8A
NATIONAL
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY AUGUST 20 2009
Mental records released for Virginia Tech shooter
BY SUE LINDSEY Associated Press
ROANOKE, Va. — Recently discovered mental health records released on Wednesday contain no obvious indications that the Virginia Tech gunman was a year and a half away from committing the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The records contain previously unseen handwritten notes from three separate counselors who talked to Seung-Hui Cho in 2005. In one report Cho denied having any suicidal or homicidal thoughts. On April 16, 2007, Cho killed 32 students and faculty members on the Blacksburg, Va., campus and took his own life.
University officials have said Cho talked to two different therapists during telephone triage sessions in the fall, then made one court-ordered 45-minute in-person
Cho
visit that December.
Cho denied the homicidal thoughts in the 45-minute telephone sessions and in the meeting with counselor Sherry Lynch Conrad on Dec 14, 2005. Cho met with her at Cook Counseling Center after being detained in a mental hospital overnight because he had expressed thoughts of suicide to people he lived with after a girl told him to stop leaving her messages.
However, Conrad, after speaking with him wrote: "He denies suicidal and/or homicidal thoughts. Said the comment he made was a joke. Says he has no reason to harm self and would never do it."
The forms filled out were based on statements Cho made about the way he was feeling. They indicated he said he was depressed and had
feelings of anxiety, but the records don't contain any evidence that they saw serious warning signs to believe Cho would commit violence. On the hospital evaluation form, it said: "There is no indication of psychosis, delusions, suicidal or homicidal ideation."
Relatives of the victims, however, said the counseling center files showed he slipped through the cracks and that therapists didn't discuss the case.
"They definitely weren't paying attention, and that's what led to April 16th," said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin was wounded but survived.
"It it sounded like he was going through a McDonald's," said Michael Pohle, whose son Michael Pohle Jr. was killed. "It just looked like he was passed through from one person to another person and there was no collaboration going on."
The missing files were released almost five weeks after they were discovered at the home of the former director of the university's counseling center.
Cho's meeting with Conrad was his last contact with the counseling center. She wrote that she gave him emergency contact numbers and encouraged him to return the next semester in January, but he didn't
make an appointment, telling her that he wasn't sure what his schedule would be.
Edward J. McNelis, an attorney for Conrad and the counselors who spoke with Cho by phone, said he had advised them not to comment because they are named in civil lawsuits filed by two of the victims' families.
A telephone message left for Conrad was not returned.
The files first turned up July 16, when former Cook Counseling Center director Robert C. Miller found them in his home while preparing for those civil suits, which name him as a defendant.