Jury finds negligence in delayed response

Despite losing lawsuits to families of Va. Tech shooting victims, Steger sticks with story

It has been nearly five years since the deadliest campus massacre in the U.S. took place at Virginia Tech (VT) on April 16, 2007, leaving 33 people dead, including the shooter. President of Virginia Tech Charles Steger was reminded of the tragic event two weeks ago when he testified against two victim’s families for a wrongful death lawsuit.

The focus of the trial stressed that VT officials should have acted sooner by alerting the campus of the shooting immediately after it was reported to them. Officials waited over two hours to send a campus alert.

According to USA Today, the initial alert did not indicate that a gunman might still be at large. If it had, victims’ parents argued in the court hearing, they could have prevented the remaining 47 victims from being shot. The jury found the school negligent and awarded $4 million to two victims’ families.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, a previous settlement of $11 million was split between 24 families, excluding other disbursements of $1.9 million set aside in a hardship fund. The state argued that the university did all it could with the information provided at the time. Steger, along with other university officials, said they initially believed the first two shootings were an act of domestic violence, based on what police investigators told them.

According to the New York Times, the Prydes and the Petersons were the only families of the shootings that were eligible to sue. Both families turned down their portion of the $11 million settlement with the state.

“When you know that something is right you’re not deterred from your course,” Peterson said in the New York Times. “We wanted the truth from the very beginning and we got it. All I know is today we got what we wanted.”

Steger responded to the outcome in a letter, writing, “The heinous crimes committed by Seung-Hui Cho were an unprecedented act of violence that no one could have foreseen.”

“I tried my best,” Steger said in his response.

There is absolutely no doubt that a concerned family member who lost a loved one during the massacre would not want some explanation as to how the situation was handled. Steger makes a valid point in that there was no way one could foresee such an act.

In hindsight, waiting over two hours to alert the campus of a shooting that killed two people in a dormitory was not the most effective way of handling this situation. Of course, we must leave room for understanding that it’s probably not as easy to strategically analyze the situation, much less react accordingly, as we might think.

However, there are consequences for everything, and Virginia Tech is still suffering five years later.