The Virginia Tech community doesn’t need to go through this pain alone. The nation will reach out, as it has before.
Only eight years ago, it was the folks in and around Columbine High School who were searching for answers amid heartbreak and confusion. No handbook exists for dealing with these tragedies, but Columbine was the catalyst for sweeping changes at schools across the country in terms of safety, bullying and how troubled students are handled.
Indeed, there are lessons learned from Columbine that could be helpful in Virginia.
Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter has extended an offer to Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. Ritter was Denver district attorney at the time of the 1999 shootings and served on Gov. Bill Owens’ Columbine Review Task Force. He can offer Virginia the benefits of his painfully learned experience.
“Colorado still struggles beneath the weight of the Columbine High School shootings, … we in Colorado can provide you with guidance and advice in the days ahead. I believe we had particular experiences in dealing with the witnesses and victim family members that may inform you as you go forward,” he wrote to Kaine. He was referring to methods for interviewing witnesses without re-traumatizing them.
Just two weeks ago, one of the lessons from Columbine was unaccountably placed under lock and key when federal Judge Lewis Babcock ordered that depositions given by the parents of the killers be sealed for 20 years. By his reckoning, their privacy trumped public interest in the documents.
“That is why we were fighting so hard to get that information – because we need to know what was going on inside the heads of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,” said Delbert Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado, who wanted to study the depositions.
Common warning signs between the two mass killings have already emerged. At Virginia Tech, the suspect’s prose in a creative writing course was so disturbing he was referred to a school counselor. At Columbine, Dylan Klebold had written a macabre English paper about murder while Eric Harris created a violent website that was brought to the attention of Jefferson County sheriff’s investigators more than a year before the shootings. Little was done.
Attention to the lessons of Columbine has served to thwart other such attacks over the past eight years. Perhaps the most important is vigilance. It can’t be underscored enough. We can’t avert all tragedies, but being alert, and notifying authorities when something is amiss, is a responsibility that falls to each one of us.
