Shooting at Virginia Tech

[Kitsune]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Now the big issue is "there were indications that this guy would go postal, but we couldn't do anything other than recommend counselling", and that VT should have "done something". Hopefully Wolf can shed some light on this, but it doesn't seem like some person or institution can force action on someone because they behave outside the norm.

I actually faced a similar issue some semesters ago. From day one in my physiology class, a male student sat in the very back of class and spent a lot of the time talking to himself. He was loud enough that he was repeatedly asked to quiet down and the prof eventually pulled him aside and had a word with him, but the only thing he would say to her was that he "hated her" and "hated the class". Some days later after another class, the student punched another for no reason at all. Police were called, no charges were pressed (the victim later said he simply wanted to know what prompted the unexpected assault from this person he didn't know and didn't even speak to, but got no clear answer) and life went on. One day, he stopped showing up to class, much to everyone's relief. Most found him highly annoying and "just weird". We figured with the grades he was getting that he finally gave up and dropped.

We learned, later, that wasn't the case. He had snapped inside a Radio Shack in a local mall and killed two random people before killing himself.

He had acted strange in class, had at least one violent outburst, but there simply wasn't enough there to baker act him. For this student majoring in psychology, the professors that all had degrees in the field didn't pick up on enough of his warning signs to do anything about it.