If this is true it's inexcusable.

If it's true, Va. Tech. is going to be up to its eyeballs in lawsuits.

According to a student on Time.com, they were locked down in their dorm at 8 a.m. The lockdown was lifted for some reason and then the guy struck a second time.

I think a 2+ hour delay of email notification is inexcusable, but I also think it's totally plausible at a college campus. I could see that happening here: bureaucracy, bad communication, early morning, people authorized to make decisions between their home and office...

I have been thinking for a couple of hours that it would be really hard to notify everybody and lock down the campus if something like that happened here at 7am. I mean, a lot of people would be asleep until 10 minutes before a 9:30 class.

The Roanoke Times has some eyewitness reports: [link]

god that's horrifying

If it's true, Va. Tech. is going to be up to its eyeballs in lawsuits.

Trying not to sound callous, but indeed, the potential liability is staggering. If this happened at a company, it would probably fold.

If it's true, Va. Tech. is going to be up to its eyeballs in lawsuits.

Trying not to sound callous, but indeed, the potential liability is staggering.

Yeah, I didn't mean to be callous -- I was just thinking, what if I had a kid there, what if I had a kid there who was killed? That 2-hour window makes it seem like the second shootings could have been avoided.

I think a 2+ hour delay of email notification is inexcusable, but I also think it's totally plausible at a college campus.

Yeah. When I was in college, the amount of time between the "official" time that the school decided "there's a hurricane coming, classes are canceled, everyone get out" and the time that anyone outside the administration got the message was sometimes more than three hours.

I'm trying to take into account this is a college campus. It's too early to speculate on how things were done or not done.

It looks like they were aware of the first shooting and investigating when the second shooting occurred. There have also been a rash of bomb threats on campus this week so that may have contributed to the lack of timely action.

I can't imagine the logistics of locking down a 25,000 student campus.

I have been thinking for a couple of hours that it would be really hard to notify everybody and lock down the campus if something like that happened here at 7am. I mean, a lot of people would be asleep until 10 minutes before a 9:30 class.

I dunno. IME everyone checks their email right before class, and RAs can be paged/called to patrol the halls. Obviously it's hard to say now whether a lockdown should have been called for, but if the police thought the killer was still alive, it really should have happened, and I'd be surprised if the school didn't have procedures in place for making school-wide announcements.