Posted on 04/17/2007 7:10:33 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
Before this is over, I predict that Virginia Tech President Charles Steger will apologize for errors that he and his administration made in dealing with yesterday's massacre. But as of this morning, Steger was still seeking to defend the failure to alert students for two hours after the initial murders. As Matt Lauer politely pointed out, his explanation would seem to fail a simple test of logic.
"Today" host Lauer interviewed Steger during the show's first half-hour.
LAUER: As you continue to mourn here at Virginia Tech University, you're also facing some very difficult questions from students and from parents and from law enforcement people who are saying we had a shooting take place at 7:15 in the dormitory in this part of the campus, and yet an email didn't go out warning students even to be cautious until two hours later.
STEGER: Well, the incident, as reported by our security people, was believed to be confined to that dorm room; an incident between two individuals. When that happened we immediately closed down that dormitory, surrounded it with security . . .
LAUER: But you didn't find the shooter at that time. You didn't find the culprit, so you had to assume that he was at large or she was at large [PC points to Matt for that.]
STEGER: We had to first see whether or not there was a murder weapon and whether or not it was a murder suicide. And then we had to track down witnesses to see if anybody saw anything else. That's what took some time.
Here is the crux of the matter. Steger takes the position that a more benign explanation had to be excluded before taking action based on a more ominous scenario. Lauer exposed Steger's error in logic.
LAUER: I think what I've been hearing talking to students and others over the last 20 hours or so is why not assume the worst assume the worst-case scenario? Why not err on the side of caution and say we've got someone who's taken either one or two lives. If it's murder-suicide, end of story. But if it's someone who's taken two lives, the game has changed and that person now has nothing to lose and has to be considered extraordinarily dangerous.
STEGER: You have to appreciate that of our 26,000 students only 9,000 live on campus. So at that time of the morning you've got 15-16,000 people in transit. You've got another 7,000 employees and 2-3,000 visitors on the campus. And so these people are going to be all over the campus. We felt letting them get into the classroom and then closing down the classrooms, which is what we did . . .
Lauer threw Steger something of a life-line
LAUER: So you're worst-case scenario was thousands of students milling about outdoors when there was a possibile shooter roaming . . .
Steger was happy to grasp it.
STEGER: That's right and you could have also, since we now know the second person was a dormitory resident, we could have ended up locking him in the dormitory and this could have happened just at another location.
LAUER: Students I spoke to yesterday, President Steger, said 'I wish I would at least have had the option. If I had been given the information at 7:45, at 8 o'clock, I could have made my own educated decision as to where to be for the rest of the morning.' And perhaps some of those students wouldn't have gone to a class where you say they could be locked in and protected. As it turned out, unfortunately, they were trapped in those classrooms.
STEGER: Well, the ones in those immediate classrooms were, it's true. But remember, we have 26,000 students to look after.
LAUER: You met with you're executive committee at I think 8:25 yesterday morning? What was the major discussion then, and even at that point was there a discussion about getting that email out quicker than the hour it took from that meeting?
STEGER: Well, we started planning what the options were. We were at that point in time still getting information from witnesses and in fact people were still being questioned at 9:15. As soon as we had some sense we released that.
LAUER: What was your gut feeling, President Steger, when that second call came, and you knew that earlier in the morning you had a tragedy in a dormitory, and here comes a second call, and I believe it was labelled multiple victims?
Though Lauer didn't make it explict, his implication seemed clear: how did you feel when you realized your failure to alert people as soon as you heard of the first incident might have cost other people their lives?
Steger either didn't get the implication or chose to ignore it, speaking instead of his administration's actions to "manage the crisis at the moment."
Steger and his administration are academics, not law enforcement professionals, though presumably he was being advised by campus security officials. There is no doubt much, much more to come out. For the time being, Steger is defending his decisions rather than acknowledging the possibility that, in all good faith, he and his administration made mistakes with tragic consequences.
Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net
Va Tech ping to Today show list.
He just needs to admit that they have no ability to protect the students there, not unlike most if not all other college campuses. When you have situations where people have no way of protecting themselves then this is what you end up with. Sitting ducks.
I thought Steger sounded rational.
I heard a statistic today: Blacksburg pop. 10,000. VT pop. 26,000.
Did the cops, SWAT team, etc. come from Blacksburg, and if so, why does a population of 10,000 have a security force so overwhelmingly larger and more skilled than a population of 26,000?
