Collegiate Times

An audio recording of the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho was found on Friday.

The recording was of Cho’s 2005 civil commitment hearing and it was thought to be destroyed in 2009.

It was uncovered in the criminal and traffic files rather than the civil commitment files, Montgomery County General District Court Clerk Kim McKittrick said.

Special Justice William Alexander recently ordered the recording be released to the parents of slain Tech students Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson.

Both parents filed two $10 million civil suits against Tech officials in 2009, and are represented by Fairfax-based attorney Robert Hall.

Cho had appeared before a special magistrate in 2005, where he was ordered to have outpatient counseling.

He was involuntarily detained overnight at Carilion Clinic Saint Albans Hospital because of a suicide threat and emergency mental health evaluation at the Tech police department.

Mental health records released previously by Virginia Tech officials show that in 2005 Cho’s diagnosis changed drastically.

Those records depicted a young man suffering with ongoing depression and isolation, to a mentally ill psychiatric patient deemed “an imminent danger,” to a college student with no psychiatric history suffering from “acculturation issues” and “stress of college life.”

There’s no evidence that Cho ever received the outpatient counseling ordered by the magistrate in late 2005.

In 2007, the recording was required to be released by court order to three state agencies investigating aspects of the shootings in which 32 people died and 20 were injured.

The Virginia State Police, a special state investigative panel convened by former Gov. Tim Kaine and James Stewart, inspector general for the state’s mental health, mental retardation and substance abuse services, all received copies, according to court filings.

McKittrick was able to find both the original and a copy of the recording by using the dates of those court orders. As of Tuesday, it was unclear as to why the tapes were in the wrong files.

The attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case requested copies and this discussion convinced McKittrick to search other court records for evidence of the tape.

“At that time in 2005, I wasn’t the clerk and I wasn’t familiar with what they would have done differenty,” McKittrick said in regards to the filing system. “After I spoke
with the Roanoke Times and the attorney, I looked through the different filing system for mental committments but the tapes weren’t attached.”

“One of the court orders was written under a criminal code and I’m assuming that those tapes were filed with them,” McKittrick said.

Under state law that governs court record retention schedules, civil commitment paperwork is kept for ten years and audio recordings of commitment hearings are kept for three years.

Mikittrick explained that the tapes recording Cho’s commitment hearing on Dec. 15, 2005, would have been kept in a box with other such recordings from 2005, and destroyed as a batch in 2009.

The mental commitment paperwork and the audio recording tapes would be batched in two separate locations.

Since then, McKittrick has given the tapes to Hall.

In an interview with the Roanoke Times, Hall said that Cho’s voice is inaudible on the tape.

Hall said he is searching for a company that could enhance the sound quality to retrieve Cho’s responses to a special magistrate’s questions.

The wrongful death suits are set for a 10-day jury trial on Sept. 29 in Montgomery County Circuit Court.

A version of this article appeared in the Jul 4 issue of the Collegiate Times.