Failings abound in Cho response

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: August 31, 2007

Hindsight in the wake of tragedy can be as distasteful as it is common. It's easy for those of us far removed from a situation to dissect others' failings when we have the benefit of knowing the results beforehand.

That said, it's become almost impossible to give Virginia Tech officials the benefit of the doubt in the bizarre case of Seung-Hui Cho. A report released Wednesday night by a state panel on Cho's April 16 rampage raises again the seemingly endless series of red flags ignored by Tech officials.

Some details — such as disturbingly violent plays and essays — we've heard before. Others are new and alarming, especially the revelations that Cho last year wrote a fictional account of a campus shooting and that he had a long history of mental illness, including homicidal thoughts.

The writings cited in the report taken separately might understandably have been dismissed as an anomaly, the mere product of an immature mind. Taken together, they paint an ominous picture of a young man on the edge and in desperate need of help. Tech officials were blind to the obvious.

They say privacy restrictions prevented them from sharing information about Cho with the people who conceivably could have intervened — his parents, authorities or other people on campus. Soon, politicians will tell us a new law needs to be written to ensure that would-be killers are monitored by police or other government agencies. We're sure to hear more about gun laws, too.

But government formulas won't provide the common sense missing in Cho's case from the beginning. Enough eyes at Tech fell on his twisted ramblings to see that something was wrong. Yet no one bothered to call Cho's parents to discuss his troubled state of mind.

That's where efforts to halt Cho's descent into darkness should have started. In another day in America, wise educators recognized alerting parents as the first order of business when young people wandered astray. Some might consider sharing a student's violent writings with his parents a violation of his privacy. We think it just makes good sense, and it's the same thing most of us would want if the case involved our children.

For this and other failings, families want to see Virginia Tech officials held accountable, starting with university President Charles Steger. After reading the report summarizing the litany of lapses, we can't help but agree.