His tone sounded reasonable, but what he was saying didn’t make sense to me. Why did he assume this was a domestic situation? Why did he have to exclude the possibility it wasn’t a domestic situation could be involved before warning others? The killer hadn’t been apprehended and he couldn’t be sure it was a domestic situation. Under the circumstances I can’t understand the delay in notifying others.
Blacksburg’s probably got a fairly big PD for its size because of Tech being there. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department is also fairly large. I expect a lot of the special tactical units might’ve been Virginia State Police from their Salem division office, which is about 45 minutes northeast outside Roanoke.
}:-)4
“But remember, we have 26,000 students to look after.”
Stupid. consensus building, no-leadership, retard.
I really doubt any campus is prepared to stop a tragedy like this. If someone is determined enough to commit a horrible crime like this they will find a way to do it and there is probably nothing that can be done to stop it. They may be able to minimize the damage but they will never be able to stop it. What’s a campus to do? Put armed guards at every single entrance of every single building, put metal detectors or X-ray machines at every single door on campus?
In the City of Philadelphia alone ... there are several Colleges and by the liberal logic .. everyone one of these colleges should shut down whenever there is a murder in the area
Holy crap, round up all the commuters and send them to execution bins? Is he for real?
Note to all management types, place a crisis communications firm on retainer so you and your people can get some quick training before you make public statements. That or heed the urge to STFU.A much better plan would have been to use the snow-storm cancellation procedure, have the media announce to the commuting public that classes were cancelled, and have the police invoke a pre-planned raodblock system and keep another 10,000 victims away from the campus.
(1) VA is a shall-issue state.
(2) Virginia Tech requires all its students, faculty and other employees to surrender their legal right to bear arms as a condition for admission/employment on campus.
(3) Virginia Tech, having removed their students' and employees' capacity for self-defense, completely failed to provide adequate protection for their employees.
If a corporation removed all seatbelts from their company vehicles and a drunk driver struck an employee's vehicle and they died because they were not belted, what would people think about the employer?
So, like most socialists, VT outsourced their security to remote entities...?
The police will never be able to protect you unless they have prior notice that something is going to happen so they can get organized and get to the scene.
Because he is probably the liberal head of a liberal university that needs to ensure that the “feeling safe” facade of said university continues to live on. I am so angry about all this.
(2) Virginia Tech requires all its students, faculty and other employees to surrender their legal right to bear arms as a condition for admission/employment on campus.
(3) Virginia Tech, having removed their students' and employees' capacity for self-defense, completely failed to provide adequate protection for their employees.
A very good summary of the situation.
There are just too many factors involved to come to some pat answer.
This is a tragedy ... period.
Many are still trying to blame someone for September 11, 2001.
I cannot prevent a thought occuring in someone else's head and no one can prevent one from entering mine. That is the gist of any human action ... As a man thinketh, so is he.
A determined man with his own brand of thought process(es) did something terrible.
Pray for the families of those dear, slain children.
They were unprepared and that lack of preparation coupled with a distinctly unAmerican attitude toward firearm ownership cost 32 human lives.
I think that it is reasonable to expect that in the future, if two college students are found shot in a dorm room at 07:00 on a school day, the campus make an all out effort to inform the students and the community that there may be an armed and dangerous murderer on the loose.
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I can see how they might have thought it was an isolated incident....but it would still seem prudent to alert the students, faculty, and media that there may be an armed individual roaming about just so people would stay on alert.
That about sums it it ... the school took away their right of self defense and they were sitting ducks
Former campus cop here...and let me tell you I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Colleges and universities usually augment most of their police force with students (as was my case), recruiting mostly ex-servicemen (my case again) or former police who are attending school. There was NO training (except a yearly visit to a firing range) because there was NO money in the budget except for salaries and academic pursuits (believe it or not our campus police vehicles back then were the same little underpowered jeeps that the post office used to deliver mail. Additionally, most of academia, being extremely liberal, was “uncomfortable” with campus police and twarted any effort for sane preparedness. Therefore, there is no preparation for situations like this. I strongly suspect that this was what happened in my state’s institution of higher learning.
Dint ding ding!!! We have a winner folks for most inciteful response
There was a shooting five years ago, if memory serves, on this very campus. It seems that, after one such shooting, some sort of emergency plan would have been in place. There apparently was none.
I see the point about Monday morning QBing. But does that mean that no decisions can be retroactively criticized?
All of our initial reports was a domestic. They had witness testimony, they thought, and thought they had the person of interest fleeing the scene. They had him caught on the side of the road, and were questioning him.
It also made sense (without the hindsight of knowing the guy shot up the classrooms) that you would want to let students get to school and then secure them in the classrooms.
