Virginia Tech is the perfect example of a mental health system that failed. Seung-Hui Cho at three was frail, shy, and hated personal contact. By the time he was in junior high he was being treated for severe depression and suffered from selective mutism, a severe social anxiety disorder. Cho was so stressed he didn't even want to speak.1 Family members said he had autism, but psychiatrists would later push back with the response that mutism and autism had no relation to each other. Cho was in therapy during high school. When he began attending Virginia Tech, however, privacy laws meant that the school remained unaware of his mental health history.2
By his junior year of college Cho had begun writing strange manifestos and acting oddly enough that a professor encouraged him to get help. He began stalking women on campus and after a university investigation a judge in Virginia in 2005 declared Cho mentally ill and ordered him to get outpatient help. He did not seek help, though, and became progressively worse.
A manifesto and videos that Cho sent to NBC News at the time of the shooting reveal his deteriorating mental state. Cho believed he would be remembered as a savior of the oppressed after he went on his shooting rampage.3 Later studies would say he was riddled with anxiety about graduating and going into the real world.4
Cho bought a Glock 19 and a box of ammunition from Roanoke Firearms.5 He also had .22 caliber Walther P22 semiautomatic he had purchased online from a website, the Gun Source.6 Just before 7:15 a.m. on April 16, 2007, Cho entered West Ambler Johnson Hall, a coed dorm, and shot freshman Emily Hilscher. The dorm resident assistant Ryan Clark tried to help Hilscher and Cho shot and killed him as well. After this Cho went back to his room and changed out of his bloodstained clothes and removed his computer's hard drive. He then walked to a pond on campus where authorities believe he got rid of the hard drive, although it was never found. Cho then mailed his manifesto and videos to NBC, which explained why he was going to shoot people.
Cho was wearing a backpack when he entered Norris Hall around 9:40 a.m., a building filled with classrooms and offices. In his backpack were chains, ammunition, a hammer, and a knife. The backpack also held his two guns. In total he had over four hundred rounds of ammunition. Inside Norris Hall he chained the front doors and locked them, leaving a note saying a bomb would explode if the doors were opened.7
Cho began walking through the building and looking into classrooms. He opened the door to room 206, where G. V. Loganathan was teaching hydrology engineering, and unleashed a barrage of gunfire, killing the professor and nine students, and wounding three others. He entered room 207, where Professor Jamie Bishop was teaching German, and shot the professor. He then opened fire on the front row and killed four students, wounding another six. He reloaded and left, and students barricaded the door. He next went to room 211, where he killed French professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, and a student, Henry Lee, as they tried to barricade the door. He then walked down the aisle of the classroom shooting each person, many multiple times; eleven students died. He moved on down the hall and tried to enter room 204, but the professor, Liviu Librescu, had heard the gunfire and held the door shut with his body to give his students time to escape through the windows. Cho fired through the door multiple times, striking and eventually killing Librescu and one student, Minal Panchal.8
Then Cho reloaded his weapons again and went back to the other classrooms. He killed Waleed Shaalan, whom he had earlier shot, then walked to room 205. The professor and students had put a large table against the door, and Cho was unable to get it, despite shooting through the door several times. Cho then shot and killed Professor Kevin Granata, who had come downstairs after he locking his students in his office. By this time, the police were closing in. Cho turned his Glock 19 on himself and fired into his right temple. He had killed thirty people in this assault and wounded seventeen more, spewing out 174 rounds. Victims had many bullet wounds and all those who were killed were shot at least three times. Twenty-eight were shot in the head.
The police were later criticized for not issuing a campus-wide notification after the initial report of a double homicide in the dormitory. In response to the shooting, Virginia passed gun legislation closing the gaps between federal and state laws. And the first major federal gun-control law in over a decade was passed, strengthening background checks through the National Instant Crime Background Check System (NICS) to stop purchases by the mentally ill and criminals. President George Bush signed the bill into law on January 5, 2008. Privacy laws were also altered to make sure schools were able to transfer medical records for incoming students.9
Authorities discovered that Cho purchased ammunition on eBay, which led the site to prohibit the sale of firearms and ammunition.10 Students at rival schools dressed up as victims for Halloween11 and a video game V-Tech Rampage was created by Ryan Lamborun who also created one for Sandy Hook.12 Virginia Tech was fined by the Department of Education for not notifying students quickly after the first two students were shot.13 The school developed an early-warning system for students in which text messages would warn of danger.14 Several books came out criticizing Virginia Tech for not helping Cho more when he contacted counseling staff three times for help.15 Eleven million dollars was paid in a settlement to twenty-four of the thirty-two families by the State of Virginia.16
Cho became the poster child for the gun-control movement when it was discovered he purchased his Glock and Walther legally. His mental illness, which had been diagnosed as mutism and depression, did not trigger the NICS system. Gun advocates blamed the gun-free zone of the university and said that if someone else with a gun had been there they could have stopped Cho. It came to light that Virginia never transmitted Cho's mental health status to the NICS system, and did not report that in 2005 he had been declared a danger to himself by the courts.17 He was by Federal Law ineligible to buy a gun because of the fact he had been declared a danger to himself and ordered to undergo outpatient treatment. On CNN, NRA board member Ted Nugent called for an end to gun-free zones at schools and universities.18
Thirty-three people died at Virginia Tech. The video diatribe Cho sent to NBC News, in which he ranted about “wealthy brats,” was received two days after the shooting.19 The tragedy is that Cho had severe mental illness and should have never been allowed to buy a gun. This is of no consolation to the twenty-eight students and five faculty members who lost their lives on April 16, 2007.
