Tech on lockdown prior to shootings, lawyers say

BY DAVID RESS
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
Published: June 17, 2008

Some Virginia Tech officials put their buildings on lockdown minutes before Seung Hui Cho locked the exits to Norris Hall and gunned down 30 students and staff on April 16, 2007.

Lawyers for the families of several victims released e-mails today showing at least one key office went on lockdown after Cho shot dead two students at a residence hall but before he attacked Norris Hall—even as the school’s top officials said they saw no need to lockdown the entire campus.

Virginia Tech officials have defended their decision not to lock down the campus.

The lawyers released the e-mails shortly after Richmond Circuit Court Judge Theodore Markow approved an $11 million settlement with families of 28 Virginia Tech students and staff who died in the massacre and 18 people who were seriously wounded by Cho’s rampage.

The lawyers also said a draft of the campus-wide alert issued after the first two shootings disclosed that at least one student died, but that the language was watered down when the release was issued.

They said one professor called her husband about 8:30 that morning—after the first two shootings but before the Norris Hall attack—to say her building appeared to be on a “quasi-lockdown.”

In the worst massacre on a U.S. college campus, Cho killed 32 people and then killed himself.