"Does Virginia Tech breed mass murderers?” asked a recent San Jose Independent Examiner commentary headline.
With the realization that alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot-dead 13 soldiers and wounded 31 others, was a 1995 alumnus, all eyes once again turned to Tech.
“What are they doing to the students over there?” asked Twitter user “swedishniceboy.” User “HolyHo33lymoley” wrote, “Maybe the govt should start profiling V.T. students and alumni from now on.”
The true contributing factors leading to a violent crimes are much more difficult to discern.
Don Shoemaker is a professor of sociology at Tech and sits on the university’s Violence Prevention Committee. He arrived at Tech in 1974.
“Some people outside the university may be making that connection,” Shoemaker said. “I don’t think it’s a valid connection; I just don’t see it.”
On April 16, 2007, Tech student Seung-Hui Cho carried out the largest mass murder in United States history on Tech’s campus, taking the lives of 32 Tech students and faculty and wounding numerous others.
Over a year later, with the limelight seemingly fading, graduate student Xin Yang was beheaded on Jan. 19, 2009, while sitting in the Graduate Life Center’s Au Bon Pain Cafe. Graduate student Haiyang Zhu is charged with the murder. His trial is scheduled for January.
In late August, Tech sophomores Heidi Childs and David Metzler were found dead in the Caldwell Fields area of Jefferson National Forest. No charges have been filed in the case.
Additionally, Tech student Morgan Harrington has been missing since attending a Metallica concert on Oct. 17 on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
“People are wondering why ... Tech seems to keep coming up,” Shoemaker said. “I don’t have an answer for that. There is no answer for that. I don’t think it does have a violence-fostering climate, any more than you would find at any other university.”
A look at Department of Education crime statistics between Virginia’s public college campuses does not generally raise eyebrows.
For example, four forcible sex offenses were committed at Tech and the smaller College of William & Mary in 2008. UVa experienced five in the same timeframe.
The year of 2008 saw 64 burglaries on Tech’s campus. However, UVa reported 73 in the same year.
The exceptions are in murder and non-negligent manslaughter statistics. The April 16 shootings accounted for the 32 murders at Tech in 2007.
It is this number, coupled with the tragedies of 2009 — the murder in the Graduate Life Center in January and the double homicide near Caldwell Fields in August — that repeatedly brings the university under scrutiny, said John Welch, director of communication for Students for Non-Violence.
“We’ve been taking a hard hit this whole semester, so it’s definitely elevated Virginia Tech in the media in a bad light,” Welch said. “All that commentary is very ignorant. It just happens to be another bad coincidence, and it’s definitely going to contribute to the stigma around Virginia Tech.”
Still, Welch said the campus community has not fundamentally changed as a result. He also said the campus has not felt many effects from the Fort Hood shootings.
“People now are a little bit more on edge, but I don’t think this latest incident has caused anyone to feel uneasy about their personal safety on campus.”
Jerzy Nowak is director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Tech. Although he ignores the comments about a link between the Fort Hood shootings and Tech, he has responded to a multitude of parents with similar, sincere concerns.
“Some of them broadly ask questions, ‘What’s wrong with Virginia Tech?’” Nowak said. “I see nothing wrong. People try to look for a scapegoat.”
Still, he does not deny the recent spate of bad luck.
“The frequency of these tragedies is unbelievably high,” Nowak said.
He attributes much of it to a broader societal tension, whether it is due to growing unemployment, socio-economic inequalities, or even fueled tensions amid the current federal health care reform debate.
Secondary victims of tragedies such as April 16, 2007, include parents and family members of the victims. As a result of the multiple incidents, Nowak said that every member of the Tech community could be considered, to some degree, a victim as well.
“Emotionally, you have to reflect what’s happening even if you were not here,” Nowak said. “You see the symbols. You walk through the Drillfield, and you see the memorial.”
As a result, Nowak said, reporting crimes that have any sort of link to Tech became almost part of the culture.
James Kenny is a professor and school violence prevention specialist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Last month he presented a campus seminar entitled “Stronger Than We Think: Self-Empowering Skills that Reduce the Risk of Violence” on behalf of Tech’s peace center.
He downplayed Tech’s connection to Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter who graduated with a biochemistry degree in 1995.
“It really has nothing (to do with Tech); he was a graduate,” Kenny said. “You guys have 30,000 students, and you have an amazing amount of graduates each year. 99.9 percent of them are accomplishing wonderful things.”
But if Tech is not responsible for “breeding mass murderers,” what is?
Hasan’s Muslim identity has perhaps been one of the most publicized details about his possible motivations in the Fort Hood massacre.
Although American Muslim leaders, including Tech’s Muslim Students’ Association, widely denounced the murders, some have chosen religion as their scapegoat, Nowak said.
Kenny added that one incident should not cast a shadow on all Muslim American soldiers.
“I think that’s not fair to those soldiers who have Islamic beliefs,” Kenny said.
Mental health has also played a role in many murders associated with Tech. Cho had visited Cook Counseling Center several times before the April 16 shootings, and although Hasan was a psychiatrist, some suspect a mental disorder affected his judgment.
“There’s always a reason (behind a crime),” Kenny said, “and I think one of the biggest problems is that we try to look at these things from our perspective, and they don’t seem to make any sense.” However, using warning signs to prevent violent crime is a difficult, but possible, task, he said.
“Almost every major shooting that’s occurred in the last 10 years — if you look at the newspapers (on) day one, it’ll talk about ‘random and senseless’ shooting,” Kenny said. “When you look (at) day 4, after there’s been some investigation and someone’s looked into it, you’ll see it wasn’t so random.
“It was predictable. There were warning signs.”
Consequently, Kenny said the effort to prevent violent crime should center on identifying those individual warning signs and bringing them together.
“The reality is that we really don’t train people to look for warning signs,” Kenny said, “and we don’t train them to act on warning signs, and we don’t provide the right mechanisms for them to report them.”
According to Shoemaker, it is a struggle to achieve the right balance between missing early warning signs preceding a violent crime and paranoia of everyday behavior.
“You don’t often think of that leading to what happened in Texas,” Shoemaker said. “The dots aren’t always connected, because you don’t always assume that if somebody says something, that in the years from years from now they’re going to go out and kill 10 people. That just isn’t normally done.”
Shoemaker and Kenny both said Tech had made considerable progress, however, in building up its capacity to prevent violence and push for a safer campus.
The threat assessment team, for example, is working to set up an early warning process. When someone experiences a potentially dangerous situation, he would have numbers to contact relating to that concern. It is the kind of program Shoemaker emphasized was essential to “connect the dots.”
“I was very, very impressed with what I saw down at Virginia Tech,” Kenny said. “A lot of these programs are relatively young, but you’re doing the right things.”
However, doing the right things does not guarantee 100 percent success, Shoemaker said.
“Even if something were to happen in the future, it would not be entirely a necessary indication that we failed somewhere,” Shoemaker said.
Kenny expected in a few years that people are going to focus not just on April 16, but the measures taken in reaction to the shootings.
“We’re going to be coming to you for leadership,” Kenny said.
Students for Non-Violence, the student-led offshoot of the peace center, is already working on teaming up with the Residence Hall Federation to lead a film series for younger students on campus to learn about violence prevention.
Another item on its agenda is choosing the speaker for the third Day of Remembrance on April 16, 2010.