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Updated: 6:00 p.m.

Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin was shot three times on April 16, liked what he saw in the report.

"I'm generally very pleased and relieved. I had misgivings over whether they could be objective," he said. "In fact, the report goes even further than I thought they would go or could go. They did an excellent job."
 
He said the report is fair to Virginia Tech. "In those situations, you don't always do everything right, you do what you think is best at the time."
 
Goddard doesn't see the wisdom of getting rid of Steger.
 
"I think if Dr. Steger is replaced, you're starting over with someone who hasn't had that very traumatic learning experience," he said.
 
"My reaction might be very different if I had lost a loved one," Goddard said. The families of the dead "obviously have a different perspective on it."

His main concern is the recommendations, particularly anything to do with guns, which he doesn't believe legislators "have the guts for."

Updated: 5:35 p.m.

Suzanne Grimes, mother of Kevin Sterne, a student wounded in Norris, said she was generally pleased with the report but she said she was "frustrated, enraged and stunned" by Tech President Charles Steger's insistence that the university did the best it could with the information it had at the time.

"He needs a wakeup call, he really does," she said. "The administration of Virginia Tech clearly needs to come forward and say they've made a mistake ... Until they do that the families of the victims, the families of the survivors, they will not rest."

Grimes added that the administration should step down.
 
Grimes takes issue with several aspects of the university's response, but particularly with the time it took to get a message out about the West AJ shootings.

Her son was stopped on his way to campus by police in August of 2006 because there were rumors of an escaped, armed prisoner on campus. A similar reaction this time could have prevented several deaths, she said.

She also noted that after the Norris Hall shootings occurred messages began to be quickly sent out. Warnings that could've been sent out hours earlier.
 
"Why couldn't they have done that at 7:20?" she said. "Why did it take a whole lot of people getting killed for that to happen?"
 
And once the shootings happened, communication from the university was non-existant, she said.

"No. I had to find my son that day," she said.

Updated: 5:30 p.m.

Harvey Barker, director of New River Valley Community Services, said the report's recommendation to expand outpatient services for mental health patients is "absolutely necessary."
 
Right now, someone who came to his agency for non-emergency outpatient care would have to wait three to five weeks, Barker said.
 
Other recommendations Barker endorsed included expanding the time frame for the various stages of the commitment process to allow mental health workers to collect more information, and clarifying procedures for outpatient commitments, the process that was used in 2005 with Cho.
 
As for his agency's role in the Cho's case -- the report notes that no community services representative was present for Cho's commitment hearing and recommends a new law requiring attendance -- Barker wrote in a statment, "We know that our staff did a very good job getting Mr. Cho into the hospital for further evaluation. As was stated in the report he was released from the hospital to another provider and that was the only contact we had with him."

Updated: 5:12 p.m.

An attorney who specializes in negligent security issues said he did not see much in the panel’s report on which to support a possible lawsuit against Virginia Tech.

"I think it’s going to be a very tough case," said Fredric Zinober of the Washington DC-based firm Zuckerman Spaeder.

Apart from the question of whether Tech would be protected by sovereign immunity, Zinober said a plaintiff would also face the difficult task of proving that Cho’s attack was foreseeable by the university.

While the report cites a number of actions by Cho that seem to indicate he was a threat, Zinober said the legal test will be what the school knew at the time — not by what is known now with the benefit of hindsight.

"Although they are critical of the university for not connecting the dots, I don’t think they are coming out and really chastising the university for not being able to foresee this happening," Zinober said.

The report also stops short of concluding in absolute terms that Tech would have saved lives by warning students more quickly of what was happening or by shutting the campus down after Cho’s first shootings in a dormitory.

"They use the term ‘might,’ and from a legal perspective, we don’t know how far ‘might’ will go," Zinober said.

To date, there has been no legal action against Tech.

Updated: 5:10 p.m.

Would Cho's fate have been different if, after he was diagnosed with "selective mutism" in high school, the school had turned to therapist who spoke Korean rather than using Cho's sister as a translator to discuss Cho's case with his parents?

Josephine Kim, a Harvard psychologist who has written about mental health issues among Asians, wrote in an e-mail today that the Tech report makes her wonder.
 
"Had the parents been made fully aware of the seriousness of his conditions, I believe they would have been more proactive during his transition to college -- as far as informing someone of his condition," Kim wrote.
 
