By Michele Leight

New York City, September 3, 2007

Last week I saw apples in clusters on the boughs of trees in Central Park and a leaf tinged with yellow, dotted with tiny flecks of orange, the first sign that summer is drawing to a close. It has been a beautiful summer filled with family, friends, laughter, vast seascapes and big blue skies. Nature is glorious.

It is impossible to imagine New York without its parks and trees that absorb harmful carbon dioxide, turning it into essential oxygen for us city folk to breathe as we jog, bike and walk our dogs, or read peacefully on the beautiful carpet of Kentucky Blue Grass on the Great Lawn against a backdrop of midtown Manhattan.

Kids sporting backpacks and "I'm-not-ready-for-school-yet" faces are back on the streets and in the stores of my neighborhood. Labor Day Weekend marks the end of summer and a return to studies, school and college for millions of children and teenagers in America. This makes me think of the urgency for safer campuses after the Virginia Tech tragedy earlier this year, which I wrote about in the Ashraya-New York Spring Newsletter.

Sending a child off to college will never feel the same after what happened there.

On August 30, 2007, a report by a Federal panel ordered by President Bush released a report on the Virginia Tech killings of 32 students and faculty by a fellow student, Seung-Hui Cho, who then took his own life on an idyllic Blacksburg, Virginia campus - a campus like our children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren are at right now.

The Federal report finds that privacy laws, untreated mental illness, and a court order that did not make it into a Federal database resulted in 32 innocent deaths at Virginia Tech. The report found that teachers and school administrators feared liability for sharing information, and did not understand if they could be held responsible for withholding information.

The President sent cabinet officials to colleges and schools across the country right after the tragedy to learn about what went wrong, and what had to be done to prevent it happening again. The report was a joint effort of the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, and Education.

When innocent life is lost through senseless violence on a peaceful campus, everyone is impacted by it. "It won't happen here" will not be an option after reading the contents of this report. The contents of the report can be accessed in the archives of online news networks, including www.abc.com, www.cnn.com, and www.foxnews.com.

The Federal report found that complex privacy laws prevented doctors, police and schools from sharing information about students who could potentially pose a threat to their fellow students as well as themselves.

The inability of doctors, police and schools to get information that could have been used to insist that this troubled student - or any troubled student - get counseling, or prevent him from buying handguns never made it to the appropriate agency.

Blatant signs of distress, violence and anger were left to fester in a young man who was troubled since childhood. He suffered from depression, a clinical (treatable) condition that often requires regular monitoring and medication, and "selective mutism," which often prevents a person from speaking, especially in social situations.

The report found that Cho's college roommates were aware he had problems. He was unusually withdrawn, he did not engage with them when they tried to include him in social activities or friendship, and his creative writing professors were concerned about his intensely violent writings - so violent that many of his creative writing classmates left the class because they were so disturbed by them.

Even a judge ordered Cho into treatment, describing him as "a danger to himself and others."

Tragically, the court order did not find its way into a Federal database, so Cho was able to buy two handguns legally because the background check run on him revealed nothing unusual. The court order would have blocked the sale.

The same day the report was released, the House passed a bill that will tighten state reporting to a Federal database that is used to block gun purchases by prohibited buyers. Anyone with as clear a history of mental illness as Cho should never have been in possession of a handgun at all, and certainly never while living among so many young people.

At the press conference on the Virginaia Tech killings, Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, raised a critical point - people do not understand what information they can share and what they cannot.

Guns aside, the glaringly obvious issues here involve Cho's mental health, which was a problem from childhood, and the privacy of students, which any parent of an 18-year-old, or older, knows all about. Cho's parents did everything they could to make college officials aware of his condition, but concerns about privacy got in the way.

Many parents I know have expressed deep concern that once a child reaches 18, it is like penetrating granite to access any information about them, whether it is from hospitals, doctors, colleges, banks, credit card companies, or employers if they are working. All of a sudden they are out of reach, "off limits" to those who love them and have their best interests at heart. As a result, if things go wrong, they can rapidly spiral out of control.

Even the best efforts of the Governor of Virginia, Timothy M. Kaine, were stymied after he appointed a Virginia panel to investigate the campus killings. They were unable to access Cho's mental health and educational records, and they found they had no authority to subpoena them.

The day the report was released Governor Kaine said: "If we couldn't get it, clearly public health safety officials couldn't get some of his mental health information, and that may have been part of the problem."

One of the most disturbing communications failures on April 16th was that Virginia Tech officials took more than two hours to alert the students that two of their fellow students had been gunned down in a dormitory on their campus. By the time they were told by school authorities, Cho was already in a different campus building killing 30 more students and teachers.

If students and faculty had been alerted immediately after the first two killings, 30 lives may have been saved.

The Federal report recommends that schools develop systems that enable them to speedily notify students and faculty when emergencies occur.

