As Virginia Tech and the surrounding community of Blacksburg began to take stock in the immediate aftermath of the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history, Pastor Thomas McDearis found himself turning again and again to the same passage of the Bible, nestled toward the end of Romans 8.
For McDearis, senior pastor of Blacksburg Baptist Church and chaplain of the town’s police department, the words emerged as a theme as the community sought solace and answers: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
“Our affirmation of faith was ‘nothing shall separate us from the love of God,’ ” he told The Examiner last week. “That was the theme: This hardship, this event that had come to us was not going to do that more than anything else had.”
McDearis said he was on campus “within four minutes of the first shot” on April 16, 2007, when mentally ill student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 students and faculty members and wounded 17 others before taking his own life in a Norris Hall classroom as police closed in.
The campus is preparing for the first anniversary of the tragedy Wednesday, a painful and stressful time and a reminder of an event that left the town in “utter shock,” McDearis said.
The anniversary comes on the heels of a flurry of lawmaking prompted by the shooting. The massacre reverberated worldwide, prompting not only a sober reassessment of the notions of public security, but also a reinvigorated push to reform the state’s mental health, campus safety and gun laws.
Much of state legislators’ policy initiatives during this year’s General Assembly session emerged from the work of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, whose chairman, former State Police Superintendent Col. Gerald Massengill, was quickly confronted with the flaws of the state’s mental health system.
But many of the panel’s recommendations on the issue, he said, would not have directly affected Cho, who had been court-ordered into outpatient treatment in 2005 but nevertheless was able to buy the firearms used in the attack. Instead, after talks with mental health professionals, the panel took a broader, “holistic” approach.
Gov. Tim Kaine last week signed into law a sweeping mental health reform package, which loosens standards for involuntary commitment, steps up oversight by local community service boards and mandates better record sharing. Still, state officials were forced to acknowledge the impossibility of preventing a similar massacre through any change in law or policy.
“I think that needs to be said up front: Almost every reasonable person recognizes that you cannot stop a madman that wants to do something like this and has no value on his own life,” Massengill said. “All you can ever do in any crime, to be realistic about it, is try to lower your vulnerabilities.”
Massengill said he was disappointed, however, at lawmakers’ inability to close a “loophole” on background checks for sales by unlicensed dealers at firearms shows, which would not have affected Cho. Also left to accomplish, he said, is the improvement of mental health privacy laws, which “need clarity.”
On the Virginia Tech campus, officials have created safety measures including locking dormitories around the clock and creating a campuswide emergency notification system.
But Tech, chief spokesman Larry Hincker said, is still fundamentally the same school it was before — still highly sought after and still a large university whose sense of community makes it feel much smaller.
“Certainly in the area of safety and vigilance, I believe the world changed for all of higher education on April 16,” he said. “All universities were affected by this. It just so happened that the tragedy befell our campus.”