I would note that with only a few dozen law enforcement, and with over a hundred buildings, and with nobody allowed to have guns, there was NO place at Tech where you could be “locked down” and be safe.
Heck, the guy was a resident of Harper. So if they had forcibly put every student into their dorms and locked them up, there could have been 30 or more people dead at his dorm, and then the complaints would have been about locking people into a dorm with a murderer.
So far as I can tell, this is the first time that a shooting has gone down this way on a campus, with a “domestic dispute” shooting followed hours later by a random mass murder. Usually subsequent killings are other “known relations” or during the attempts at apprehension.
I think the focus on “7:15 am” is somewhat misleading, because I think that is when the shooting happened, not when the investigators knew about the shooting. I imagine it took some time to collect information, and it would be hard to release a lot of info for the students before you HAD the info.
They sent out the alerts well before the 2nd shooting started, so by the time of the shooting there was widespread knowledge, and some students report deciding NOT to go into class. But most seem to be content to be “locked down” in their classrooms. Most of them were perfectly safe in their classrooms. If the gunman had taken up a position to shoot people on the drillfield, being locked in classroooms would have been the right thing.
But with the gunman being a student, and going into the buildings, whatever building he chose was going to have a bad outcome, whether there was a lockdown or not.
I’m not saying that there wasn’t a way to react that could have prevented this, just that I’m not seeing the reaction as being hopelessly flawed given what they knew at the time. I believe they were genuinely and reasonably shocked at the reports of the second shooting, given they thought they had the guy in custody.
Steger’s screwed no matter what so....
I’ll say that if you respond to what even may be a “murder-suicide” odds are probably better than even you’ll find a murder weapon on scene. If not, you probably have a double-homicide which means the killer is still on the loose.
See? Probably 30secs to deduce that.
If they assumed the worst every time, then the schools would never be opened. Everytime the terror alert goes up to orange, they'd have to do a lockdown. Everytime there was a threat or a fight or a bomb scare they'd have to lock the university down.
All indications were that this was a simple everyday domestic violence murder and I doubt anyone could have anticipated what was going to occur two hours later. FWIW NOTHING happened on campus for TWO HOURS after the initial reporting of the murder. They had NO REASON to suspect that a rampage was going to take place. All these monday morning quarterbacks would probably have made the same decision under the circumstances.
I Beleive I’ve figured out where to squarly place the blame.
It was the guy that murdered (executed) all those people!
He methodically planned it out, and carried it out.
I’m afraid I could not deal with all the second guessing about what could or should have been done. If I was in their possition I would have have went on a rant to those reporters saying somthing to the affect;
Yes,oh,yes you buntch of M efin vultures this is what we knew would happen by not closing down the whole G.D. campus! We wanted to see all this mayhem! That way all of you vultures could come here and tell the world how you would not have lost a single sole!
We can’t wait to face the familys of these victims.
And you know, with all your expertise you absolutly Would Have, Not Could Have, but Would Have prevented this! I have really tried to purchase the same model crystal ball you all have, but you know, budgets and and all!
I know you all had moral presance of mind and dignity to not shove your cameras and microphones in the faces of the dead and surviving victims familys.
Well I’ve gotta go now, you know I can’t wait to visit the victims familys. I hope you left some for me.
Oh S@@T another victim has died, bet I beatcha to her mom & dad to tell em!
You “people” are almost as evil and demented as the killer!
Exactly. Campus administration treats a snow storm with more seriousness than 2 murders on campus.
Perfect definition of most administrators!
When I was at JMU in the late 90s there was a student who shot his girlfriend just off campus, then skipped town. There was a large manhunt for the perp but they never shut down the campus. He just as easily could have headed to a lecture hall and started blowing people away.
“You “people” are almost as evil and demented as the killer!”
People who think the administration shouldn’t have waited two hours to send an email are “almost as evil and demented” as someone who murdered 32 people in cold blood?
Your punk posturing is childish.
How about don’t assume anything, except that getting information out quickly is always the best policy?
At about 7:15am, two people were shot on campus. Maybe everything else besides that fact is still fluid. So what. Email the info to students, broadcast to school populace, and tell the local radio stations, TV and papers. This all could have been done within 30 minutes.
At a minimum, tell them: “two people have been shot on campus. Other details are sketchy or unknown.”
Then, if the school and/or the police have some other policy or procedure to advise the student population or community as a whole, add it to that fundamental, factual statement.
THE POINT: withholding the fact of the shooting for over two hours after it occurred was WRONG.
Matt Lauer demonstrates he’s a lightweight once again.
