Lucinda Roy, the English professor who tutored the killer of 32 VA Tech students and faculty members, is still haunted by not only the day of the massacre but by the events that lead up to the tragic day filled our nation with horror. Dr. Roy tutored Seung Hui Cho privately after he was removed from his poetry class. He has been removed because he frightened the other students and another professor with his writing.
Dr. Roy was so troubled by Cho’s writing that she urged him to seek counseling and wrote numerous emailed to officials on campus alerting them to his behavior and asking for help.
According to the Washington Post:
She goes through it all in painstaking detail in what she calls a memoir-critique, “No Right to Remain Silent.” It’s a book she began writing just months after the massacre in an effort not only to understand what had happened, but also to take the Virginia Tech administration to task for failing to communicate openly about it and to sound a warning to other schools that unless they begin to take troubled students seriously and find ways to intervene earlier, a Virginia Tech most assuredly can and will happen again.
In the video, she talks about her own feelings of guilt for not being able to somehow intervene in time to have prevented this horrible tragedy.
Not to belabor the tragedy at Tech, but there are some serious issues in this state with how we deal with mental illness. Why did Tech ignore the warnings of Dr. Roy? Why did Fairfax County Schools not warn officials at Tech about these troubled students? Why was Cho not required to go to counseling? Where do our privacy rights end when someone potentially could simply go off the deep end and kill many people or themselves? This discussion was begun on another thread.
I think we have several ideas on a collision course. Have we changed our gun purchasing laws? Has Tech changed its rules as they pertain to student counseling? Has federal or state law changed laws about privacy? Has the VA General Assembly addressed any of these issues?
Professor Roy’s story is extremely haunting and frightening.