The absence of a law enforcement presence after he had already killed two people emboldened Cho, who went on to commit horrific carnage and murder. When he saw the police arrive, he killed himself, because he knew he would not be allowed to continue what he was doing. Why did no one in a position of authority at the college call the police after the first two students were killed? If they had, Cho would not have had access to others.

The most disturbing aspect of this case is that so many people repeatedly tried to alert school authorities about Cho's mental instability, but each time concerns about violating his "privacy" got in the way.

The complexity of students' "privacy" is laid out in the report which shows that Federal privacy laws govern health and student information, but states have different laws, and the police have their rules that limit the disclosure of criminal information. All these stumbling blocks conspired to enable one of the worst massacres of innocent people in US history - of college kids, teachers and professors.

Seung Hui Cho's parents never hid the truth about their son's mental illness. He was seeing a psychiatrist until his 18th birthday, when, against their wishes, and the wishes of others who had his best interests at heart, he decided to stop therapy.

Depression is a clinical condition. Cho was most likely born with it, because it is hereditary, but as an 18-year-old, when he technically became an "adult," he was able to cut loose from all the protection and care that had thus far shielded him from the more damaging aspects of his condition.

The news conference on Virginia Tech in Washington on August 30, 2007 confirmed that if Cho had been monitored, and if the college had acted at the first sign of emotional and mental unraveling, his condition may have been stabilized, he would have taken a leave of absence, he could have been placed in a secure situation where he was not a danger to himself and to so many innocent people.

From the outset, witnesses at Virginia Tech say he was a deeply troubled young man. For those who might not yet have read them, Cho's writings are terrifying. It is impossible to imagine what his young classmates must have felt when he shared his assignments with them, as was required for all students in the creative writing class. His teacher was disturbed enough to ask him to leave her class.

Many students left the class because they feared Cho and his stories. Students and teachers also remarked on his prolonged silences, saying he refused to participate in class discussions, or engage socially.

In "Mind of a Killer" on ABC's "Nightline" August 30, 2007, Terry Moran reported on Cho's childhood and teenage years, and the circumstances that enabled him to slip through through the cracks: "He was a broken young man in a broken system," he said.

The Nightline report traced Chos immigration to the US from South Korea in 1992. In third grade he was described as having "no social interaction." In 1999, when Columbine happened, he was 15, in 8th grade, and his mood became more depressed. Columbine impacted on and influenced Cho profoundly. Sadly, violent incidents often promote "copycat" behavior in disturbed individuals.

Dr. Bella Good, a child psychologist who treated Cho, was interviewed for the Nightline program. She said he had "selective mutism" and anxiety. He was given Paxil for one year and counseling. He looked better after this, she said, he had his own personal counselor, and his GPA was 3.5. Dr. Good said his parents and schools did everything they could for him and that his parents felt especially strongly that he should attend a small college.

However, the university was not told of his problem, she said. When his teachers advised that Cho get help at the university's behavioral health center he did not receive it. Instead, he was sent to an outpatient facility and released, despite the concerns of teachers and students in his creative writing class.

"When he got to Virginia Tech all the systems designed to protect him failed," said Moran in "Mind of a Killer." "It was a clear failure to connect the dots." I watched the Nightline program that night, and I have followed most of the news reports since the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Spring.

The police took 3 minutes to get to Virginia Tech once they were alerted. Cho had been at the university for many months, giving off potent warning signals, like a taut string waiting to snap, but no one took action to save him from himself even when teachers and students were deeply disturbed by his behavior and said so. The Nightline program suggested that after what happened at Virginia Tech, mental illness could not be considered a "private matter." The entire community has an obligation to get involved and help.

As a parent and aunt of a college-age student, I feel the time has come for student "privacy" laws to be overhauled if we are to avoid tragedies in the future.

Cho's grandfather had insightful comments we can all learn from when he was interviewed in Seoul, South Korea, for Nightline's "Mind of a Killer:"

"Our entire family is ruined by this. I knew there was something wrong when he was a boy. He did not ask me questions like grandchildren usually ask their grandfather. Whenever I tried to talk with him there was an impenetrable silence."

This is an important documentary for parents, students, schools and colleges everywhere. Hopefully it will be available to anyone who is interested in learning from it. I learned that for any student with any problem "privacy" can be lethal once they reach their 18th birthday, because those who love them cannot reach them as privacy laws stand now. It is up to us all to change it.

In memory of all those that died so tragically at Virginia Tech, and for the families that must live the rest of their lives without their children and loved ones, I hope we take all this information and use it to make young people and their educators safer in schools and college campuses in America, anywhere in the world, so that such horrific violence never happens again.

I hope we listen closely to parents, teachers, law enforcement, healthcare professionals, psychologists and judges when they try to do what is best for a deeply troubled young person. There were many opportunities to prevent this tragedy from happening. Sadly, they were missed.

"Harvest of Innocence," a book by Michele Leight,

available now on www.amazon.com, seeks to raise awareness about risky behavior, health, poverty and AIDS

 

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