V. Tech found negligent in 2007 killings
A jury declared Virginia Tech guilty of negligence in the 2007 massacre on the Blacksburg, Va. campus, MSNBC reported Wednesday. Jurors found that the university could and should have alerted students after the first segment of the murderous rampage, in which Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people over the course of two and a half hours before killing himself.
The families of Erin Peterson and Julia Pryde, who brought the lawsuit, were each given $4 million, though the state subsequently filed a motion to cut the award, as the Virginia cap is $100,000. Jurors were not informed of the cap.
The April 16 massacre constituted the most lethal mass shooting in America in modern times. On that day, Cho shot two students fatally in a dormitory, but hours passed until the second, deadlier bout of shooting in an undergraduate classroom.
Prosecutors argued that university authorities should have understood the threat to students and sent out a warning to campus. Police said they initially deemed the first two shootings to be isolated events.
One of the mothers who brought the suit, Celeste Peterson, said the verdict established justice and transparency, MSNBC reported. "Today we got what we wanted. The truth is out there, and that's all we ever wanted," she said. "We came here for the truth." Her attorney said the families' goal was to hold the university accountable, not to receive financial compensation.
An attorney for the state, Peter R. Messitt, said the university did all it could under the circumstances. "What happened at Norris Hall was not reasonably foreseeable," he said at the trial.
UC students may be asked orientation
Incoming University of California students in future years may be asked to disclose their sexual orientation, the Daily Californian reported Monday. The move would come as part of an effort to improve on-campus resources for LBGTQ students by better identifying the scope of such groups on campuses.
A statewide Academic Senate committee made the recommendation in January that UC schools implement the change, though any decision would not take effect for the class currently being accepted. The choice was made in response to an October law requesting that UC schools gather data on students' sexual orientation. State officials portrayed it as an equitable measure designed to bring sexual orientation in line with other measures of diversity.
Officials from both the UC and the California State University systems said administrators are still investigating whether and how to carry out those recommendations. Only one other college -- Elmhurst College in Illinois - has implemented such a practice thus far, and this year was the first in which Elmhurst asked for the information from its applicants.
