2 weeks Ago
Flags across Virginia flew at half-staff on Wednesday, a silent, solemn reminder of the 32 students and educators killed by a gunman at Virginia Tech 18 years ago. Time marches on, but the commonwealth will never forget the horror of that chilly April day, nor the cruelty of young lives needlessly cut short. In the aftermath of the shooting, state officials conducted a thorough investigation and made its findings public, all with the goals of ensuring accountability and providing a blueprint for other schools to improve campus safety.
Eighteen years later, colleges and universities across the country have adopted many of those suggested strategies to better protect their students, instructors and staff and keep them apprised of potential threats and criminal actions. That has been invaluable given the challenge of trying to foster an open, welcoming campus atmosphere while ensuring public safety. In a similar way, investigations into the 2022 shooting at the University of Virginia that killed three students and injured two others might help other schools, here in the commonwealth and across the country, better serve their campuses.
At the very least, they should prompt university administrators nationwide to review procedures, including about how best to communicate quickly with a large campus population, in times of crisis. But getting copies of those reports for the public to review proved to be a tremendous challenge, with UVa. officials citing the ongoing criminal case against former student Christopher Darnell Jones Jr.
as the reason for withholding them. In November, Jones pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and several other charges for the Nov. 13, 2022, shooting deaths of Devin Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis Jr.
Chandler, Petty and Davis were all members of the Cavaliers football team; Jones was a former player. Another player, Mike Hollins, and another student, Marlee Morgan, were wounded in the attack. The shooting took place on the Charlottesville campus when a bus full of students returned from a field trip to see a performance of “The Ballad of Emmett Till” in Washington, D.
C. A campuswide shelter-in-place order was issued as law enforcement searched for Jones, who was identified quickly as the shooter and arrested a few hours later. Unlike the aftermath of the Tech shooting, when then-Gov.
Tim Kaine convened a panel of experts to conduct a sprawling and exhaustive investigation into the tragedy, UVa. officials asked Attorney General Jason Miyares to commission a report. Two law firms hired by the AG’s office completed separate reports, diving into the university’s response and outlining Jones’ history at the school, which included an investigation by UVa’s threat-assessment team after comments he made about firearms that alarmed a fellow student.
The firms’ work was completed in October 2023, but the reports were kept under wraps as the criminal case against Jones wound its way through the courts. Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley asked they be withheld to avoid compromising the prosecution, a request the university understandably honored. Sign up for Viewpoints, an opinion newsletter But after Jones pleaded guilty in November, the school said it would continue to deny requests for the reports until he was sentenced.
The Daily Progress petitioned for copies under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, and ultimately filed suit to review the documents, to no avail. Finally, in March, the school assented and made those reports public. But citing the requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, large sections of those documents are redacted, which greatly detracts from their value both as a record of what happened and as a blueprint for how UVa.
and other schools might better handle similar situations in the future. The Virginia Tech tragedy remains a source of tremendous pain and sorrow each year, but it also imparted colleges with powerful lessons about how to improve their emergency plans, better secure their campuses and protect their students. The UVa.
tragedy could provide similarly important information were critical details made available for the public to review..
