Healing the Wounds

One year ago today, the unthinkable happened at Virginia Tech, when Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 fellow students and professors before turning the gun on himself in the worst shooting spree in U.S. history. As campus community members and Virginian political figures gather today to remember the victims, questions about both how to best care for the victims and how to prevent another such tragedy remain wide open.

Addressing criticism that Cho had slipped through the cracks of the state's mental-health facilities, Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine signed a law on April 9 that clamping down on patients' ability to buy guns, broadening the standards used to commit individuals against their will, requiring schools to alert parents about dangerous behavior and boosting the monitoring of patients after their release from state care. A special justice had determined that Cho posed a danger to himself and others in a December 2005 hearing, but no one from the New River Valley Community Services Board (CSB)—the agency tasked with drawing up his postrelease treatment plan—was present at the hearing. Just over a year later, Cho was able to buy two handguns, with which he fired the shots that continue to reverberate on campuses and in legislatures throughout the country.

As Virginia Tech marked the anniversary of the tragedy, NEWSWEEK's Katie Paul checked in with the New River Valley CSB spokesman Mike Wade about how his agency has changed in the year since the massacre first thrust it into the international spotlight. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What major changes has your agency made in the last year in response to the Virginia Tech shooting?
Mike Wade: The key legislation that impacted what agencies like ours do in situations similar to the Tech incident [requires] that someone from the Community Services Board be present at all commitment hearings, and that's something that we had in place prior to the legislation. So, as far as impacting what we're doing, there hasn't really been too much change. We do have folks in place at those commitment hearings. Fortunately, the [Virginia] General Assembly also made room for some additional funding for community mental-health services that are going to be distributed throughout the state among the 40 CSBs that serve Virginia, and we'll see a portion of that funding, which will help fund some additional positions. We don't have the particulars on how that's going to be broken down yet, but that's certainly a step in the right direction.

What does that look like on a day-to-day level?
We expect those funds to fund an additional clinical position and an additional case management position.

And how would those new positions help prevent something like the shootings from happening again?
I don't think this is something that necessarily could have been prevented. [Cho] was evaluated, [issued a temporary detention order] and committed almost a year and half before the incident took place, and, obviously, someone's mental-health status can change drastically in that period of time. So how do we prevent this kind of thing from happening? We can't. We put measures in place to make sure we do everything we can on our end to evaluate each person to the best of our ability.