Blacksburg, Va. – Officials at Virginia Tech on Thursday defended their decision to allow the gunman in Monday’s rampage to return to campus after he was released from a psychiatric facility, even though they were aware of his troubled mental history and potential for violence.
Cho Seung-Hui, 23, the student who killed himself and 32 others, received outpatient psychiatric care after he was involuntarily hospitalized and reportedly suicidal in late 2005.
Christopher Flynn, director of the campus counseling service, said the university had played no role in monitoring Cho’s psychiatric treatment.
“The university is not part of the mental-health system nor the judiciary system, and we would not be the providers of mandatory counseling in this instance,” Flynn said at a news conference. “He had broken no law that we know of. The mental-health professionals were there to assess his safety, not particularly the safety of others.”
Also Thursday, a law-enforcement official who asked not to be identified said it now appeared that Cho fired more than 100 shots during his rampage. The official said investigators believed most of the 32 dead were shot a minimum of three times and that many of the 28 wounded were shot more than once.
In the weeks before the violence, the investigator said, Cho went to a shooting range in Blacksburg, spending an hour practicing with his weapons and buying more magazines there.
Investigators believe, based on interviews with an employee at the range, that Cho recorded part of his video statement in a van at the range. The employee described an Asian youth recording himself there.
Soon after the shootings, university officials and police were criticized for taking too long to alert students to the danger after Cho’s first two victims were killed in a dormitory.
On Wednesday, criticism increased after court documents, classmates and professors indicated that Cho had a long history of disturbing and menacing behavior.
On Thursday, President Bush joined the chorus of those questioning whether more could have been done to avert the tragedy, though he did not specifically mention university officials. “There have been warning signals (in the past) that if an adult, for example, had taken those signals seriously, perhaps tragedy could have been avoided,” Bush said at a town meeting in Tipp City, Ohio.
On Thursday, Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine appointed a panel to look into how authorities handled the tragedy.
University officials also said all of Cho’s student victims will be awarded degrees posthumously and that officials are outlining a way to let students complete their courses, possibly by allowing their work this semester to count as completed.
Police recovered a laptop computer and a cellphone that appeared to belong to Emily Hilscher, Cho’s first victim, according to a search warrant affidavit filed Thursday. They are investigating whether there were any links between Cho and Hilscher.
Of more than a dozen people injured in Monday’s shootings, 10 remained hospitalized.
The New York Times and The Asso- ciated Press contributed to this report.
