panel wouldn’t miss “the broader opportunity to make something good come from the tragedy.”
That was probably for me one of the highest moments of the panel experience. She was so positive in her expression of concern, that good come from this tragedy.

It’s natural for people to want the panel to provide the cure-all, isn’t it?
We can’t fix it. All that the panel can do is to share all the information that we found in hopes that it will lead to improvements in the areas of communication, in mental health reform and in public safety. You can’t fix something like this. We’re dealing with human frailties and human illness. Even the FBI profiler on our panel, Roger Depue, was challenged to identify the psychological makeup of Cho. Who’s to say if Seung-Hui Cho had not gone on a rampage at Virginia Tech that he wouldn’t have gone to a mall in northern Virginia and done the same thing? 

Do most of the panel’s recommendations deal with mental health? 
We have more than 70 recommendations; 26 of them address mental health issues. 

In the mental health field, our recommendations are intended to improve the evaluation process and services available to people struggling with mental health issues. To address problems with mental health commitments and to provide more continuity of service – to make sure there are no gaps. There are insufficient outpatient services available. There also needs to be follow-up and consequences if a patient does not comply with an outpatient commitment.

These recommendations will require changes in the law?
There’s nothing in the Virginia law right now that calls for Cook Counseling Center at Virginia Tech to have reported to the special justice that Cho was not coming to counseling, for instance.

There are no tools or procedures in the code that would give the special justice any guidance on what actions he could take if notified that Cho was in violation of his order. He has no authority to issue a warrant, no enforcement authority, no way to insure compliance. 

We’re recommending legislation be passed to insure that outpatient orders be more specific. Right now there’s no who, where or when required in the orders, and nothing about medications.

Also, there’s nothing that requires the order to be shared with the provider of the outpatient services. There are just so many gaps.

What about communication at Virginia Tech? For instance, Nikki Giovanni, after having Cho removed from her class, was never questioned again by administrators or counselors about Cho.
There’s a need for better communication between the professors and administration. There were a lot of places along the timeline when problems cropped up with this man, but nobody connected the dots. We’re recommending that they review all policies at Virginia Tech to determine how they might improve communication between necessary parties.

Virginia Tech is just where this happened. Universities elsewhere don’t do things a whole lot differently when it comes to sharing information between faculty and administration and counseling centers.

Cook Counseling Center only takes patients on a volunteer basis. They couldn’t force him to come to counseling.

Giovanni has said that she thinks we’ve taken the notion of privacy too far.
Yes. We require these kids to submit their high school grades and to have immunizations but we don’t require their mental health records. 

We don’t even care about their HIV status. Privacy has gone pretty far and I think it’s time the pendulum swung back a bit. 

We’re recommending better training and education about which circumstances do prevent the sharing of information. Because it’s hard for people to understand, it’s easier for them to say, “I can’t do that.” HIPAA [health privacy law] is too strictly interpreted. It’s so much easier not to share information. People aren’t bothering to make an effort to understand.

How much time did your service on the panel require? 
Since it was convened, a typical week was an average of 30 to 40 hours. Towards the end the hours increased as we tried to meet the deadline for the report. Since most of us had other jobs, it was quite a time commitment.

Has the governor been involved?
He’s been hands off. He has wanted the panel to be independent from the outset.

What was your reaction when you were asked to be on the panel?
I said no at first. I said, I’m not sure I’m the right person for this responsibility. They asked that I reconsider it and when we spoke again I said, “Well, if you think I am the right person, I‘ll do it.”

Art’s been such a saint [her husband, Art Strickland, a Roanoke lawyer] because I have had very little time to spend with him this summer. He’s listened to my process complaints when we weren’t getting the documents we needed. At first we were writing the report by committee by e-mail; and he’s put up with me constantly sitting in front of the computer and complaining about the difficulty of trying to write a report when we couldn’t all sit down together – because of FOIA restrictions.

How do you imagine the report will be received? 
I anticipate that the report is going to be subject to criticism. It would seem unlikely that it would not. There are so many sensitive subjects and there are such competing views on all the subjects. Did Virginia Tech do the right thing responding to West AJ? 

What about the issues of guns on campus? What about the availability of making mental health records accessible to families and other people with an immediate need to know? Should it be easier to commit someone with mental health problems? The list goes on and on.

