posted
Why is not common practice to shut down a school when a shooting/murder occurs? The second the first incident happened why weren't all classes canceled and all students told to go lock themselves in their dorm rooms?
Especially when the shooter's location is unknown. As I understand it, they thought the shooter had left campus. What led them to this assumption?
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Why would you want the students frantically running around campus with a gunman on the loose? If anything, a lockdown should have kept everyone exactly where they were.
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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posted
No, I don't remember hearing about one but the school did send out emails and called some houses.
Posts: 160 | Registered: Nov 2006
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posted
I think the emails (urging lockdown procedures) went out a little less than 2 hours after the first incident. Email isn't a very reliable form of messaging either, if you want instant results, so I would hope that our schools' ability to send messages to phones etc. will improve sometime soon.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote: Originally posted by Strider: The second the first incident happened why weren't all classes canceled and all students told to go lock themselves in their dorm rooms?
It has been reported that many students were already in classes or on their way to classes. I don't know if you have ever been in a college class when something happens, but I know from experience ( in my Spanish class at UMASS on 9/11) that teachers and students alike hear nothing during the class, especially on a large campus. We heard nothing about 9/11 until we left the classroom at the end of class - even though all classes had been cancelled an hour before(the class lasted an hour and a half).
As to the part about telling the students to go lock themselves in their dorm rooms; sounds good in theory, but have you ever tried to tell a teenager or a college student what to do? They tend to rebel even if it is for their own good. Multiply that by the thousands of students that attend that school. Do you really think they would all obey? Not likely even given the circumstances.
Reports from several students said that there was a lockdown and that they were prevented from leaving the buildings they were in for a couple of hours.
Posts: 325 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Why is not common practice to shut down a school when a shooting/murder occurs?
My guess is, the same reason why it is not common practice to shut down an entire city when a shooting occurs in one building within that city. It may be safer, but it is extremely difficult to shut down a 20,000 student campus - which is in effect like a small city in itself.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
Even an automated phone warning could have helped. Something along the lines of: "Be advised that there has been a shooting on campus this morning, and the gunman has not yet been apprehended. We urge you to stay inside and lock your doors until this crisis has passed."
Even with people disregarding the message, if you can even get one person to stay in their dorm who would have otherwise been shot and killed, isn't it worth it?
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: [QB] Why is not common practice to shut down a school when a shooting/murder occurs? The second the first incident happened why weren't all classes canceled and all students told to go lock themselves in their dorm rooms?
The first incident happened 45 minutes before class - when I was at Tech, I was either in my car or waiting for the bus 45 minutes before I had to be in class, otherwise I'd be late. I'd imagine it's worse now the way the town and University have gotten built up.
Off the top of my head, I can probably think of at least 15 roads onto campus, and there are a lot more I can't come up with considering it's a 2600 acre campus spread on two sides of a major highway and nestled into a town. There are also close to 100 buildings all over those 2600 acres. How are two relatively small police departments going to be able to lock down a campus of that size while dealing with initial scene?
I'm also listening to some lady on the tv getting all up in arms about how VT & Blacksburg PD should have realized they were overwhelmed and called in State and Federal assistance a lot earlier. Who's to say they didn't? Particularly considering that Blacksburg's not really close to anything and it would take a while for any non-local law enforcement to deploy.
And even if they had been able to lock down the campus, should they also have locked down Blacksburg? Particularly since, as far as I know, a killer coming back in the way this one did is unprecedented? And considering that West AJ is maybe four or five blocks from downtown BBurg, who's to say he wouldn't have gone there and shot people on mainstreet if he was thwarted by a lock down?
As to the issue of email being unreliable, as I understand it, the Administration also sent messages to all phones. But again, I have to say that when I was a student, I'd pretty much roll out of bed and head to class on a Monday morning. Maybe I'd check time and temperature, but certainly not my email or phone messages.
And I'm certainly not trying to give anyone a free pass on this. It's entirely possible that the police and the administration could have done things differently and somehow prevented at least part of the tragedy. But I don't think a lock down was possible and even if it was, I don't think it would have helped that much.
I'm devastated by this. Although I'm no longer a student and no longer live there, I am still a part of the VT community and frequent visitor. Even though I don't personally know any of the victims who have been identified, they are still very much part of my family.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Jan 2002
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quote:My guess is, the same reason why it is not common practice to shut down an entire city when a shooting occurs in one building within that city. It may be safer, but it is extremely difficult to shut down a 20,000 student campus - which is in effect like a small city in itself.
