Virginia Tech officials will meet with families of April 16 victims this weekend, in an attempt to answer numerous questions about events and decisions made in 2007.
President Charles Steger invited families to the campus this weekend with a letter sent on Sept. 15.
Families of the wounded will have their question session with university officials on Saturday at 11 a.m., while the families of those killed will have a similar session on Sunday at 2 p.m.
Some families of the deceased, especially those who reside out of state, find the schedule inconvenient.
Michael Herbstritt, father of Jeremy Herbstritt, who was among those murdered, lives in Bellefonte, Pa. He said the weekend trip is not feasible and will not be attending.
"It is extremely difficult. The university seems to think we can come anytime," Herbstritt said. "University officials have never come to central Pennsylvania."
However, he said there is very little the university can do for the families.
"Virginia Tech has tried everything to console us," Herbstritt said. "It is impossible to console any of the 32 families."
Since the invitations were sent, families have gained access to handwritten notes of Tech officials from April 16, bringing more concerns to the surface.
Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin was wounded in Norris Hall, said facts about the university's response are hard to find.
"There are still a lot of unanswered questions about how we got to where we were on that day," Goddard said. "The more we look into those things, it seems like the questions turn out to be more, because many things turn out to be different than they were before."
The released notes left some holes in the story for Goddard.
"The initial notes point to the fact that a gunman was loose on campus," Goddard said. "Nobody knew who it was. Nobody knew why. That is a potential threat, as much as an escaped convict on campus was a threat on the first day of classes, yet the response was very different."
Goddard said the notes indicated a lack of action between the double murder in West Ambler-Johnston and the Norris Hall shootings. He is also focused on preventing future tragedies, and hopes to ask what could have been done to help Seung-Hui Cho.
"I want to fill in a few blanks about what appears to be a very unresponsive couple of years about Cho's behavior," Goddard said.
Goddard said he and his family are not looking for a scapegoat, but instead for answers.
"We're not looking to apportion blame, were looking for what really happened," Goddard said.
Goddard and other attending families will meet with the university's Policy Group, the same officials who handled the decision-making on April 16.
University spokesman Larry Hincker said all members of the group would be present for the meetings.
Hincker also said there would be no restriction on time.
"Those meetings are going to go as long as they need to go," Hincker said.
A letter from 17 families had asked for additional meetings, claiming families of the deceased would not have sufficient time to address their concerns.
Herbstritt said the university appears determined to move on.
"I think the university just wants to forget," Herbstritt said.
Hincker said the families would leave with a better grasp on the events of April 16.
"We're there to answer all their questions and help them understand the sequence of events," Hincker said.
At this time, there are no other scheduled meetings for the victims' families with university officials.
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I would ask these questions - 1. Why was no one from the Cook Counseling Center or Dean's Office FIRED for screwing up the Cho case? Aside from the token dismissal of a lowly filing clerk, the other professionals there were allowed to remain in place due to "misunderstanding" the FERPA and HIPPA provisions and thus sitting on their hands on the matter of Seung-Hui Cho. 2. Why have Cho's parents been allowed to basically remain hiding behind paper-covered windows in their Northern Virginia home and not come forward to speak to these families and explain why they sent Seung-Hui the mute loner to Virginia Tech, far away from his limited familial social network in NoVa?
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It is clear that VT knew about his stalking and harassing behavior. He should have been permanently expelled long before 4/16/2007. Would this have prevented any tragedy? I am not sure. Maybe Cho would have sought revenge, or maybe he would have just left peacefully and headed back to northern VA. VT had campus and workplace violence prevention policy in place since June 2005. This policy clearly takes hard line stance against stalking and other activities. Unfortunately policy fails when it is not backed up by action. Everyone should really think about this and thoroughly consider if we are actually any safer now. Anyone can still come onto campus, and there is no way to check if they have weapons of any kind. So apparently the right thing to do is keep our heads in the sand and move on instead of taking a proactive safety approach. Sometimes the good people in society need to put the bad people and crazies on notice that "we are prepared and don't come around here looking for trouble."