Blaming the University for this is absurd, but typical of the MSM.
Using this logic, we would have every single school, kindergarten thru college, underground because a school was once struck by a Tornado.
Uh, no. People are asking legitimate questions about the handling of information in this tragedy.
“Uh, no. People are asking legitimate questions about the handling of information in this tragedy.”
You can’t ask ‘legitimate questions’ before the facts are known.
And I didn’t say anything about asking questions, either way.
I said this ‘rush to blame’ stuff is typicial of the MSM, and lightweight Matt Lauer. Saw it when Katie Couric rushed to dance in the blood of Columbine. Same thing here.
We’ll know what are ‘legitimate questions’ by the end of the week, not until.
Didn't VA Tech shut down when there was an escaped convict in the area a while back? Why shut down for that and not for 2 murders on campus?
DITTO!!
My post post mentioned a fact not in dispute by anyone: at about 7:15, two people on the campus were shot and killed.
What, that fact important enough to convey to the students/community for over two hours?
I’m sure this guy will lose his job and VT will be sued into oblivion. That should make everyone happy.
“You can’t ask ‘legitimate questions’ before the facts are known.
My post post mentioned a fact not in dispute by anyone: at about 7:15, two people on the campus were shot and killed.
What, that fact important enough to convey to the students/community for over two hours?”
Do you notify everybody at the local college when a homicide occurs, and it appears to be ‘over’?
Nope.
Try considering it from the viewpoint of the authorities, at around 8 AM, 45 minutes after the shooting was reported.
You have two dead in a dorm. No further shots fired beyond the first initial reports. Nobody hanging around the crime scene with a gun, or an apparent motive.
Your choices are 1)Continue the homicide investigation as you normally would. 2)Race around the campus, sirens blazing, saying via loudspeakers...what, exactly?
Sorry, a homicide that appears to be a single, one time event, doesn’t indicate a shooting rampage is going to occur two hours later, on the other side of the campus.
What I will say is its beginning to look to me like VT dropped the ball on the alleged killer. If you want to question why they didn’t deal with this guy after he reportedly set his dorm room on fire...I’m right here with you.
But questioning why VT didn’t basically ‘incite panic’ based on what was known in the two hours before the second incident - a unpredictable rampage, is using 20/20 hindsight those in charge didn’t have the luxuary of at the time.
Just my opinion. We are allowed to disagree.
Aren’t we?
Lose his job? I say his decision to withhold information for over two hours, if he was the decider, was inexcusable. So, imo he should lose his job.
I think I’m missing your point.
If it is what I think it is, I was referring to eageristic, vulturistic and almost carnival attiude of the media for this Heiness Crime. The investigation should carry on to completion before talks of blaming anyone other than the killer.
There was probably things that could have been done,but we or I don’t know that yet. We will find out. No one else is dying, just let the investigation carry on there is plenty of time to blame others
And did you mean should have or shouldn’t have?
On a side note, to all Americans, we still have soldiers fight in Iraq, God Be Them
I think you’re suffering from hindsight logic. Bad things happen on college campuses, bad things happen on college campuses all the time, but the vast majority of the time it’s a one shot situation. You can’t treat every violent act that happens on a campus as if it was a potential rampage closing down the campus and keeping everybody away. It’s not like a snowday, people can see snow storms have hit and will wonder if there’s any closures and check the radio and TV to find out, you don’t get that with killings. Then you’ve got the “boy who cried wolf” situation, there’s a couple of killings and/or assaults on or around the UofA campus every year, if you locked down the campus “just in case” every time in short order people would just stop paying attention. Then you’ve got geography, I don’t know how VTech is laid out but I know the UofA simply could not be locked down in under 4 hours with hundreds of cops, it’s got over a 10 mile perimiter with 2 dozen streets cars can use to get in and out and numerous other open paths pedestrians and bikes can uses.
It sounds really good to say “treat it like a snow day and close the campus”, but saying and doing are two different things. Doing requires logistics and understanding how the student body will react the 4th or 5th time that school year the campus gets closed “just in case”.
Of course we can disagree. And we surely do. Every day in communities around the country we wake up to news of rapists or murderers, may of whom remain at large. It’s a fact of life. It doesn’t result in chaotic “panic” at every turn.
Sorry. There was a fundamental fact that should have been reported to the community without delay.
If the police or University could suggest no procedures or policies to follow in light of that info, well then they need a better plan in the future. But that’s no excuse not to inform people.
I for one, like being informed. If I were at that campus or on the way to that campus at, say, 8am, I would want that info. You wouldn’t?
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