Hour after hour, the testimony went over the facts
of the case. At 8:16 a.m., Emily Hilscher’s roommate, Heather Haugh, returned
to the dormitory and was questioned. It was during this questioning that the
name of Emily’s boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, was raised. Thornhill had dropped
Hilscher off that morning and proceeded to Radford University where he had an
8:00 a.m. class.
Haugh went on a police computer and opened her
Facebook page to show the police pictures of Thornhill, including a photo Emily
took of Thornhill at a shooting range. The photo shows Thornhill holding what
appears to be a .22 rifle. Based on that information the police made Thornhill
a “person of interest” and began to search for him on campus, but still did not
warn the campus of their suspicions or the fact that a killer was on the loose.
Andy Goddard and the jury listened to the
defense’s flimsy line of reasoning—Thornhill is Hilscher’s boyfriend and he
goes to shooting ranges, so he must have shot her—to justify the police
officer’s decision to classify the double homicide as a “domestic incident.”
The defense also said that because the victims were male and female, that
appeared to make the murders some sort of domestic-related incident. But there
was absolutely no evidence to support this contention. President Steger
testified that he was told by Chief Flinchum at 8:11 a.m. that the deaths were a
domestic incident. Andy could only wonder if classifying a murder as a domestic
incident makes the person firing the gun less dangerous.
If you factor in the following, absolutely nothing
makes sense about the assumptions the police were making and the actions they
took in the first hour after the shootings. First, if Karl Thornhill was the
killer, why did he drop Emily Hilscher off at her dorm and then some time
shortly thereafter return to her room and kill her? Why bring her back to the
dorm to kill her and risk the chance of witnesses?
Second, why kill Ryan Clark? It was well known
that Ryan, the other victim, had no romantic interest in Emily Hilscher—this
would have ruled out a love triangle. Furthermore, to say that Thornhill was a
suspect because he went to shooting ranges was ludicrous. Guns and shooting
ranges are a way of life in rural Virginia.
I agree with Andy Goddard: The testimony of
President Charles Steger, Virginia Tech Police Chief Flinchum, and Virginia
Tech Associate Vice President for Public Relations Larry Hincker, can only be
described in one word, “bewildering.” For example, on the witness stand
President Steger admitted that the killer could have been on campus—even hiding
in West Ambler Johnston Hall. But when he was informed of the murders, it never
occurred to him to issue a warning. Steger’s own words before the jury appeared
to indict him; he admitted that no one knew where the gunman was, and he had no
thought of warning.
Even more disturbing, Flinchum testified that if
the two dead students were “targeted” then the shooter would not be dangerous.
How and why could Flinchum make this assertion? He tried to explain that he
thought the shootings in room 4040 were an isolated incident, and thus they
were targeted murders. There are two problems with this argument. First, room
4040 is not really isolated. It is on the middle floor of a seven-story
building, near the elevators and half way along that wing of West Ambler
Johnston Hall. Hardly isolated and the police knew that fact—they had to use
the elevators and pass other rooms to get to 4040. The second problem is that
Flinchum gave no evidence in his testimony as to how and why “targeted” murders
mean the killers are not dangerous to others. Flinchum’s assertion left Andy thunderstruck.
When Chief Flinchum was questioned about the
timeline and asked if he knew the timeline used by President Steger was wrong,
he said he didn’t recall. Flinchum acknowledged that he prepared a timeline for
the panel and agreed that there were differences with the one used by Steger.
Here, Flinchum—just as Hincker—suffered from faulty memory. He could not recall
ever correcting Steger. When Flinchum was pressed on the stand as to why he did
not tell the panel about the timeline errors, he said he assumed they knew—the
errors were common knowledge. But if the errors were commonly known, why
weren’t they corrected? By this point in time, Andy Goddard was getting a
headache from the verbal twists and turns of school officials.
Flinchum asserted that when the first version of
the Governor’s report came out he knew of the errors and called them to the
attention of Kay Heidbreder, general counsel and Special Assistant to the
Attorney General assigned to Virginia Tech. He did not call the errors to the attention
of the panel chair, Massengill. The unanswered question is what did Heidbreder
do with the information? If the state paid TriData over $700,000 to write and
correct the report, didn’t Heidbreder have an immediate responsibility to
report the errors in the report? If she did not, was she negligent? Again,
Goddard thought, “How could this woman be working for the defense given the
role she played at the university?”
The school’s defense attorneys could not explain
away the nearly two and one-half hour gap following the double homicide at West
Ambler Johnston Hall and the school’s decision to alert the campus to the
shooting. The jury saw through the defense’s lame attempts to justify the
Steger administration’s inaction.
Indeed, even for the casual observer it is next to
impossible to explain why the school did not warn the university community that
two people had been murdered and that their killer was on the loose. How could
the school not see a threat? No one could predict the massacre at Norris Hall.
But how could anyone who was aware of the two murders on campus, with no known
motive, and the perpetrator’s identity and whereabouts unknown, make the
assumption that no potential threat existed? What did the Steger administration
and the Virginia Tech police expect the killer to do—just lay down his weapon
and surrender after murdering two people? The warning came over two hours after
the double homicide and just minutes before Seung Hui Cho slaughtered 30 people
in Norris Hall. The defense attorneys’ justification for the time lag fell on
deaf ears. (To be continued)
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