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Cho Went Once To Campus Center

June 30, 2007

By Rex Bowman

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Mentally ill Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho kept at least one appointment with an on-campus counseling center, according to the director of a Blacksburg-area mental-health agency.

It's still unknown what level of care Cho received at the Cook Counseling Center, but Dr. Les Saltzberg, director of the New River Valley Community Services Board, told board members Thursday night that the records indicate Cho did show up for mandated outpatient treatment. Saltzberg said he had been given the information unofficially.

The revelation undercuts speculation that Cho avoided getting mental help by simply not showing up. A special justice had ordered the outpatient treatment in December 2005 after deeming Cho a danger to himself.

The disclosure also allows the panel to focus the mental-health section of its inquiry on determining how much help, if any, Cho received after his initial appointment and when he stopped receiving it.

The head of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's review panel, W. Gerald Massengill, acknowledged yesterday that Cho had interactions with the counseling center during an undefined period of time, but Massengill declined to go into details.

"He had some contacts with it, but I don't think I'm that comfortable yet saying what those contacts were," Massengill said. "The records we've received, they're not detailed, and we're doing some follow-up work to find out what kind of counseling, what depth of counseling, those contacts amount to."

Cho, 23, of Centreville, fatally shot 27 fellow students and five faculty members April 16 before killing himself. Sixteen months earlier, after two females complained of unwanted overtures by Cho, and after a roommate said he appeared suicidal, a magistrate ordered Cho to stay overnight at Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health near Radford.

At a commitment hearing the next day, Dec. 15, 2005, Special Justice Paul Barnett ordered Cho released for outpatient treatment despite concluding he was mentally ill and a danger to himself. Cho was handed a phone and told to make an appointment with the Cook Counseling Center. In a public meeting this month, James W. Stewart III, the state mental-health inspector general, told the panel that Cho made the appointment.

Though Stewart refused to discuss Cho's case specifically, he said that in general an initial appointment with a counselor would likely involve some treatment. "If a person comes in in a crisis mode, treatment would begin in that first session. That would generally be true in a noncrisis mode, though the emphasis would be on assessment."

The panel obtained Cho's mental health-records this month when Cho's father waived Cho's privacy rights, and panel members are now scrutinizing them to get a better understanding of Cho's experience with the mental-health system.

Even if the panel learns how much care Cho received, it's uncertain how much of the information can be shared publicly, because of restrictive federal privacy laws regarding mental health. The panel holds its next public meeting July 18, but Massengill said the panel will also meet with lawyers behind closed doors to try to figure out how much it can disclose.

Despite the mystery of how much care Cho received at Cook, his ability to drop out of view of mental-health providers is already accounted for. Last month, Saltzberg, of the New River Valley Community Services Board, acknowledged that his agency should have set up an outpatient-care treatment plan for Cho once he was released but failed to do so because no agency representative attended the commitment hearing. After the shootings, the agency has begun sending a representative to the hearings at Saint Albans.

Contact Rex Bowman at rbowman@timesdispatch.com or (540) 344-3612.