Virginia Tech is found not liable in 2007 killings
any liability.
A university spokesman praised the court for rejecting a “faulty” jury verdict. “In the end, the cause of these heinous acts and continuing heartbreak was a troubled and angry young man with easy access to powerful killing weapons,” said Lawrence Hincker, a vice president for university relations.
The state court justices said a university and the state of Virginia cannot be held liable for a grave danger they could not have foreseen at the time.
About 8 a.m. that day, university officials learned a female student had been shot and killed in a dorm room. Amale student in the dorm, a resident adviser, also was killed. Campus police thought they were dealing with a “domestic dispute,” and the woman’s boyfriend was the prime suspect. And he had fled the campus, the police said.
About 9:26 a.m., the university sent a campuswide “blast email” that reported the “shooting incident” at the dormitory.
Less than 20 minutes later, a gunman, later identified as student Seung-Hui Cho, opened fire in Norris Hall. Within minutes, 30 more people had been killed, including Erin Peterson, 18, and Julia Pryde, 23. The university sent out a second campuswide “blast email” at 9:50 a. m warning that a “gunman is loose on campus.” But it came too late. Cho, who was not the female student’s boyfriend, also shot himself.
The Peterson and Pryde families did not join in an $11 million settlement paid by the university but chose instead to sue university officials and the Commonwealth of Virginia. They alleged the university was negligent for failing to warn students in time that a gunman was on the loose.
In Thursday’s unanimous decision, the judges said the university had a duty to warn students of dangers that were “reasonably foreseeable.”
“Based on the limited information available (to officials) prior to the shootings in Norris Hall, it cannot be said that it was known or reasonably foreseeable that students in Norris Hall would fall victim to criminal harm,” the state court said. “Under the facts of this case, there was no duty … to warn students about the potential for the criminal acts by third parties.”