Response to first report of shooting is under scrutiny

As soon as the shooting stopped, the questions began.

Why did it take two hours for Virginia Tech to issue a campus-wide warning to students that the first two fatal shootings had occurred? And where were the police before the gunman started walking around Norris Hall picking off students and teachers with an almost casual precision?

One Virginia state law enforcement official said Monday evening that the university and its police department will need to explain their response. “The more facts that come out, the more questions arise,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.

Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell said his office probably would launch a review of the case.

While expressing confidence in the Virginia Tech and city of Blacksburg police, he said in an interview late Monday that “it is always going to be important to look at every level of detail in an investigation like this to see not only how it happened but whether there are any safety procedures that can be improved on in the future.

“Once the facts become known we can go back and determine what, if anything, could have been done differently.”

University President Charles Steger and the school’s police chief, Wendell Flinchum, said they and their employees did the best they could under confusing and trying circumstances. They said they would be reviewing their responses to see if mistakes were made, both in the notification of students and in the police response to the shooting rampage.

“We made the best decisions based on the information we had at the time,” Steger said at an evening news conference, the second of the day in which he was peppered with questions about his school’s handling of the incident.

By late Monday, another question emerged: Were the police off campus interviewing the wrong suspect when the shooter entered Norris Hall and began firing?

Campus police were still refusing to discuss a mysterious male “person of interest” that Flinchum confirmed was being interviewed off campus by his officers and the Blacksburg police department just before 10 a.m. The man was not a student at Virginia Tech, but he knew at least one of the victims in the initial shootings at the dorm.

Asked at the evening news conference if his officers were chasing the wrong suspect when the rampage started more than two hours after the first shootings, Flinchum said: “It may be, it may not be” the case.

Perhaps the most pressing question involved what the university did to alert the students and when. There were no public address announcements or other warnings on campus until at least two hours after the initial burst of gunfire had killed the two students in the dorm. That warning came in the form of an e-mail announcing the shootings. By then, the gunman, or someone else, was in the process of launching his deadly rampage in Norris.

Steger and Flinchum explained that authorities believed the dorm shootings were a domestic dispute, “an isolated incident,” and that the gunman most likely had fled the campus.

Police mobilized quickly, they said, entering the dorm and following up leads by 7:30 a.m. By 8:25, the school leadership was meeting to decide how best to notify students of the initial shooting, Steger said.

But it took another hour, until about 9:20, before the first e-mails went out, notifying the students of the homicide investigation and asking them to report any suspicious activity, Steger said Monday night.

About 20 minutes later, Steger and Flinchum said, the first 911 call went out alerting police to the shootings inside Norris. Within a minute, officers breached the doors to the building, which had been chained shut.

By then, Flinchum said, “the gunshots stopped.” Officers arriving on scene determined that the shooter had killed himself about 9:55 a.m.

Although police made some efforts to secure at least part of the campus before the second round of shooting started, the question remains why the entire campus wasn’t locked down right away.

Flinchum said that, even if authorities believed a gunman was loose on campus, “a lockdown doesn’t just happen.”

“I’m sure we’ll all sit down and talk about this incident,” he said, “and what we could have done better and what we did right.”