Has Tech been receptive to the panel’s questioning?
They’ve been very cooperative but they are being very careful. They’ve had their university counsel present during the interviews, in person and the even the ones we’ve done on the phone. Whether it was interviews with the Tech police officers or the Cook counselors or faculty members, Tech’s counsel was there.

What was the biggest challenge?
The most difficult challenge for me was the sessions with the family members, the informal meetings. . . because I felt at such a loss for words that would communicate my sympathies for their loss and how to provide the appropriate amount of reassurance that we were going to do the best job we could to answer their questions. It’s certainly caused me to reflect on my own children and my own blessings and how often we might take things for granted.

Has it given you a better understanding of the mental health system?
Yes. I thought I understood it well from my time on the bench but that was really from afar. Now I’ve spent time talking to people in the trenches. . . [Had she known then what she knows now] I might have been more understanding about why a person couldn’t be treated more quickly and more frequently. I didn’t fully appreciate the lack of resources, particularly when dealing with people who don’t have insurance.

From all that you read and heard, do you feel like you know Seung-Hui Cho?
No. I don’t feel that I know him. My sense is that he was a very insecure person, very immature, too. But he was so uncommunicative that he was hard to know.

I read a lot of his writings. If they were autobiographical, they show his insecurities and lack of social skills. For example, there was one about a guy and his girlfriend going to a park. The girlfriend is going down the slide and playing on the swings, but the boyfriend is afraid to go down the slide and the girlfriend ridicules him. 

In another, he writes about a girl who tries to get a good-looking guy to notice her. When he does not respond as she would like, she takes her anger out by smashing his car with a hammer. Other writings were even darker. But some of the Tech professors that I spoke with said that it is not unusual for students to write about anger and violence.

Was there any humor? 
There was no humor at all in any of Cho’s writings that I read.

Who was Cho closest to in his life? 
In some sense, his sister was his closest person. When the schools had concerns about him, they called her in to explain [interpret for her parents]. But on the other hand, his mom said that Cho seemed to open up and be happier when his sister went off to college. . . at Princeton, as if maybe he felt that he’d been in her shadow.

If you could predict the headline on the day of the report’s release, what would it be?
There’s so much in there, that it’s difficult to predict which area might capture the most attention. I would love for it to be “Panel does thorough job..  Perhaps more likely to capture the headlines, however, is the fact if we had delivered our report last week as originally scheduled, we would have missed what in my opinion is Cho’s most pertinent writing. We only Sunday night received the paper that he wrote during spring semester ’06, telling the story of a young man who hates himself and the students at his high school and plans to kill them all. There are some striking parallels to both the events of April 16 and to the words spoken on the videos received by NBC.

What’s next for you?
I’ll resume my mediation practice and get back to some of my pet projects. Particularly, I need to get back to recruiting folks to help with rebuilding the coast. I was thinking as I watched the reports of the two-year anniversary of Katrina that Interfaith Neighbors has not sent a single team to the coast since I began my work on the panel. In October I take over as the chair of the Boyd-Graves Conference, a statewide organization of lawyers and judges who meet to address areas of law that need to be changed. We put forward recommendations for legislation to be considered by the General Assembly or Rules of Court for consideration by the Virginia Supreme Court. Some of the recommendations in the year ahead may be related to the issues raised by the events of April 16 at Virginia Tech.

I’m told that many judges could sentence three people to prison in an afternoon and not appear to give it a second thought — but that the cases sometimes seemed to weigh on you. Do you think this experience will be the same?
I always carried cases home with me, yes. It wasn’t always a healthy way to be. But perhaps it’s useful in some ways, too. I suspect that this experience will always be a part of me.

Something like this never leaves you. But I know that what I feel pales in comparison to what the families who lost a loved one or the students and faculty who went through the experience are suffering.

-- POSTED: 8:14 a.m.

UPDATE: After the panel's report was released, reporter Beth Macy followed up with Strickland. Their conversation is below:

Can you elaborate on how the recent news about Cho’s short story written for [Associate Professor of English Bob] Hicok’s class came to your attention?
[After a Washington Post reporter told her about its existence] I contacted the university counsel because the university counsel, who’d sat in on the interviews we did with Professor Hicok, and my notes both indicated that the professor said Cho wrote about some violent things, and “I’ve seen worse,” and “There’s nothing unique about the subject matter.”

But that story was significant, wasn’t it? Why didn’t you get it earlier?
We had had assurance from the Tech counsel that as soon as executive order is received by their department, they would make copies of everything and get it back to us.

