Next week’s initial hearings in identical lawsuits from two families of April 16, 2007, shooting victims will determine whether the university officials named as defendants are covered by Virginia’s sovereign immunity.
The families of Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson, who were shot and killed by Seung-Hui Cho in Norris Hall, filed the suits in April seeking to “reveal truths” about the shootings and its aftermath. The suit’s first hearings are scheduled for Dec. 14 and 15 in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
The sovereign immunity statute protects state employees from being sued, but a judge can disregard it. It also does not apply for actions taken outside the scope of the employee’s job position.
Each family is seeking $10 million in damages. Eight university officials are named in the suit, including President Charles Steger, former Executive Vice President James Hyatt, Provost Mark McNamee and Vice President for University Relations Larry Hincker.
Additionally, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum, five employees of the Cook Counseling Center and two members of the New River Valley Community Services Board are also named as defendants.
Robert Hall, attorney for the Peterson and Pryde families, said the defendants have filed two motions seeking to dismiss the suits.
“The general theme for the hearings is that the defendants contend everyone gets off on sovereign immunity, and that even if they don’t there was no reason to anticipate the criminal misconduct of a third person,” Hall said. “Even though there are some earlier Virginia cases that give them the basis for their arguments, the judge is going to have to decide whether those are applicable.”
Hall said another defendant motion will claim the officials were not responsible for anticipating the violent acts.
“I don’t anticipate that the cases will come to an end on these motions, but they’re serious motions,” Hall said.
He said what the motion calls “high-ranking state officials” should not be protected by absolute immunity, and pointed out less than a quarter of Steger’s compensation package comes from state funds.
In 2007, Steger was paid $169,339 of state funds, but received $270,000 from “private sources,” according to the Chronicle for Higher Education’s executive compensation database.
Steger also received $200,000 in deferred compensation and a $21,973 performance bonus.
“I have trouble with a high-ranking government official getting that kind of money from private sources and still being called a government official,” Hall said.
On the second motion, Hall counters that the university had previously anticipated potential violent situations and locked down the university.
He specifically cited William Morva’s escape from a nearby prison in August 2006 as an instance where the university sent a warning to students of potential danger and locked down the Tech campus.
A recently released addendum to the Governor’s Panel Report on the shootings featured an expanded timeline of the day’s events.
The report, added to and corrected by independent information systems company TriData following requests for a corrected report by victims’ families, is still not a complete account of the shootings according to Michael Pohle, whose son Michael Pohle Jr. was killed in Norris Hall.
Families asked Gov. Tim Kaine to reconvene the original panel following the discovery of Cho’s mental health records at the home of former Cook Counseling Center Director Robert Miller.
Kaine refused to reconvene the panel, but collected suggestions from family members and university officials to be compiled by TriData.
“We were allowed to submit corrections,” Pohle said. “There was no opportunity to review a draft of what they were planning to send out.”
Pohle said even the revised report omits discussion of the emergency preparedness policies that were in place at the time.
“Neither the original panel report, nor this addendum adequately, or even barely at all, assessed the university’s adherence to procedures they had in place,” Pohle said. “The panel report focused far more on changing laws, which is good, but they failed to cover in any detail existing law.”
Hall also plans to address university policies that he said should have governed the school’s response to the first two shootings in West Ambler-Johnston Hall.
“There were policies in place,” Hall said. “But originally we were told there weren’t any.”
He said they later located the policies governing the university’s response to an emergency that had been published in the 2005-2006 faculty guide. Hall said the document had been deleted from Tech’s Web site in the days following the shootings.
Pohle said the revisions also failed to clarify other conflicting accounts of the events.
The revised report said Hincker attempted to send an alert to the university community at 8:50 a.m. It said the failed attempt, which would have informed students of the shootings in West Ambler-Johnson Hall, was caused by technical difficulties.
Pohle said the report leaves out some inner workings of the university policy group, which included several of the defendants in the suits.
He said during an October 2008 meeting between victims’ families and policy group members, the officials said they decided to delay the alert until after the next class session. During that class session, Cho killed 32 in Norris Hall. That information is not reflected in the revised report.
Another point of controversy involved the revised report’s claim that two “policy group” members informed family members of the West AJ shootings before the university community was alerted.
A statement from university spokesman Mark Owczarski said “two University staff, who were not Policy Group members, did have conversations with family members in which they made mention of a shooting on campus.”
Pohle said the language in the university’s statement was misleading, claiming the staff members who made the phone calls were privy to policy group information and were paid more than $100,000 per year.
Hall, after extensive discovery research, said the revised report did not offer much information they had not already encountered.
He also said Miller, who was unknowingly in possession of Cho’s records until July, offered differing explanations of the universities mental health policies.
In a discovery response to the plaintiffs, Miller, who is a defendant, said he did not fill out a triage form after speaking to professor Lucinda Roy about Cho’s behavior because of confidentiality concerns.
However, in an inspector general’s report on the discovery of the documents, he said it was customary to fill out a triage form when consulting faculty about a student.
Pohle said he and other families still consider the report to be incomplete and plan on publishing their own addition.
“Several of the families are currently discussing it, and we are probably going to publish a supplement to that addition,” Pohle said.
The victims’ families have been invited to the final meeting with current Gov. Tim Kaine guaranteed by a settlement signed following the shootings. Only the Peterson and Pryde families did not sign the settlement.
Pohle said he hopes the pending civil suits can shed more light on the events of April 16.
“I wish them the absolute best and we hope they proceed,” Pohle said, “Because it appears that’s going to be the closest we ever get to finding out the complete truth.”