New details revealed Friday about the university's response - from the time the victims were found to when they alerted the campus of a gunman on the loose
- brought angry reactions and questions from some victims' families about leadership during the massacre that ended with 33 people dead.
At least two administrators told family members about the dorm shooting well before the rest of the campus was notified about the gunman. Even garbage service was canceled before that.
The report adds to the long list of apparent missteps by university officials before, during and after the 2007 rampage by Seung-Hui Cho. The mentally ill student shot two students to death in the dorm, then three hours later chained the doors of a classroom building and killed 30 more people before committing suicide.
Dennis Bluhm, whose son was killed in the rampage, laid the blame on President Charles Steger, who has faced calls to resign from Bluhm and other families.
"He's got to live with himself," Bluhm said. "If he's got any heart at all, and I'm not sure he does, he's got a long life to live with this on his brain."
The two administrators notified their families about the dorm shootings around 8:05 a.m.
- an hour and 20 minutes before a campus-wide e-mail warning was sent to staff members, faculty and students. The massacre in the classroom building began at 9:40 a.m.
One of the administrators who notified a family member was Steger's chief of staff, Kim O'Rourke, said Phil Schaenman, the president of TriData, the outside firm that put together the report. She often called her son, a Tech student, to make sure he went to class. She told him about the dorm shootings but still told him to go to class, which he did.
"I did tell him what had been happening, and I told him to go to class," O'Rourke told The Washington Post. "He was in class at the time of the shooting in Norris Hall."
"It's been taken that their families were given advance warning," Schaenman said. "But in her case, she said it was safe to come to school."
The other administrator, then-assistant vice president of administration Lisa Wilkes, was dropping off her children at her mother's house when she got a phone call about the dorm shootings and telling her to come into work. She then told her mother about the shootings.
The two administrators' actions clearly "do not comprise a concerted effort by University staff to notify their own families of danger in advance of notifying the campus community," school spokesman Mark Owczarski said in a statement.
Gov. Tim Kaine said if there was an effort by the school's administration to notify family members before anyone else, it would be "inexcusable."
"There is almost never a reason not to provide immediate notification," Kaine told The Associated Press. "If university officials thought it was important enough to notify their own families, they should have let everyone know."
Later, Kaine spokeswoman Lynda Tran said his office had spoken with Tech and TriData officials about the report's findings and it "does not sound like there was wrongdoing" by the two administrators.
Steger's office said Friday he was unavailable for comment and referred questions to the university spokesman, Owczarski. Calls by the AP to multiple phone listings for O'Rourke and Wilkes rang unanswered Friday.
On campus Friday, Student Government Association president Brandon Carroll said he does not think the revised report damages the administration.