Bottom line: They didn't get it in time to hand anything to us during interviews. Back in our own respective locales, three of us who interviewed the English professors got an onslaught of materials. We just naturally assumed that we had everything there was to give.

But why didn’t he mention it specifically because so obviously paralleled what happened? I don’t know the answer to that. I have not spoken to him again, and he declined interview requests [by the reporter].

There seems to be a wide range of opinion among professors about whether Cho was someone to be pitied or whether he was just plain manipulative?

[Some professors] thought he was pathologically shy. And others felt like he used this failure to communicate to his own advantage and used words such as manipulative — that he could speak when he wanted to and chose not to to serve his own ends.

What has the response to the report’s issue been like for you?
I feel that the report is taken seriously in that it’s being received as being a very comprehensive work, and there’s a lot of information and a lot of recommendations. I know that at this point in time people are just looking for the bombshells, if you will. And it will take a while for folks to give into the heart, the 70 some recommendations we have in there. Once the dust settles a bit from the initial response to it, and folks start getting into the meat of key findings and recommendations, I am hoping that we’ll see a lot of activity in the Commonwealth of Virginia and at Virginia Tech and other higher institutions of higher learning to respond to recommendations we’ve put forward.

I was surprised, reading your chapter on mental health, at how diligent the Cho family had been in getting him treatment in his middle and high school years and following up on clinicians’ recommendations (with the exception of not forcing him to attend a small college). They visited him every weekend his freshman year, which seemed incredible, given that they worked six days a week and live in northern Virginia.

I was impressed when I received the information from the panel member and staffer that did the interview, that they really have been very supportive. As we’ve discussed, some comments in the press that it was not typical or even strongly frowned upon in certain cultures, including perhaps in their culture, to seek out counseling services. With that in my mind from having read it in the press, I was very interested to learn that they had actively involved him in counseling, and since he didn’t have means of transportation at that time,

They were, in addition to working jobs, making sure he got to his counseling for that three-year period.

At least five times in the chapter on mental health, Virginia Tech employees responded to your requests for information by saying their records were missing. Are you concerned about these missing and/or unfurnished records?
It’s a curious matter to us as a panel that some of these records have disappeared from the Cook Counseling Center. He was triaged three times – once by phone in November, once by phone in December and once in person in December. And all three of those reports are gone.

I have to say that Dr. Christopher Flynn, the now-director of Cook, said when I interviewed him: “No one, no one more than me wants to find those records.”

There is no reason they would benefit from the records being gone. Their guess, when they were talking to me, as to what might have happened to them was that somebody must have pulled his files after the April 16 incident, and the records were inadvertently misplaced. That’s totally speculation on their part. They have no other theory about why they weren’t there.

Does that ring true to you?
Having worked in a courthouse with many many files, I know how misfilings can occur. When I spoke to them… they were hopeful they were still in existence.

My sense is that, even if the records were to show up tomorrow, they likely would not tell us more than what we already know.

What was the biggest problem with the counseling attempts?
The biggest concern certainly was that he was triaged when he should’ve been counseled. Apparently they didn’t cross-check the fact that he’d already been triaged [at Cook]. … The third triage is the big question mark in my mind: When he comes after his discharge from Saint Albans and is triaged yet a third time in person, whether or not someone should have known what had happened with the first two triages and, perhaps more significantly, what happened at Saint Albans. The patient representative told me unequivocally that he called Cook. And that Cook insisted they put Cho on the phone to make the appointment so whoever took that incoming call should have had information that he was at Saint.

The person at Saint Albans thought he was setting him up for actual counseling but that wasn’t the case.

Does the report paint a complete picture of Cho?
He was truly a very complex individual, not quite as black and white as we had anticipated going in.

Cho’s shame about needing help seemed to be a huge part of his failure to get treatment.
Yes. I think he was not forthcoming on the fact he’d had counseling. Whether or not he was motivated by shame or just a desire to be deceptive and not have the information known, I can’t say.

A big theme with Cho seems to have been that he needed to vent but couldn’t. He changed his major to English when he was better at math and science. Writing was the only means he had of expressing his perceived position in society. . . until April 16, when he showed the world how he felt. Do you agree?
Yes, it seems true. I recall that one of the professors that we interviewed stated that it was not at all uncommon to have very shy people in the creative writing department. Because people who felt that they could not express themselves orally oftentimes chose the written word as an outlet to allow their feelings to be known. That appears to have been the case with Cho. One of the other things we learned from one of the sources in the mental health field was that sometimes with selective mutism, individuals are able to speak when there aren’t other people around, as he spoke to the camera when he prepared his final message. Ordinarily, that would raise the question: How can he do that if he has selective mutism? This source opined that it’s different when he’s the only person in the room with the camera.

