May 22, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. - As horrific as the massacre at Virginia Tech was — student gunman Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 before killing himself — investigators yesterday suggested it could have been far bloodier and deadlier.
Col. W. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of state police, disclosed to a panel reviewing the April 16 shootings that in addition to finding two knives and a claw hammer in Cho's backpack, investigators found 203 live rounds of ammunition on his body and on the floor around him. Cho had fired 174 shots.
The shooting was the deadliest in U.S. history, but the extra ammo strongly hints that Cho intended to kill far more than he did. Twenty-four people were wounded or injured in the massacre, Flaherty said.
Flaherty speculated that Cho stopped his killing rampage inside Norris Hall only because he heard campus police shooting a door open one floor below him. Among the live ammunition found were two fully loaded magazine clips containing 15 rounds each.
"Cho was a very troubled young man, at the least, determined on taking life," Flaherty told the eight-member panel assembled to look at Cho's motivation and Tech's response to the shooting.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine appointed the panel in the wake of the shooting rampage with a mandate to also look at any miscommunication among mental-health agencies that might have allowed the mentally disturbed Cho to slip through the cracks.
Cho had been ordered to undergo outpatient mental treatment in late 2005 after a female student reported that he had sent her bothersome computer messages, but Tech police were unaware of the order.
The charge to look at mental-health issues frustrated some panel members yesterday because Tech officials said federal privacy laws prevent them from turning over any of Cho's mental-health records. Without those records, officials do not know if Cho ever showed up for outpatient treatment and, if he didn't, why no one noticed.
Yet the panel cited a need to privately discuss mental-health records yesterday when it met behind closed doors for more than an hour. The panel closed the meeting after citing state laws that allow it to discuss mental-health records in secret. News media objected, citing the state Freedom of Information Act.
The closed-door session was called by the panel's chairman, W. Gerald Massengill, a former head of the state police, despite the governor's charge that the panel conduct as much business in public as possible. Massengill himself has said the panel would be as open as possible in its work.
Yesterday, Flaherty and Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum briefed panel members during the closed hearing.
After reconvening in public session and hearing that they have no access to Cho's mental records, panel members suggested that federal privacy laws might need to change so such agencies as campus police could be made aware of a student's mental illness.
"We'd be remiss if we didn't do a real deep dive into this area," said Tom Ridge, former U.S. Homeland Security secretary and a member of the panel.
Cho shot and killed two students at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory, early on the morning of April 16 before going to Norris Hall, an academic building, and killing 25 students and five faculty members. Yesterday, Flaherty said Cho fired 174 rounds in nine minutes in Norris Hall before turning one of his handguns on himself as police rushed up the stairs.
"You certainly can speculate that the gunman on the second floor, he would have continued to go methodically from room to room and continued shooting people," Flaherty told reporters outside the room where the panel held its second of four planned public hearings. "He was not quite halfway through his ammunition."
Cho used two handguns, a 9 mm and a .22-caliber. Flaherty said Cho fired 113 rounds with the 9 mm and 61 rounds with the .22-caliber. Of the live ammunition found on or around his body, 122 rounds were 9 mm and 81 were .22-caliber. Police also found a straight-blade knife, a folding knife and a claw hammer.
Flaherty said investigators still have found no motive for Cho's attack.
"It's as mind-boggling to me as it is to you," he said. "We've got a young man who lived here on campus for four years that nobody much knew."
Cho first came to Tech officials' attention in November 2005, when a female student complained of unwanted contact by Cho by phone and in person. That same semester, the chair of the English department also contacted police about some of Cho's violent writings and classroom behavior that included using his cell phone to take pictures of classmates' legs. In December 2005, another female student complained of bothersome computer messages Cho sent.
The same month, an acquaintance of Cho's alerted officials that Cho might be suicidal, and police took him to a local mental-health agency. Cho was involuntarily sent to a mental institution, where a special justice released him after ordering him to undergo outpatient treatment because he was a danger to himself.
Campus police were never notified that Cho had been ordered to undergo treatment.
Yesterday, Kay Heidbreder, an assistant state attorney general, said federal laws, specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, wall off medical and counseling records from public scrutiny. If such records exist at Tech's Cook Counseling Center, police — and panel members — can't obtain them, she said.
"Police are not informed when students are treated for psychiatric problems," Heidbreder said. "In the same vein, the police are not given health information when a patient is released from a hospital."
But state-police investigators have used warrants to obtain some of Cho's medical and counseling records from Tech, according to court records. Flaherty said yesterday that he has not spoken to the investigator who obtained the records, so he doesn't know what they say.
Massengill said he has heard about the records obtained with the warrants and is determined to find out more about them. "We'll get to the bottom of it," he said.