Tech officials did not know of Cho's history of special education, and the university made no accomodations for his difficulties with public speech, except on an individual-class basis by some of his professors.

Updated: 4:45 p.m.

Paul Barnett, the Montgomery County special justice who conducted Seung-Hui Cho's mental health commitment hearing in December 2005, said he found some surprises in the Tech report.
 
"Wish we'd known some of this stuff in his background" during Cho's hearing, Barnett said.
 
Cho came before Barnett after telling a Virginia Tech roommate he "might as well kill himself,"receiving an initial mental health screening, and being held overnight in Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health, the mental health wing of Carilion New River Valley Medical Center.

Barnett had only information from the screening, and from doctors who'd seen Cho briefly at Saint Albans. He had no knowledge of the full extent of Cho's strange behavior on campus that semester, or Cho's prior diagnosis of "selective mutism" and depression and the therapy he'd received for it.

He ruled that Cho was mentally ill, was a danger to himself, but could be treated on an outpatient basis. He released him with an order to seek outpatient treatment.
 
The report said that Cho did keep an appointment at the university's Cook Counseling Center, but that workers there left it up to Cho whether to schedule a followup visit. Cho did not return.
 
Among the report's recommendations are measures to ensure that special justices and others charged with determining whether to compel someone to receive mental health treatment have more complete information about the person.
 
Barnett, who has been involved in Virginia's mental health system for decades, said many of the issues addressed by the report are not new. "I hope that out of this whole thing will come some real positive changes," he said.

Updated: 4:27 p.m.

Elizabeth Hilscher, the mother of aspiring veterinarian, Emily, who was one of the first people killed in the tragedy, said she was going to take the report on vacation and spend some time “reading every word” and formulating a response.

She did share her an initial impressions to the investigation of Cho’s shootings.

“From everything I’ve heard, there were endless opportunities to be made aware of how troubled he was,” said Hilscher from her Woodville home. “Every single time, people either ignored it or didn’t act. That flabbergasts me.”
 
She hopes people will react more quickly to troubled individuals given their heightened awareness now after Cho.

She said, “the next step is to take the information from the report and make some determinations of action.”

Updated: 4:24 p.m.

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said today that despite criticisms in the report, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum remains in Steger's good graces.

"I have nothing but admiration for Chief Flinchum and his job is not in jeopardy," Steger said.

Others haven't been so lucky. Steger said during a news conference that while most changes already implemented at Tech in the wake of the shootings have had to do with procedures and structure, not all have.

Some people have lost their jobs. Steger didn't name names, but he did say that "missing records and things like that are unacceptable. Those people are no longer employed by us."

Updated: 4:10 p.m.

On campus, many students walked to classes and sauntered through Tech’s Squires Student Center as if nothing were special about the day.

The findings of the report seemed to be the last thing on their minds as they chatted on cell phones or studied biology. Many said they didn’t even know the report was being released on Thursday.

Some had no knowledge of the state panel, or confused it with Virginia Tech’s internal review, which was released last week.

“I don’t really give a crap about any panel,” said sophomore Nathan Carter, who bowled with his friends inside Squires.

He, and other students questioned said no report could make a difference to those who were injured or killed. Others believed the panel was created to appease the media.  

Still, as the news conference to discuss the findings aired, a small group of students huddled around a mounted television outside of Au Bon Pain to watch. To some, Gov. Tim Kaine’s speech was background noise to a typical lunch. But, just as in April, a few students clutched back packs and spoke softly, eyes glued to the screen.

Mark Milo, an engineering senior, said he could not fathom the amount of pressure on the panel to complete a review on the issues in four months.

Milo had not read the report, which criticized the university for not sending out an alert sooner than it did, thoroughly, but said he expected it be thorough and fair when he did.

Looking for someone to blame, he said, is futile because no one will ever understand all the details.

“It’s like the pieces of a puzzle,” he said. “You dump them all out and you know they go together, but it’s hard. And, once you’ve put them together, you know how. In retrospect it’s so obvious. When you’re looking at it all jumbled as soon,”

“A solution is definitely harder to come up with without all the information,” he said.

Updated: 3:59 p.m.

John Snook, a staff attorney for the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, said the Tech panel's report is filled with "good signs" for improving mental health care in Virginia.
 
