Tech Commission Will Convene Today
By Michael Hardy, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.
May 10–The gubernatorial panel investigating the massacre at Virginia Tech meets for the first time today in Richmond. The meeting will start at 10:30 a.m. in House Room C of the General Assembly Building, located off Capitol Square.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will kick off the meeting and outline his hopes for the eight-member panel, which includes law-enforcement and mental-health experts. Tom Ridge, the former Homeland Security director who was governor of Pennsylvania, is one of Kaine’s appointees.
The commission’s schedule sets aside 30 minutes, beginning at 2:15 p.m., for members of the public to provide comments.
Maj. Robert Kemmler, a deputy director of the Virginia State Police, will brief panelists on the process for obtaining a weapon in the state.
Kaine has said the commission’s chief focus should be on the background and possible motivations of Seung-Hui Cho, 23, a Tech student who killed 32 at the Blacksburg campus before fatally shooting himself.
Additionally, the panel will consider how university and mental-health officials handled Cho. It is uncertain whether the commission, which lacks subpoena power, will be able to obtain Cho’s mental records because of federal and state privacy laws.
The commission also will investigate the law-enforcement response to the April 16 rampage and establish a timeline for the events before and after the killings.
Kaine has told the panel he wants it to recommend procedures that colleges and universities in Virginia and nationally could establish to prevent and respond to dangerous threats. The governor wants the recommendations by the beginning of the school year in late August.
Yesterday, Gerald Massengill, former superintendent of the state police, met with police officials about their investigations.
Col. W. Steven Flaherty, of the state police, and Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum briefed Massengill and staffers from TriData, an Arlington County firm hired by the governor to assist the commission. The firm specializes in such reviews, having conducted one on the Columbine High School shootings in suburban Denver in 1999 and Virginia’s response to Hurricane Isabel in 2003.
“They’re very informal meetings,” Massengill said yesterday. He said the purpose of the conversation was to help the panel develop a timeline and to identify the key people who should be interviewed.
Massengill and Kaine have promised that the panel’s meetings will be as public as possible but reminded that some sensitive discussions would be confidential. As examples, they cited discussions with police, court officials and mental-health practitioners.
“What comes out of those meetings will be made public in some fashion,” Massengill said.
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