We go swimming in the pool and life seems to take on a flavor of normalcy. The girls squeal in the lighted pool and I swim from one side to the other, feeling the stress slithering away. Clay sits in a chair next to Kitty and watches. It is midnight and I think the pool is closed but rules seem to have been suspended. People are still sitting in the semidarkness with their suitcases and talking. One man talks about running out of Terminal 1: “I was in Nam and I know what gunfire sounds like. I haven't run like that for years.” Others sit quiet and exhausted among the palm trees and the Spanish façade plastered over a cheesy hotel. But it is isolated and bucolic and this is enough.
Everyone is hungry. There is a Burger King nearby and Clay and I take orders and then set out to walk there. A major expressway rumbles overhead as we leave the confines of the Quality Inn. The garish orange light of an American city close to midnight in an industrial area is unsettling. We are not in a bad neighborhood but, like most neighborhoods by expressways, airports, and factories, it has elements that make one question the wisdom of walking around in the middle of the night. We reach the Burger King and walk up to the counter.
“Dad,” Clay says in a low voice, nudging me.
He gestures to the television mounted overhead and there I am again. There is no sound, mercifully; there is just this sunburned man with a backpack speaking on camera. I, like most people, do not like to see myself on television. We all have an image of how we look and television takes that image and shreds it in seconds and says, no, this is how you really look. Deal with it. Then I see Callie and Kitty and then the news cuts away to another story.
“Weird,” I mutter, but this is local news and the shooting is sweeping the airwaves. I have become B-roll footage to be played over and over. Here is the witness, the dad from Chicago, as one station captioned me, or the author, as another said, or witness to the shooting. None of it is good and it adds to the surreal moment of standing in a Burger King in the middle of the night outside the airport. It hits me then that we would have been home by now. We would have been unpacking and greeting our dog and our cat and we would have had that feeling of being away replaced with the its-good-to-be-home feeling. Instead, I am waiting for several whoopers, a whopper junior, chicken nuggets, lots of fries, many drinks, and some apple pies in the middle of the night outside a Fort Lauderdale airport.
I look around and notice we are one of the few people in the restaurant. The people behind the counter are busily making our food. All seems to be normal, but then it comes, the strange thought that I would have never had in a million years before today. I think that we could all be shot at any minute. Someone could bust in through the door and swing up a 9mm and we would hear those four metallic sounding shots again. There is no safety here. A disgruntled employee, a jealous boyfriend, an estranged husband, someone with severe mental illness, a veteran with PTSD, a frustrated loner who decides in a haze of schizophrenic delusion that we people in the Burger King are the source of all his problems. Or just a psychopath wanting revenge on the world.
I look around and wonder if I will ever feel safe again. My basic confidence in the world has been shaken to the core. If I don't feel safe getting some fast food for my family in an area where there are only a few people, how will I feel back in the airport, or in a train station or a stadium or a classroom, or out on the street? Someone with a gun could be anywhere. I keep looking around, examining the few people eating their Burger King fare and then I look at the employees. Does one of them have an angry lover or someone they owe a debt? Or maybe a fired employee is even now walking toward us locked and loaded, about to scream out, “You think you're going to fucking fire me…think again motherfucker!”
“Here you are,” the woman at the counter says, handing me three large bags and a stack of cups for the sodas.
I stare at her.
“You say thank you, Dad,” Clay whispers.
“Thank you,” I mutter.
I turn to Clay and murmur.
“Let's get the fuck out of here.”
He frowns and gestures to the cups.
“Dad, what about the sodas?”
I head for the door. I am leaving, now. I want to get away from the danger I am sure is coming again out of the warm Florida night. There is a trigger there now, a tripwire that stretches across every public space where the unthinkable could occur. My heart is racing. I am sweating. I am that guy in the airport again, looking for his family, thinking he is about to get shot. Clay follows me out the door and into the parking lot.
“Dad, what about the drinks? We paid for them!”
I wipe my face, heart racing, blood pumping, the world around me swirling.
“Dad, the drinks—”
I turn on him, eyes blazing, a man clearly coming unhinged. “Fuck it. We can drink fucking water. Okay? Fucking water!” And then I turn and start walking again.
Clay must read my body language because he glances around and then nods. “Cool.”
We walk quickly back to the Quality Inn with our fast food. I just want to get back to the hotel, where the environment is reasonably controlled. Kitty looks up from the table by the pool.