Specifically, he endorsed the report's call for reviewing the threshold for compelling someone to accept treatment. Virginia's standard of "imminent danger" is too high, he said, and "needs to reflect the reality of severe mental illness."
 
As the law is now, when someone does not recognize the need for treatment, their family too often is told "Why don't we wait a few more days and maybe he'll get more violent," Snook said.
 
"It's unfortunate it took something this big for people to pay attention," Snook said.

Updated: 3:50 p.m.

Mary Vail Ware, director of Virginia’s Criminal Injuries Compensation Fund, said she agreed with the panel’s findings, particularly those dealing with the shooting’s immediate aftermath, and hopes the report will spur the creation of “an intensive plan for responding to mass crime incidents.”

There are already plans for what to do in the event of a hurricane or flood, she noted, but when it comes to a mass crime incident, “we still have some work to do.”

Ware visited Tech soon after the shootings to provide victim survivors with the funds needed to cover funeral expenses and participated in panel interviews about the incident.

Of Tech’s aftermath organization and communication, she said, “I think there were a lot of competing interests here and not only competing interests, I think when you have people who aren’t experienced … doing this, then you might do what you think is the best thing but it might not be the best thing.”

“I’m not going to say there were any ill intentions,” she added. Virginia Tech officials “are working as hard as they can, but this is really not their area of expertise. They, too, are suffering and struggling and I’m not sure how we can expect them to be perfect. I don’t think a victim should be responsible for their own recovery and the university is a victim, too.”

Updated: 3:45 p.m.

Celeste Peterson who lost her only child, Erin, 18, in the shootings said the report was “very comprehensive,” covering everything requested of them by the parents.

Still, Peterson said she felt was disappointed the Tech report failed to hold anyone accountable.

“I’m spinning, my compass is gone. I don’t have my child any more,” said Peterson, speaking on her cell phone as she drove to New Jersey to care for an elderly aunt.

“I’m disappointed. Virginia Tech is brick-and-mortar, but it is being run by people who aren’t competent.”

She said the panel did an exhaustive probe, but few real surprises had emerged.

“There are some minor details that we didn’t know. But it is like throwing gasoline on the flame that is raging,” she said. “I haven’t stopped my life because the report came out. It puts in black-and-white and puts down all together in one central area what happened.”

Peterson said she felt “a sense of severe injustice” as she listened to Gov. Tim Kaine and Tech officials. While she heard three times personally from Kaine, she said it wasn’t until July until Steger’s secretary made any contact with her family.
  
“This report doesn’t give any indication that Tech’s president and police chief should lose their jobs. That’s interesting – we hold our children responsible and there should be consequences,” she said.

“For the people who have children – imagine that they are not there anymore,” she said.

“I mean, we hold our children accountable, we tell them to follow rules and be responsible for their actions. And that isn’t what is being played out now. Shame on them, shame on them.”

She said she is sustained by people’s prayers, but every morning she feels Erin’s absence.

“The report doesn’t change the fact that I hurt everyday and my husband and I cry everyday,” she said. “If you have children, imagine not having them any more. Something as simple as letters on a piece of paper don’t provide closure. We’re devastated."

Updated: 3:41 p.m.

Mira Signer, executive director of NAMI Virginia, the state office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said that while her group is still studing the report, it welcomed the call to examine laws regarding commitment and privacy.
 
Commitment laws as they are written now are too vague and open to interpretation, Signer said. Privacy laws may well be fine as they are, but "there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation about their application."
 
Signer said the report seems to support putting more state resources into mental health, especially investing in outpatient services and crisis stabilization efforts.
 
"Virginia has a real opportunity here ... to provide some leadership in these issues," Signer said. "Let's face it, all eyes are on Virginia."

Updated: 3:28 p.m.

Colleges need more information on students who apply to them each year, in Virginia Tech's case, 20,000 of them.

Applications don't include mental evaluations or the mental health records, Steger said during a 2:30 p.m. news conference in response to the release of the Virginia Tech Review Panel's report late Wednesday night.

The school asks about criminal history and health, but not mental health.

"I think we're moving into a new era," Tech Provost Mark McNamee said. "Safety has clearly risen to a much higher profile in terms of predicting student behavior."

McNamee and Tech spokesman Larry Hincker ran down a list of things Tech has already done.

