Report faults response in Virginia Tech shootings

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) Virginia Tech University officials should have been quicker to notify students and faculty about two killings on campus hours before the deadliest shooting rampage in modern US history, according to a state report obtained by The New York Times.

Criticising the university's response yesterday, the state panel convened by Gov. Tim Kaine, said that lives could have been saved if officials had issued an alert or canceled classes after student Seung-Hui Cho shot his first two victims in a dormitory on the morning of April 16.

Two hours later, Cho turned up on the other side of campus where he killed 30 other students and teachers, methodically gunning them down in a classroom building.

The report, scheduled to be released today, said university police concluded prematurely that their initial lead in the first shootings was good. Police had pursued another suspect they believed was no longer on the campus.

''They did not take sufficient action with what might happen if the initial lead proved erroneous,'' said the report by the eight-member panel, which included former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

It concluded that a campuswide lock-down after the first two shootings would have been impractical and likely ineffective in stopping Cho, who ''had started on a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge.'' A Virginia Tech review last week said the university should step up counseling for troubled students and monitor those who may turn violent.

But the state report said Virginia Tech officials missed numerous indications of Cho's problems because they misinterpreted federal privacy laws as forbidding any exchange of a student's mental health information.

The report found campus police knew of Cho's history of bizarre behavior and his stay at a mental health facility but the information never reached university officials working with troubled students.

Despite what school officials believed, federal privacy laws would have allowed for the communication of some information about his problems to local, state and campus police, the report said.

Although Cho's motives remained unclear, the report traced his fantasies to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in which two students killed 13 people.

Cho wrote in a paper in an English class at school some years earlier that he ''wanted to repeat Columbine,'' and later received counseling and medication, the report said.

The Virginia governor's office could not immediately be reached for comment.

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