Virginia Tech: The Blame Game

It finally came.  The day everyone’s been waiting for since the dust settled around the events of April 16 at Virginia Tech.  The day someone could definitively say whose fault it was that Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and then himself.

In watching hours of news conferences and statements from the Governor, the members of the state panel investigating the shootings and Virginia Tech officials it’s clear that people want it to be about what happened on April 16th.

People want it to be about those two hours between the time Cho killed the two students in West Ambler Johnston Hall and when he opened fire in Norris Hall.

There’s a lesson here that has nothing to do with the Tech situation per se.  It has everything to do with human nature and news coverage.

Boiled down, the panel found that the University could have saved lives if they had issued a warning more quickly after the first two deaths were discovered in the dorm.

The University counters that faced with the circumstances of the moment, that solid, rational decisions were made.

Both sides seem in agreement that if the University had issued a warning—even with little or no information – that some of the people who were killed might have decided not to go to class and therefore survived.  The next thing almost everyone adds after debating “warning” vs. “non-warning,” is that Cho was not to be denied.  If he hadn’t killed the people in Norris Hall, he would have killed other people.

After so much news conference coverage, and point, counter-point, it’s like a puppy chasing its tail. Round and round.  You point at me and I’ll point back.

Here’s the lesson. Everyone wants this to be easy.  Viewers and readers want a nice tidy story they can digest.  Family members want something to explain their inexplicable loss.  Students and Alumni want to know the world’s take on their University.  Up or down they want it understandable.  The media wants to report something that fits in a newscast or on a page.  The butler did it with the candlestick in the kitchen.

I wish it was that easy. I wish the panel had found a motive and the missing clue to the killings.  Wouldn’t it have been nice if they put the case under a microscope and discovered all kinds of evidence that Cho was headed from the dorm, to the post office to mail his manifesto and then to Norris hall where he would chain the doors and open fire.

They did not.  There is no known motive.  No known connection between Cho and his initial victims.  No evidence that anyone knew what Cho was about to do, or that any amount of investigation would have set investigators on his tail in those first hours after the dorm shooting.

Sadly, the crux of this case lies in the almost-impossible-to-understand mental health system.  Even University Relations Vice President Larry Hincker, referred to the chapter on the mental health breakdown in the Panel’s report as, “impenetrable.”

I took him to mean it was hard to understand and difficult to follow.  Larry is no idiot and let’s face it, as the man about to face the world’s media, he was more motivated than most to get to the bottom of this report.

If he can’t decipher the legal restrictions and conflicts, you can bet the average television viewer isn’t going to sit through it before clicking over to Sports Center or the Food Network.  If you prefer the newspaper, ask yourself if you really want to digest the state’s tangled mental health policies with your coffee at 7 a.m.

So we in the media look for the quick answer, and people at the water cooler want to debate relatively easy, “who should have released what information, when.“  Not which section of the legal code should permit xyz agency to reveal personal psychological information to some clinic.

Despite all that, the angle that will have legs will be mental health.  President Charles Steger vowed today that Tech would not “sit on the sidelines” waiting for someone else to push for legislation that would make it easier for colleges and universities to identify people like Cho.

The State Panel found conclusively that the system failed.  A lot of people, all the way back to his elementary school knew that Cho was a potential time bomb, but no one at Virginia Tech knew.  Some people may have felt they should tell, but thought it was illegal to do so.

Virginia and other states are about to begin a great legal debate about where to draw the line between the privacy rights of mental health patients, and the need to protect society from future Cho’s.

Mental Health experts will argue that if we stigmatize people with mental health issues that they will either be treated unfairly by co-workers or fellow students, or that patients have a right to privacy.  They will further argue that if people fear they will be put in a mental hospital or that their conditions will be revealed, that they will not seek or accept treatment.  Those arguments have value.

On the other hand, admissions offices are going to want more information about who they are admitting into their colleges.  Ditto for employers a few years down the road.  Anyone up for hiring a “crazy” person?

So the real story will be where to draw the line between the public’s need for safety and the right to privacy Americans hold so dear.

The debate will be wrapped in the straight jacket that is the endless entanglement of red tape stemming from laws, agencies and other state officials.

It’s an important story.  More important that who did what at 9:15 a.m. on April 16th, but it won’t be interesting to talk about nor easy to tell.