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Anon, I would answer your questions this way: First, nobody should have been fired from Cook. There are several reasons for this, but the bottom line is that 'being weird' is not a legitimate consider someone mentally ill. We have to remember that Cho's history was minimal - and aside from writings with a fair amount of violence (but none worse than, say, a Tarrantino film), he gave no indication that he posed a threat to himself or to others. The fact that his teachers were creeped out by him doesn't establish mental illness, either - nobody has the right 'not to be creeped out by someone else.' Comfort is not a right. Secondly, his parents had actually nothing to do with his actions. Think about it - if you were arrested for DUI, would you expect the state to arrest your parents too? Should the parents of murderers be held responsible for their offspring's actions? There comes a point where an individual is responsible for his own actions - and by the time you're in college, you've already reached that point. I'm no Cho apologist, and I suffered along with the rest on April 16 - but I'm not sold on the idea of blaming people who didn't actually cause the incident to occur.
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Kyle - The Cho parents allowed an obviously mentally unstable young man to go to Virginia Tech. I'm not calling for them to be charged for doing so, but I do feel they need to come forward and talk to the parents of children whose lives their son took. Cho, who was too much of a slacker to take a job, remained a dependent on them. Instead, they are given a free pass and allowed to hide behind papered over windows in Northern Virginia, free from personal responsibility as were never considered being named as litigants in the once proposed suit over the massacre.
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I'm sure that this will be a very productive worthwhile meeting, and that President Strudel will make major changes in his lackluster approach to campus security, and providing campus watch with much needed equipment....NOT...
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By that token, the parents of any murderer ought also to be held responsible for letting their 'obviously unstable' children run wild in the world. What you're asking for is a nanny state - if parents were REALLY charged with ensuring their childrens' stability once they achieve legal adulthood, nobody ought to be allowed to go to college away from home. The responsibility always lies with the individual - and in this case, especially so. Note that not only did Virginia Tech 'fail' to see the instability, but so did the Commonwealth of Virginia. He was a weird dude, and then he snapped - but being weird isn't a crime (nor should it be), and often it isn't (and shouldn't be) a cause of any concern. Else, we'd be without most of the world's greatest artists of the last several centuries.
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What good would it do for Cho's parents to speak with the victims' families? A proxy apology on their son's behalf is trite at best, meaningless at worst, and I'm not sure I understand exactly what is to be gained by such a meeting.
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The Chos were the progenitors of the bad seed that destroyed 30 families. They shrugged off Cho's evident mental problems, i.e. the non-communicativeness, the demonstrated infatuation with the Columbine massacre, the absence of any social acquaintances whatsoever and felt that he could was suited for Virginia Tech. They thought such behaviors must be "normal" for American life and sent him off to an environment that was completely unsuitable for such an anti-social personality. It is a remarkable irony that the taxpayers of the Commonwealth had to pay dearly, in terms of money for Seung-Hui's violent temper tantrum. But no, the Cho's haven't had to pay a red cent of compensation or make any such appearance. They have instead been allowed to hide behind the papered-over windows in "shame", while Tech administrators have been raked over the coals repeatedly for what they did or did not do on April 16th. What gives the Chos the luxury of hiding out? Is it because after 20 odd years in this country they still haven't decided to assimilate and refuse to learn to speak English? That's almost as bad as the early proposals, quite serious, to include them as recipients of a cut from the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund.
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Again, Fred, all you keep doing is pointing to 'conditions' that, in many children and young adults, are considered psychologically quite normal. As you yourself indicate, it's quite possible that the Cho's didn't even know their son's condition was abnormal. Some people are simply introverted - and to claim that there is something inherently 'wrong' with a desire to be left alone is to discount introversion as an appropriate social attitude. It sounds more like you're looking for someone to blame, and the obvious choice is dead because he took his own life. Unless you are going to start insisting that everyone in the nation take a psychology curriculum before attempting to raise children, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to be done here.
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Kyle: Most young men in high school would get their rocks off to the likes of the latest girl in Maxim magazine (or alternatively one in the flesh). In Cho's case, he was infatuated with the Columbine killings, he wrote about it extensively and idolized the killers. This was known by the parents. Their boy wasn't going out and hanging out with friends, he was too busy silently brooding, all the time. What did they EXPECT was going to happen when Seung-Hui, free of anti-depressants that brought him close to a somewhat normal state, went to school 250 miles away? Do you let a young child take a hunting rifle and go out alone for deer season? No, of course not. As a parent, you use judgment and deem that they are not ready for that experience. In this case, the Chos, if they had had a pulse, would have deemed that Seung-Hui, unlike his sister, was totally unprepared for living on his own and was not going to amount to a functional component of society.
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