This is almost certainly the reason. How do you lock down 20,000 people?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:August 21, 2006 An escaped inmate wanted in the shooting deaths of a hospital guard and a sheriff's deputy...prompted Virginia Tech to cancel classes...and lock down the campus.
The killings occurred near but off campus.
But apparently having two unarmed civilians, a student and an advisor murdered on campus isn't important enough to merit informing students&faculty that a killer may be loose on campus. Kept hush-hush cuz it might "unnecessarily harm the school's reputation"? Two separate murderers? Or did the police grab the first Asian-looking male after the first two murders? then just assume that he had to be the killer because he looked Asian?
quote:My guess is, the same reason why it is not common practice to shut down an entire city when a shooting occurs in one building within that city. It may be safer, but it is extremely difficult to shut down a 20,000 student campus - which is in effect like a small city in itself.
This is almost certainly the reason. How do you lock down 20,000 people?
And do you lock it down after the first incident? Aside from the logistics of how can you lock down that campus, should you lock it down after what may have appeared to be a typical murder, aside from the fact that it took place on a campus?
People keep calling them the 'first shooting' and the second shooting, as if they were the same type of situation. However, based on the description I would call the first incident a murder which (in the 2 hour timeframe they had to investigate it) wouldn't be a clue-in that there was about to be a Columbine type incident a couple hours later.
Heck, the guy who did the crime probably didn't even plan a shooting rampage at the time he committed the first murder. Sounds like he just wanted to kill his girlfriend and then the guy who got her pregnant. Who knows though, I could be wrong about that.
Posts: 1412 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote: Heck, the guy who did the crime probably didn't even plan a shooting rampage at the time he committed the first murder. Sounds like he just wanted to kill his girlfriend and then the guy who got her pregnant. Who knows though, I could be wrong about that.
Where is everyone getting this stuff? They've just barely ID'd the shooter and I haven't seen anything to suggest any kind of motive, but I've seen variations on this scenario since the first I've heard of the story. Where's this cr*p coming from anyway?
Posts: 2069 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
One thing that's gotten touched on here, but still hasn't been talked about as much as I think it deserves is the seperation between college dorms and the college itself. I'm not certain that VT is the same as Purdue on this, but our dorm system is largely independant of the actual university, so even if the officials in charge of the dorm(system) decided within the 2 hours that it would make sense to "shut down campus" (whatever that is actually supposed to mean) they would still have had to contact appropriate university officials, discuss things with them and then figure out a way to issue such an announcement (which I'd say many/most universities don't have the capability to do).
So even assuming there was reason to believe right at 7:15 that the rest of the campus was in danger there likely would be no way to ward people off before the second incident occurred.
Similar to what other people mentioned with regards to 9/11: I didn't hear about it until hours after both towers were destroyed, and that was mostly pure chance of me ending up in a computer lab between classes and someone iming me. There was every possibility that I wouldn't have heard about it until well into that evening if my schedule had been slightly different.
As for many of the other points about how people should have been able to figure out it was him and stopped things earlier: We live in what is basically a civilized and free society. One of the dangers of this freedom and civilization is that we don't immediately think "murderer" when we see a college student walking around on campus with a backpack or a coat etc, and we don't immediately think "well a crime has been committed, this means that there's likely to be a murder-suicide rampage in a few minutes." If we were conditioned to be looking for this kind of thing then we would all be living in a state of perpetual fear...
I can tell you right now that it wouldn't be all that hard to carry in enough weaponry to do much more damage than this and not raise a single eyebrow until the mayhem was completely underway. But in order to make that impossible, we would have to infringe so much on personal freedoms that it wouldn't be worth protecting that society...
Posts: 1038 | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:On Monday morning, campus police at Virginia Tech were faced with the discovery of two people shot to death in a residence hall. There apparently were no witnesses to this crime who could supply officers with the killer’s identity or even his description, so detectives began, as indeed they should, by investigating the victims’ known associates. When they learned that Emily Hilscher, the female victim, had a boyfriend who had taken her to a shooting range, it was only logical for the officers to try to locate and question him. It was during that questioning that the second, more deadly attack occurred.