Lucinda Roy clearly tried very hard to help him, that’s obvious in the report. And yet in a large university like Tech, one person working diligently with a disturbed student clearly wasn’t enough when other departments dropped the ball. What are the most important recommendations in your view to assure that Tech addresses the myriad gaps exposed in the report?
Both Professor Roy in the fall of ’05 and Professor Norris in fall of ‘06 were very conscientious in their efforts to try to get Cho into counseling. My observations are, I don’t know what else they could have done. Professsor Norris even offered to go with him . . that seems to be above and beyond the call for a student and college professor.

The concerns were made known in '05 to the Care team, which is a body of individuals that discuss student issues. And it was fully discussed at that time. The problems that I see with what they had in practice at that time was that they didn’t have clear channels for information to come to the Care team, in part because they didn’t have all the key people on the Care team. For example: no chief of police on the Care team. So, these reports [about Cho] made to the police department at Virginia Tech from female students would have automatically been presented at the next meeting by the chief of police or some other member of the department had they been part of the car team.

So you have situation where there’s a group that has responsibility but they don’t have the data and information they need to connect the dots, to see the big picture. Through no fault of Tech’s, they had no prior history of his counseling in high and middle school or his interest in the Columbine shootings. They were operating with a blank slate there. But if they had had a means by which faculty members communicated to a chair, and a chair communicated to another designated individual – so that data could have been collected – they certainly would have begun to see a very disturbing picture emerge.

Within the university setting, the most important recommendations are those dealing with open lines of communication. That’s going to entail a better understanding of the privacy restrictions laws, so individuals know they are free if there is a concern of public safety or the safety of an individual to share information more freely.
Now, this is by no means unique Tech – this is a systemic problem throughout higher education – people are very very cautious in what they’re willing to share. They’d rather err on the side of not turning over information rather than risk a lawsuit for violating the rights of privacy.

There needs to be some education. There may even need to be some clarification of the federal laws. . . And certainly the Virginia patient health records statute could be clarified in order to show the clear lines of authority for communicating between providers, and persons with a legitimate need to know for public safety reasons.

You mention another professor urging him into counseling in ‘06…What else were you able to uncover about 06?
I think the absence of information from that period is certainly significant in that it suggests that to me, one of two things: either he had leveled out in his behavior to a certain extent, although of course we do know that professor Norris was very concerned that fall, wanting him to go into counseling.

Or, the other alternative: that he’d already started to formulate this plan and wanted to stay below the radar until he carried out his plan.

Does the report go far enough in assigning blame? I got the sense that some families wanted it to do so.
Our charge was to investigate all of the facts and to come up with recommendations for how to improve the system. We were not charged with assessing blame.

Is it “scathing” as some news reports have suggested?
I think it’s a hard-hitting report. I think that we certainly have pointed out a lot of areas of concern, both about his mental health issues — how they were not addressed by not only Virginia Tech but by the mental health system, with the failure to transfer records from high school to college, which is apparently a system-wide problem and on to the findings that we made on the handling of the matters on April 16 on the part of law enforcement and university administrators.

“Scathing” is not a term that I would probably use, but I certainly think there are some very powerful findings in there.

How many of the 70+ recommendations will require General Assembly action? How many can be implemented by executive order?
I would say that a significant number in the mental health field do because they have to do with the commitment process. . . . and there are some in the privacy law areas. But I think a significant number will not require legislative action.

Was the panel unanimous about all the recommendations – are there some that were disputed?
We were unanimous in the entire report, which is quite significant since we came from such diverse backgrounds. That’s not to say that there wasn’t very animated discussion on a number of issues contained in there and there wasn’t give and take and compromise on the wording on some of the recommendations.

Should students and parents be any more cautious about Virginia Tech than any of the state's other colleges and universities, or more cautious about Virginia’s colleges than those in other states?
I would be of the opinion at this point, given the focus that Virginia schools are putting on matters of public safety in the aftermath of April 16, that perhaps there would be greater comfort to a parent in sending their child to a Virginia college. They know they have been working very diligently to try and close the gaps in their system.

-- UPDATED: 5:15 p.m.