Va. Tech panel gets gunman's records
Family relents on health files
RICHMOND -- A panel investigating the Virginia Tech massacre obtained university mental health records of the student gunman after weeks of negotiation with his family, officials said yesterday.
Federal privacy laws governing health and student information had prevented the panel from reviewing Seung-Hui Cho's records. Its chairman, W. Gerald Massengill, had said he would go to court if necessary to obtain them.
"This is not all the records that we will need," Massengill said, "but this is certainly some that we felt a strong need to take a look at."
Virginia Tech officials had been in negotiations with the family since the panel met in Blacksburg last month, using "some law enforcement organization" as a liaison, school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
Panel members -- who do not have the power to issue subpoenas to compel testimony or obtain records -- have expressed frustration with state and school officials, who have said they couldn't turn over Cho's medical, mental health, or scholastic records because federal privacy laws protect people even after death.
Cho killed himself on April 16 shortly after a shooting rampage in which he killed two students at a dormitory and then 30 other students and staff in a classroom building, Norris Hall. It was the worst mass shooting in modern US history.
Yesterday, university officials let members of the news media tour Norris Hall, which has been locked since Cho, armed with two handguns, fired 174 shots in nine minutes in four classrooms. Bullet holes have been patched, walls freshly painted off-white, and doors, ceilings, and floors replaced, leaving no visible evidence of the rampage or its victims.
"I almost didn't recognize my own classroom," said professor Bryan Cloyd, whose daughter, Austin, was killed. "It's changed that much." Cloyd toured the building last week.
University officials have said classes will no longer be held in the building. Next week it will reopen for engineering laboratories and offices.
Hincker said Cho's family gave permission for the school to release his mental health records late last week. Massengill said that they were delivered to the eight-member panel Wednesday but that he had not yet examined them. They will not be made public.
Cho was involuntarily sent to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Center near Radford for an overnight stay and mental evaluation in December 2005 after a female student reported receiving unwanted computer messages from him. A special justice found him to be a danger to himself, but not to others, and ordered him to receive outpatient treatment.
After a nearly 15-hour stay at St. Albans, Cho made an appointment with Virginia Tech's Cook Counseling Center, but there was no indication he received the treatment.
"I think these records should show a number of things, but certainly some of the questions that we had as to any counseling, any encounters he had had with the mental health community," said Massengill, a former Virginia State Police superintendent who oversaw the agency's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon and the 2002 Washington-area sniper attacks.
Massengill said he still wants access to other records.
"I think it's important that we learn as much about Cho as we can from his childhood on up," he said. "His high school years are of particular importance to us."
Classmates have said Cho was teased at affluent Westfield High School in Chantilly apparently because of his shyness and mumbling . In a video diatribe Cho mailed to NBC News on the day of the shootings, he ranted against rich "brats."
Governor Timothy M. Kaine has asked the panel to finish before school resumes in the fall. 