The school has strengthened its system to evaluate and respond to at risk students, McNamee said.

"We'll be expanding those resources," he said.

Hincker said locks are being placed on classroom doors and an emergency alert system has been established.

Updated: 2:57 p.m.

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said he has no intention of resigning as a result of the April 16 shootings on his campus, and a report released Wednesday night that is critical of Tech's handling of the shooting and events before and after it.

Steger spoke in response to a question at a 2:30 p.m. news conference. Some relatives of victims have called for him to leave. Has he considered that?

"The answer to that is no," Steger said. "There is no basis upon which that decision would be appropriate."

In response to another question, Steger pointed out that the Virginia Tech Review Panel's report said "things may have been better... "It didn't say they would have been better."

Regarding earlier notification of the potential danger on campus that morning, Steger said, "We had a message ready at about 9 o'clock, as I recall."
But all they knew was that there had been a shooting. Officials were waiting for more information.

"The first report that came in was that a student had fallen out of bed and bumped his head," Steger said. As the situation became clearer, the response was ramped up.

"We knew we had some extra time because classes weren't going to change for another 50 minutes."

Steger said he recalled the incident the previous fall, during a manhunt for accused murderer William Morva, when students ran from Squires Student Center while a SWAT team ran in and other students stood around watching.

"For me that was a formula for disaster I wanted to avoid," Steger said. "I do not believe the outcome would have been significantly modified" if an announcement would have been made earlier.

Updated: 2:52 p.m.

Virginia Tech police "did just what they should have done" on April 16, President Charles Steger said at a 2:30 p.m. news conference in response to the release of the Virginia Tech Review Panel's report on the tragedy.
 
The notion that there was a two hour gap between early morning shootings in a dormitory and the mass shootings in Norris Hall is wrong, Steger said, referencing the report. "I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about this whole business," he said.

"This crime was unprecedented in its cunning and murderous result," he said.

Steger repeatedly seemed to weave between accepting the committee's report and defending the university's actions, contrasting the information available at the time with the hindsight the report exercised.

"Nobody can say for certain what would have happened if different actions have been taken," he said.

He conceded, though, that Virginia Tech needs to be more aggressive identifying and assisting students at risk, and said it will do that.

He referred to recommendations in the report -- including the creation of a threat assessment team and the addition of staff at the Dean of Students office the Cook Counseling Center -- to find at risk students faster and serve them better.
 
The lack of knowledge of Cho's history of mental health problems was a serious problem, he said.
"If we had known that context, our response might have been quite different."

The campus is still traumatized by the tragedy Cho perpetrated on April 16, Steger said at the start of his remarks.

"He was a member of our own community, which magnifies the violation we all feel."

Nineteen of Cho's victims have returned to campus.

"We are doing everything we can to make that transition back to the classroom as easy as it can be," Steger said.

Steger praised Gov. Tim Kaine, the hundreds of people who worked on this and other reviews and the thousands who came to Tech's support after April 16.
Then he turned to the report.

"It's painful to hear the blunt and sometimes critical findings," he said. "But it was necessary."

The news conference began at 2:30 p.m. with Virginia Tech police officers -- members of a force criticized by the report -- standing guard at the exits of the news conference site.

Tech officials -- Steger, spokesman Larry Hincker, and provost Mark McNamee -- all filed in wearing somber suits.

"I don't have fond memories of this room," Hincker said, alluding to the many hours he and other Tech officials spent there on April 16 and the days after.

Only a handful of satellite trucks are parked outside the Inn at Virginia Tech. A bank of nine video cameras line the back row of the room where Virginia Tech officials are about to face the media in the wake of a report that criticized their handling of Seung-Hui Cho and his actions before, during and after his April 16 shooting rampage.

But event is still big news. Local, nearly-daily papers are represented along with national electronic media. It was one of the top stories even in Toronto this morning.

Updated: 12:19 p.m.

Joe Painter, a Blacksburg attorney and former special justice who was interviewed by the panel, noted the Tech shootings already have prompted changes to federal and state procedures that deal with aspects of firearms ownership or mental health, and said he hopes the report will prompt farther changes.
 
One particular area he hopes the General Assembly will look at is the 48-hour time frame for mental health temporary detention orders. "The period of temporary detention should be extended to 96 hours," Painter said. "... In that initial period, you can do a lot and they may not need to be commited to a mental hospital."
 
