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.

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.

As a fellow University employee-- I agree. We have procedures to follow at the Medical Center, but none at the College proper (different campus).

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.

Right -- at the very least, RAs could have been informed and kept their residents inside. Off-campus students would be harder to notify, but probably not very, once people start calling and text-messaging.

Thinking of the campuses where I've been a student and also worked the word that keeps coming to mind is that they are very porous places -- every building has so many entries/exits, people coming/going, etc.

everyone checks their email right before class, and RAs can be paged/called to patrol the halls

and some people won't check their email, because they're late, or "right before class" means they're commuting and parking the car, and RAs are students who don't always sleep in their own beds, etc., etc.