VIRGINIA TECH SPINS, TWISTS, AND LIES

Five years after Angie Dales murder at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, one of the nation’s worst mass shootings occurred at Virginia Tech--less than 200 miles from the law school. Despite the expressions of sympathy and crocodile tears, Virginia Tech officials, as well as politicians of all stripes, came together in a cauldron of deceit, dishonesty, and political larceny.

Virginia Tech is a state school and protected by sovereign immunity. The largest judgment anyone can win against the state, with few exceptions, is $100,000. In reality, the state is willing to spend millions of dollars to protect incompetent and inept university administrators, but not one cent more than $100,000 to the dead students’ parents or the spouses of dead professors or instructors.

Let’s look at how Virginia Tech spent its money in order to spin the tragedy to its benefit and conceal the incompetence of the school’s leadership:

·      Virginia Tech paid $150,000 to the public relations firm, Firestorm, for 10 days work to help the school begin to spin the tragedy to its benefit.

·      Virginia Tech paid $663,000 to an even bigger public relations firm when it became clear that the negative publicity about the school was too big for Firestorm to handle. That firm was Bursen-Marsteller, the same public relations firm that was the spin-doctor for Dow-Corning’s campaign to limit damages arising from their silicone breast implants. The same Bursen-Marsteller who had been hired by big tobacco companies to develop a campaign to defuse the bad publicity associated with smoking.

·      Virginia (unlike Colorado in the case of Columbine and Connecticut in the case of Sandy Hook) hired a private company to write the report analyzing the Virginia Tech shooting and determining if the school was culpable. That firm was TriData, an Arlington, Virginia-based company that had done business with the state. The state paid TriData over $600,000 to produce a badly flawed report. The state then paid TriData another $75,000 to issue two corrected, subsequent versions. The final version still contains errors.

·      As noted above, the families of the dead students and faculty each got $100,000. You should also know that the 30 families of the deceased agreed to settle with the state only after lawyers from the state’s Attorney General’s office made it clear they would hold up paying the medical bills for the wounded until a settlement was reached.

·      The lawyers representing the families received over $1 million.

·      Two Virginia Tech families who lost daughters on April 16, 2007 and would not settle with the state, sued. They won a jury verdict, but the Virginia Supreme Court, as cited earlier, overturned that decision. The Pryde and Peterson families got $0. (To be continued)