Painter said he also hopes Virginia will consider lowering its "imminent danger" threshold for issuing temporary detention orders and compelling mental health treatment. "I would go with 'significant risk,'" Painter said.

Updated: 12:15 p.m.

Panel chairman Gerald Massengill praised and thanked Seung-Hui Cho's family for their cooperation with the panel's work. Cho family members sat for did  an extensive interview, and were "very forthcoming," he said.

Moreover, the family's release of information about Seung-Hui Cho's background and mental health allowed the level of detail found in the report, Massengill said.

Updated: 12:06 p.m.

During questioning by reporters at the 11 a.m. news conference, Gov. Tim Kaine said information on students behavior and mental state not following students to college is probably a broad and systemic issue.

Asked who should be responsible for seeing that information is transmitted, 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 responsiblity, when problems are observed, to pick up the phone and call the parents, he said.

Kaine also said in response to a question that while he wouldn't hesitate to recommend personnel changes based on the report's findings if warranted, "I believe we can make effort to fix these problems, and I needn't get involved with personnel decisions."

"We've had the recommendations for a day," Kaine said. The task now is to determine who can implement each recommendation and how.

"I would think many of the recommendations far beyond the commonwealth," he said, citing gun control issues.

Asked about the police response after the first shootings in West Ambler Johnston Hall, Kaine said police had a good lead that was "highly probable" and moved quickly on it, but having that kind of lead shouldn't have caused them to narrow their focus and ignore other possibilities.

Updated: 11:50 a.m.

Panel member Roger Depue largely praised the Virginia Tech Police Department and Chief Wendell Flinchum during the 11 a.m. news conference in Richmond.

"I have a great deal of admiration and respect for Chief Flinchum ...This man had an active shooter response plan." He said relatively few police departments like his have such a thing, yet his officers were 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.

Panel member Gordon Davies praised Virginia's 23 community colleges for going to work immediately on a coordinated emergency response plan, but he's disappointed he hasn't seen the same from other Virginia public colleges.

Updated: 11:38 a.m.

Gerald Massengill, who chaired the review panel, thanked the governor and the families of the Tech victims at the 11 a.m. news conference. "They kept us focused in a very apporpriate and eloquent way."

Massengill noted the lack of dissenting opinions. 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.

"This report tells a comprehensive story, with detail, about this great tragedy," Massengill said. The panel interviewed over 200 people and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. "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 panels work had a scope far broader than they 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 diginity, and I hope the work we have done will aid them in finding some comfort," she said.

Updated: 11:16 a.m.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, Gov. Tim Kaine said at the 11 a.m. news conference, "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."

In hitting other key points he sees in the report, Kaine said there was an intense awareness in Seung-Hui Cho's family and his public schools that he was a troubled boy. But there was a recognition that his issues could be managed. His family was advised that a large school away from home like Virginia Tech might not be good from him. Information about his fascination with Columbine and violence was not passed on to Tech, and that was "a huge missed opportunity," Kaine said.

At Tech, there were "clearly indications that he was troubled." But there was not an effective mechanism where that information could be brought together.

He also singled out for praise the emergency medical response, and in particular the Virginia Tech student rescue squad, who he said will likely never face a more difficult task in their lives.

"There was much in the emergency response that was heroic," he said.

In general, he called the panel's report thorough and comprehensive and at times hard-hitting. He said the panel had lived up to their charge.

Updated: 11:00 a.m.

A news conference with Governor Tim Kaine and the Virginia Tech Review Panel he appointed is about to begin.

Updated: 9:11 a.m.

Following a Wednesday night briefing about the report made to families of the shooting victims, Holly Adams-Sherman, mother of victim Leslie Sherman said via email, "I was pleased with a large number of the findings as they were pretty much what I expected the panel to find."

"As we already suspected, a number of critical errors in judgement were made during (Seung-Hui) Cho's educational career throughout his entire time in the U.S.," Adams-Sherman said.

"Specifically, at Virginia Tech, he exhibited seriously deviant behavior that went unchecked and the faculty did not take adequate steps to put him in check. There were many, many, behavioral acts that should have been reported but were not reported."

The university blames misinterpretation  of HIPPA and FERPA, the federal laws protecting the privacy of medical and educational records, she added. "Yet another error."