Good
people make terrible decisions with horrific results. The more I delve into the
school shootings in this country, the more apparent that fact becomes. It also
becomes crystal clear that our society needs to hold “good people” accountable
for their actions and inactions—particularly when they result in death. I am
not talking about revenge; I am talking about removing people who clearly do
not understand the law, override experts in mental health, or do not do their
jobs.
Many
of the poor decisions I am talking about are made for fear of lawsuits or to
protect careers. In doing my research I came across a similar example of poor
decisions made in connection with the murder of a freshman student at the
University of California, Berkeley.
On
October 26, 1969, Prosenjit Poddar murdered Tanya Tarasoff, a University of
California Berkeley student. Poddar had met Tarasoff at a social event, fell in
love with her and proposed marriage. When Tarasoff rejected the proposal,
Poddar began stalking her.
Poddar
voluntarily sought psychiatric help, saying he had thoughts of violence and
getting even with Tarasoff. He had around eight sessions of outpatient therapy
with Dr. Warren Moore over a period of two and a half months. When Dr. Moore
challenged him about his violent tendencies, Poddar became angry and broke off
therapy.
On
August 20, 1969, Dr. Moore called the campus police and reported that Poddar
was dangerous to himself and others. He provided the police with a letter from
the acting head of the psychiatric department concurring with his diagnosis of
paranoid schizophrenic reaction, acute and severe. Dr. Moore proposed a 72-hour emergency
detention order if the police would pick Poddar up and take him to the hospital.
Three
police officers interviewed Poddar, and based on their interview, decided
Poddar was not dangerous and did not detain him. To my knowledge, none of those
officers had any experience or training in mental health, but they overrode the
recommendations of two highly trained mental health experts.
No
one warned Tanya Tarasoff or her family of the threat Poddar posed.
On
October 27, 1969, Poddar found Tarasoff alone at home shot her with a pellet
gun and then chased her into the back yard where he stabbed her to death with a
kitchen knife.
In
2002, people in positions of authority ignored the warning signs at the
Appalachian School of Law—requests for campus security from the faculty, the
soon-to-be murderer taking over classrooms and ranting and raving, a doctor
calling the killer a time-bomb waiting to go off, police ignoring the very
basic rules of triage and allowing a critically wounded student to bleed to
death when the hospital was 10 minutes away—I could go on and on. A few weeks
before Peter Odighizuwa killed three people and wounded three others,
then-law-school President Lucius Ellsworth responded to requests from female
faculty for campus security (the school had no security) by saying, “Oh you
women, and your hormones, nothing will happen, it will be all right.” Ellsworth
was never held accountable, or even asked to explain his words.
As
for April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech, volumes could be written about the
warning signs centering on Seung Hui Cho. He was deemed a threat to himself and
others, but no one put his name on the list making him ineligible to buy guns
in the state of Virginia; a faculty member threatened to resign because Cho
frightened students and faculty alike, but he was not barred from campus. On
top of this, on April 16, 2007, the school administration failed to follow its
own security procedures and standards and as a result 30 people were
slaughtered at Norris Hall.
On
August 21, 2006, eight months before the Tech massacre, William Morva escaped
from custody in Blacksburg, killing two people. There was no evidence or
indication that Morva was on the Tech campus, yet the school closed down. On
the morning of April 16, 2007, two students were found shot to death in a
school dormitory, there were bloody footprints leading from the crime scene,
and the school hesitated and vacillated over whether or not to even warn the
campus. While administrators dithered, Cho made his way unhindered to Norris
Hall, finding 30 more victims. And, no one has been held accountable.
To
make matters worse, the state of Virginia paid a small fortune to a contracting
firm to write a report that covers up, glosses over, or does not address many
of the actions that would make people culpable and accountable. I will examine The Governor’s Review Panel Report, and
TriData, the firm that wrote the report, in future posts.
Some
argue that there is no way to prevent tragedies like the shootings at Berkeley,
the Appalachian School of Law, and Virginia Tech, saying that history does not
repeat itself. They are right, history
does not repeat itself, but we can learn from history. The future cannot be predicted with exact
certainty, but based on warning signs you can predict that the conditions exist
and the stage is set for violence. We should and can learn from the past. We
can learn from 1969, 2002, and 2007. If we will finally face the hard facts and
realities of what led to these shootings, if we can make people in positions of
authority accountable for their actions or inactions, we can prevent some of
these kinds of shootings from happening again. We can make it a crime for a
university president and school officials to ignore warning signs; we can adopt
laws that keep guns out of the hands of those who have been deemed a threat to
themselves and others. We can and should learn from history.
Just
because something has been done in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings,
does not mean the right things were done, and it is certain that not enough has
been done. So I persist, I write in hopes that my words will sensitize the
public—particularly parents—to the seriousness of the problem of school
tragedies and the fact that much more must be done to prevent future shootings.
(To be continued)
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