Remember the unforgettable scene in “A Few Good Men” when actor Jack Nicholson growled, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth”? Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is basically saying the same thing to the relatives of victims and survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre.
Kaine set up the Virginia Tech Review Panel to find out if the April 16, 2007, mass murders at the Blacksburg campus could have been avoided. After the panel issued its report, Tech officials admitted that the timeline they had provided the panel was not accurate.
That fact was reason enough to reopen the investigation. But Kaine refused to reconvene the panel – claiming some families don’t want the case reopened – even after startling new evidence unexpectedly surfaced last month.
The panel, chaired by former State Police Superintendent W. Gerald Massengill, never saw 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho’s mental health records because a former university official “inadvertently” took them home with him.
In an email to the victims’ families, Mark Rubin, Kaine’s lawyer, slammed the door shut on the deadliest shooting in modern American history so as not to further “upset” them.
Nonsense. Kaine doesn’t want to reopen the investigation because he accepted a report that turns out to be quite at odds with the truth. “The report issued by the panel contains grave errors, misinformation and glaring omissions,” more than 60 family members said in a letter to the governor. So what does Kaine do? He decides to put TriData, the same Arlington consulting firm that produced the original, incorrect version in charge of future revisions.
University officials knew the gunman was still at large at least an hour after the bodies of Cho’s first two victims were discovered, according to documents obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. But no general warning was issued, even though some buildings – including University President Charles Steger’s office – were locked down.
A campus-wide alert was not sent until 10 minutes after Cho started gunning down students and faculty members in Norris Hall – at least 46 minutes later than the university’s official timetable. During that 46-minute gap, 30 people died, but university officials will not be grilled about the false and misleading information they previously submitted.
Nor will Dr. Robert C. Miller, the former head of the university’s Cook Counseling Center, who finally admitted two years after the fact that he had removed Cho’s files, a major breach of patient confidentiality and medical ethics.
This critical information was not given to the panel by university or state officials, but by lawyers representing the families of Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson, who refused to participate in the $11 million settlement and are now suing the university for gross negligence.
Why did the panel interview more than 200 people, but not Dr. Miller? Why didn’t the State Police interrogate every single member of the counseling center staff, and search every nook and cranny until Cho’s records were located or somebody admitted what happened to them?
How many other student medical records have been removed from campus by university staff without legal authorization?
Those are the questions the grieving families want answered but Gov. Kaine doesn’t want them to know the truth. It might upset them.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is the Examiner’s local opinion editor.
