Two families have each been awarded $4 million dollars for the wrongful deaths of their children during the VA Tech massacre on April 16, 2007. The jury ruled that administration and the campus police did not send out an early enough warning of two shootings on campus. The school argued that they thought the shootingdeaths were isolated incidents.
The school has already filed an appeal. The other victims’s families settled out of court.
I am simply not sure how I feel about this jury award. I just don’t know. 31 more people were killed within the next 3,5 hours after the first shooting. Had students been warned and gone in to lock down, could lives have been saved?
Read more at the Richmond Times Dispatch.
I guess $2 mil dries a lot of tears. A far more preferable outcome to me would be better initial screening and care for mental health patients, and a school that is not so rabbit-scared of discrimination lawsuits that it fails to take action against students who might pose a threat to others.
I expect that people who have lost a child wouldn’t be that cavalier about it. I don’t think any amount of money dries tears.
I understand what you are saying after I get past your initial shock jock statement. However, the fact remains that the schools often ARE sued for things like that. I don’t think that is right but it happens all the time.
As for the initial screening and care of mental health patients…we run into the same problem there. Discrimination and HIPAA law violations. What if Fairfax County had been allowed, by law, to inform Tech of Cho’s mental health evaluations? I expect that there would be 33 more people alive today associated with this massacre. Of course there is no way to know that for sure but we, as a society, shouldn’t have to always ‘wait intil someone does something.’
“Had students been warned and gone into lock down, could lives have been saved?”
In this case, I don’t think so. Remember that Tech had already been through a lock down the previous semester and they initially thought this was an isolated boy/girl friend issue. So the question stands about the two hour gap, who they thought they were looking for and where and then whether Cho might have otherwise been locked in somewhere else. What they thought was a crime of passion was in fact a planned attack. A lock down with a crazy person already in the building and intending to do harm is worse. As it was, the shooter came into classrooms and was prevented from entering others. In a lockdown they all would have been in the hallway and grouped looking out the window. I don’t know how it could have been worse, but maybe. To me the only real question is whether under a lock down with Cho in some other building, would he still have attacked. Because he had already killed, I tend to think so.
I don’t agree with the lawsuit. The intentions of these two families as compared to all the others who were hurt or were just there and what they think they proved are beyond me. It was not a lawsuit for compensation, that was a done deal. They would have gotten a significant piece of the $11 million set aside for that purpose. It was a lawsuit to get more. It was also a lawsuit that re-opened real wounds in the Hokie community.
@Blue
Your last paragraph states pretty much how I feel. Actually, it states exactly how I feel about the law suit.
@Blue,
You have made some interesting comments. I still am not sure how I feel. Money doesn’t bring back a loved one. Taking money punishes though. I don’t think Tech should be punished.
At the end of the day, they did a pretty darn good job considering what they were dealing with. If they had had hind sight, which is always 20/20, of course they would have done better. Give anyone a crystal ball and a little head start and things will always go better.
I don’t mean to be dismissive but how do institutions ever prepare for the unthinkable? There can’t be a protcol for every scene some nut case comes up with.
@Moon-howler
I think you just hit the nail on the head on this lawsuit. An institution like Tech should be expected to take reasonable precautions and have reasonable systems in place, but cannot be expected to invest millions of taxpayer dollars to prevent a one chance in a million maybe it could happen. That is like buying insurance for stock market losses upon the first alien landing from space. They had a lockdown protocol with cell phones, sirens and everything. It was the facts of the case that were not clear.