On the day that Columbine came to college, Ali Haskins awoke to an e-mail that said: “A shooting incident occurred at West Ambler Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating. The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious.”
As Haskins, a 23-year-old senior engineering student, looked out her dorm window, she saw roughly 100 people sprint across a field from a classroom building.
“I made the connection that there was probably another shooting,” Haskins said. “There was mass hysteria. People didn’t know where the gunshots were coming from.”
Monday’s chaos at Virginia Tech put everyone through an emotional wringer. With at least 33 killed and 15 injured, the massacre far surpassed Columbine. It was the bloodiest shooting in U.S. history.
The bulk of the slaughter – 30 dead, plus their murderer – came in Norris Hall, a classroom building. There, the lone gunman apparently killed wantonly before apparently killing himself.
A few hours after Haskins watched fellow students running for their lives, she again looked out her dorm window. Police, she said, were stringing yellow crime-scene tape around a building where, in years past, she went to class.
For Haskins and her classmates, another layer of innocence was lost.
“You’re never truly safe anywhere,” she said in what has become a mantra for America’s young.
“It was good to get the phone call that he was alive,” my friend Steve Corneliussen told me tearfully.
Steve was talking about his son Danny, a recent Virginia Tech graduate who still lives near the campus.
“It’s scary,” Danny Corneliussen said Monday. “It seems like these things are happening more and more.”
Monday’s madness – innocent victims gunned down by a guy in a suicidal rage – sure sounded like Columbine. But answering security questions raised by the Virginia Tech slaughter may be harder.
One obvious screw-up appears.
The e-mail sent to Haskins and other Tech students at 9:26 a.m. never mentioned that the dorm shooting two hours earlier resulted in two murders. The e-mail didn’t say the killer had not been caught. The e-mail didn’t cancel classes.
“That makes me really mad,” said Haskins. “They knew this person had killed. They knew they didn’t have him in custody.”
The second e-mail Haskins got – the one telling students that a gunman was on the loose and to stay away from windows – came at 9:50 a.m., five minutes after Haskins watched folks fleeing Norris Hall.
It was clearly too little, too late.
That said, college campuses, especially public college campuses, are by nature open. Anyone can walk freely into almost any classroom building. Most dormitory lobbies are open during the day.
College is supposed to be like that. Trying to lock down a college campus the size of, say, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University or the Auraria campuses of Metro State College, the Community College of Denver and CU-Denver would be incredibly difficult in a single moment of crisis. Restricting access on an ongoing basis would be virtually impossible.
“We have a police force,” said CSU spokesman Brad Bohlander. “But we’re talking (a campus of) 1 square mile, with 30,000 people coming and going each day.”
Unsecured firearms are everywhere. But so, it seems, are people willing to use them to settle almost any score.
The Virginia Tech massacre came four days short of the eighth anniversary of Columbine. It’s as if we learned nothing. Beyond sane gun control, Americans must look at their reliance on violence.
Our society is sick. And when America’s college students take more casualties in a day than America’s fighting forces in Iraq take in a week, this country teeters on the verge of terminal illness.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