“Any problems?”
“No,” I say, feeling like I am gritting my teeth.
I begin unloading the food. We are a family again, doing what families do best, eating fast food. I want to dive into the pool, float to the bottom, and stay there. I just want order in the universe, quiet. I want the world to remain at a moral level while I catch my breath.
“Something the matter?”
I shake my head. “No…No. All good,” I mutter.
“Where are the drinks?” Careen demands.
“Drink water,” Clay answers.
“I forgot to get them,” I explain.
Kitty frowns. “But you have the cups.”
“Yeah. I know. I just forgot,” I mutter, slumping into a chair, closing my eyes, a headache coming on quickly.
“He forgot, Mom,” Clay says, backing me up.
“But—”
“HE FORGOT, MOM.”
Kitty stares at Clay, then nods. I stay in my chair, suddenly exhausted, jittery, my heart thumping crazily. I wonder if I am having some sort of delayed stress reaction. Maybe I am having a breakdown. I just want to go where all is still. I want to get as far away as possible from the airport and everything associated with it. I want to get back to the Midwest where it is three degrees and snowing. I want to get away from the sickening warmth and palm trees and the smell of jet engine fuel that is now linked in my mind with those four shots. I want to get away from Florida and go back to the icy tundra of frozen cornfields. I know nobody would dare shoot anyone when it is that cold out. But we are stuck like everyone else, and while we are out of the airport we are in a second limbo that cannot be escaped. If fear is losing control of one's fate then we still are not in control of ours. No car. No flight out. We are in a crappy Quality Inn around a small pool, sitting in the dark eating Burger King food after being in a shooting in a major airport. I look around at the other people at the tables, sitting in the shadows by their suitcases. We are all stuck for now, waiting in the dark for whatever comes next.
James Holmes might have seen himself as the Joker. No one is sure. He liked Batman, anyway. His father was a scientist educated at Stanford and UCLA. His mother was a nurse. When he was eleven, James Holmes complained about Nail Ghosts, and this was the first time anyone suspected he might have mental health problems. The ghosts hammered the walls at night, and he saw men fighting out of the corners of his eyes. He tried to commit suicide that same year. In high school, he played soccer and ran cross country. He graduated from Westview High School in San Diego and headed for the University of California, Riverside.1
Holmes was brilliant. He graduated with honors in the top one percent of his class with a degree in neuroscience. Letters of recommendation talked about his leadership skills. He worked at a summer school camp and then at a pill-capsule-coating factory. People he worked with said he was antisocial, however, and would often not talk at all. He left the factory in 2011 and enrolled at the University of Colorado in the neuroscience doctoral program. He received a 21,000 dollar grant and university stipends. Holmes was wooed by several universities with offers of free tuition and lucrative stipends but he chose to stay at the University of Colorado. While a student there, Holmes met with three mental health professionals. He expressed homicidal thoughts to them, and one, Dr. Lynne Fenton, told the campus police about Holmes's desire to kill. She considered putting an involuntary mental health hold on him but decided he was a borderline case and that he wasn't mentally ill enough to justify the restraining hold.2 Holmes also told other students to stay away from him because he was bad news.
In 2012, Holmes chose a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises to kill as many people as possible. On May 22, he went to a Gander Mountain sporting goods store and picked up a Glock 22 and then a week later went to Bass Pro Shops and bought a Remington 870 Express Tactical shotgun. The week after that he failed his oral exams for his doctoral program and immediately purchased a Smith and Wesson M&P15 rifle. Holmes passed the background checks when purchasing all these weapons.3 He went on to buy 3,000 rounds of ammunition for the pistol and rifle and 350 shells for the shotgun from the internet. He rounded out his arsenal with online purchases of body armor, an assault vest, gas mask, helmet, and a knife.4
On July 20, the day of the shooting and hours before he left for the theater, Holmes mailed his notebook to his psychiatrist at the university. In the notebook he had detailed his plans and thoughts leading
up to the shooting. He also called a crisis hotline with the hope that someone might stop him from the shooting, but he was disconnected.5 The notebook was never delivered and was found days later in a mail room.
That night, Holmes drove to the Century 16 multiplex theater in Aurora, Colorado. He had picked a midnight showing to avoid shooting children. He bought a ticket and sat in the front row for twenty minutes before slipping out of a side exit and propping it open with a plastic cup. He armed himself and put on his vest, helmet, gasmask, bullet-resistant leggings, bullet-resistant groin protector, and gloves. He returned dressed all in black, blending into the audience that had dressed up for the movie. Holmes also wore earbuds and blasted techno music, to block out the screams of the people he shot.6
Holmes began by throwing two tear gas canisters into the theater and then fired at the audience in the back of the theater with his shotgun. He used his semiautomatic rifle, equipped with a hundred-round drum, and started mowing down people in the aisles and in their seats. He whipped out the Glock and fired back and forth as well. In all, Holmes fired seventy-six bullets: six shotgun blasts, sixty-five from the rifle, and five from the Glock.7
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