Up to the moment the killer opened fire in Norris Hall, the police had absolutely no reason to believe they were dealing with anything more than a horrific but isolated murder case, one in which the suspect’s identity, whereabouts, and even description were unknown.
posted
It just occurred to me that the first shooting was probably a practice run to show himself he could do it and to commit himself enough that in his eyes he woudl HAVE to mail the package and go through with the rest.
posted
I'm of two minds about the broadcast. Personally, I wish they hadn't broadcast it particularly with all the accompanying promotions but at the same time I understand that it's part of a story and that's what journalism about.
What I wish NBC had done is talk about it or perhaps make a transcript available or if they really felt the need to broadcast parts of the videos make it so that individuals would have to put some effort into it finding and watching it (like broadcasting it at times when people who didn't want to see it wouldn't stumble across it; unobstrusive links on websites instead of bright, blinding 'watch me now' links, etc). But none of that would have gotten NBC the high ratings they got yesterday.
I've read a story or two this morning about how different papers are dealing with the photos and everything else, and I greatly appreciate that there are some papers that chose to either not publish photos or to bury them inside rather than put enlarged photos of the killer on the front page.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Jan 2002
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quote:August 21, 2006 An escaped inmate wanted in the shooting deaths of a hospital guard and a sheriff's deputy...prompted Virginia Tech to cancel classes...and lock down the campus.
The killings occurred near but off campus.
But apparently having two unarmed civilians, a student and an advisor murdered on campus isn't important enough to merit informing students&faculty that a killer may be loose on campus. Kept hush-hush cuz it might "unnecessarily harm the school's reputation"? Two separate murderers? Or did the police grab the first Asian-looking male after the first two murders? then just assume that he had to be the killer because he looked Asian?
You must certainly have a faulty memory. The school was shut down during the previous incident, but it was not "locked down" in the sense that one couldn't move about freely. First, the reports were that the killer was heading in the direction of the school, so the police's natural reaction would be to create an environment where the killer could be apprehended while not immediately becoming a danger to bystanders. So campus police had students remain in buildings, city police cordoned off the roads, and other law enforcement who were already in pursuit continued to follow the killer's trail.
The difference in this scenario was that it was not relatively well known who the killer was at first, and as such there was not a definitive trail. Once the police had a suspect, they wanted to be able to approach the suspect without them panicking and becoming desperate. Locking down the school directly after the shooting would have done so, having the school plan to close that day would have been standard procedure in a double murder. They already locked the doors on the building and were questioning anyone they could for leads, so it isn't like they were doing nothing at all. This case took the deadly turn it did not because of the reaction to the initial shootings, but because the initial shooter decided on his own to go on a completely different killing track that was essentially disconnected from the original two murders.
Typical police procedure is to start at the initial crime scene and work outward in concentric circles, unless some information comes into play to divert more attention right away. Until Cho began shooting others, their procedure seemed to be pretty standard from all reports I have read, and that procedure is what normally leads to arrests. There was no indication that there would be more shootings until more shootings began to take place.
Posts: 1170 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk: How do you "lock down" a 2600 acre campus anyway?
Close the buildings and assign people to watch for people exiting and entering buildings. Close off the roads going in and out. From there it becomes a matter of cross sectioning the area and having a team check every section methodically.
It can be done, but is time consuming, costly, and requires a very good reason to do so. Just to note, the Morva case did not include all of those steps I mentioned above for a true lockdown.
Posts: 1170 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk: How do you "lock down" a 2600 acre campus anyway?
Close the buildings and assign people to watch for people exiting and entering buildings. Close off the roads going in and out. From there it becomes a matter of cross sectioning the area and having a team check every section methodically.
It can be done, but is time consuming, costly, and requires a very good reason to do so. Just to note, the Morva case did not include all of those steps I mentioned above for a true lockdown.
Agreed, and it also requires a great deal of manpower, and in this case it might just have resulted in the killer being locked into a different building with different students.
Also, in the Morva case, there was a lot more warning. Morva escaped custody in the middle of the night, and although the deputy was not killed until around 7am, law enforcement was already mobilized and at least realized that Morva could be heading towards VT. And the lockdown didn't occur until at least three hours after the deputy was shot. So even if VT had tried or been able to institute a lockdown on Monday, the chances are it wouldn't have been complete until it was already too late.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
Precisely. With Morva, they were locking him out. With this case, even if there was evidence that there would be more shooting (there was not), they would have been locking him in with more victims.
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