Virginia Tech fined $55K for response to shootings

Virginia Tech officials have been criticised for their slow respond to the campus's 2007 shootings.

Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the 2007 shooting rampage, the U.S. Department of Education announced March 29.

Department officials said in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for the school’s slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech’s two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus.…Read More

Feds: Va. Tech broke law in ’07 shooting response

Virginia Tech's alert eMail was not clear enough, officials said.

Federal education officials have found Virginia Tech broke the law when it waited two hours to warn the campus that a gunman was on the loose, too late to save 30 students and faculty who went to class and were killed in the 2007 rampage.

The U.S. Department of Education issued a report Thursday rejecting the university’s defense of its conduct and confirming that the school violated the Clery Act, which requires that students and employees be notified of on-campus threats.

The report concludes that the university failed to issue a timely warning to the Blacksburg campus after student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed two students in a dormitory early on the morning of April 16, 2007.…Read More