Tech newspaper posts massacre documents online

Virginia Tech's Collegiate Times is posting a number of documents related to the April 16, 2007, massacre that were released to victims' families on Wednesday.

The documents provide a new portrait of shooter Seung-Hui Cho, the Times points out, and include, among other items:

• internal correspondence between English department members and Cho that show a combination of violence, social awkwardness and painful emotional turmoil in the shooter's psyche;
• the approach taken by University Relations to the tragedy;
• fundraising advice on handling donors in the aftermath;
• a report on investigation into a harassment complaint against Cho from a female student at West Ambler-Johnston Hall;
• handwritten notes by Tech's Policy Group as the tragedy unfolded; and
• information related to killer William Morva's escape, which prompted the campus to be shut down in August 2006.
Cho killed two students at West Ambler-Johnston Hall and then 30 students and professors in Norris Hall the morning of April 16 before committing suicide.

He shot and wounded 17 others in the rampage.

The college newspaper apparently thwarted the university's plans to make the documents public sometime in February.

On Wednesday, Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said it was important to give the families a chance to review the archive material before it would be made available to the public in February.

However, Collegiate Times editor-in-chief David Grant wrote on the newspaper's Web site Friday that the Times got a number of the documents that were released to the families and is putting a selection online.

The paper will continue to post more online over the winter break, he said. He noted that none of the documents have any family-specific information. The documents are part of a $440,000 archive set up under a June settlement agreement in which the families and survivors agreed not to sue the state.

On Wednesday, Hincker said that the archive will ultimately be available on the Internet for inspection by anyone.