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VT Victims' Families Want to Reopen Investigation
A group including parents of many of the 32 people killed by student gunman Seung-Hui Cho issued a statement Tuesday calling on Gov. Tim Kaine to reopen a state panel's review. The group also includes people hurt in the shooting.
The statement follows disclosure last week that the former director of the university's counseling center found missing mental health records for Cho at his home.
The families say they "cannot comprehend" how Dr. Miller failed to remember he had the Cho files, with all the media attention and the intense search for that information, back in 2007.
Earlier on Tuesday, Governor Kaine was already talking about taking another look at the state report. "We are going to re open the factual narrative of that report and look at any information that has come in since the report was done in September of 2007 to determine if corrections need to be made, and yes the contents of this file are going to be examined very carefully," Kaine said on WTOP radio.
Kaine said he wants the full story of how Dr. Robert Miller took treatment records of Seung-Hui Cho as he departed as the campus counseling center director in 2006.
On his monthly radio show on WTOP in Washington, D.C., Kaine said the review panel's professional staff was already updating the report to correct factual and typos.
Reconvening the appointed members of the panel would be a problem, he said, because all were volunteers when they served two years ago. Former state police Superintendent Gerald Massengill headed the panel.
Cho committed suicide after killing students and faculty members in a dormitory and classroom building on April 16, 2007 -- the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history.
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Statement from Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech:
"The decision to involve the Massengill Panel in future deliberations belongs to Governor Kaine. At this point, the only new information is the discovery of the counseling center records. We believe that their contents should drive a decision. It is for that reason that we strongly urge the Cho estate to approve release of the files. It is important to note that the Massengill Panel provided sound recommendations on mental health, operations, and physical security for Virginia Tech and Virginia college campuses."
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