Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said Thursday that some family members of victims of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre don’t want to reopen an investigation of the mass shooting, casting further doubt that a panel will reconvene to address a controversy over the gunman’s missing mental health records.
Two days after a coalition of victims’ relatives and survivors of the April 16 shooting called on the Virginia Tech review panel to revisit its initial report, Kaine said on Richmond’s WRVA radio station that other family members “are saying that frankly they don’t want to go through it again.”
“So I am dealing with a situation where some of the family members are saying I don’t really want to go through a new investigation of this, we know who the perpetrator is,” Kaine said.
State police are investigating why a mental health file on gunman Cho Seung-Hui, who shot and killed 32 students and faculty at the Blacksburg campus before committing suicide, had been removed from the school’s counseling center a year before the shooting. Dr. Robert Miller, the Cook Counseling Center’s former director, said he accidentally took the file home when he left the job in 2006. He has since returned the document.
“Before saying the fact of the file means it all needs to be reinvestigated, let’s look at the file and see what it says,” Kaine said. “The file might suggest that some of the material in the report was wrong, or it might suggest that there may be no corrections to be made.”
The families of slain students Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson, who did not sign onto the call for reconvening the Virginia Tech panel, have filed lawsuits against the state and Virginia Tech. Attorney Robert Hall, who represents the families, said the absence of Cho’s file was important when he was “on the radar screen as a behavioral issue in his English classes” in 2006 and school officials couldn’t access the mental health records.
