"To the Editor,"

In my opinion, the potential lawsuit concerning the Virginia Tech shootings has merit. This potential lawsuit was described in an October 15, 2007 editorial in The Spectrum. The original assumption that a "domestic dispute" had occurred was based upon the erroneous belief that, without any evidence, merely because a dead black male, Ryan Clark, was laying near a dead white female, Emily Hilscher -- the two had been having an affair that had gone awry and Ryan had killed Emily and then himself. In fact, Ryan had tried to come to Emily's rescue when he heard her screaming while she was being shot by Seung-Hui Cho.

Mind you, Police Chief Wendell Flinchum and his investigators were not deterred from this inane murder/suicide theory by the fact that Cho left bloody footprints leading away from the murder scene, on top of which no gun was found nearby which usually indicates a murder/suicide could not have occurred. Guns don't usually get up and walk away.

When it finally occurred to Flinchum that this could not be a murder/suicide, he next concluded that Emily had been having an affair with Ryan and they were both killed by a jealous boyfriend, Karl Thornhill. This, despite the fact that Emily's friend, Heather Haugh, told investigators that Emily's relationship with Karl was "perfect." Nevertheless, when Heather told the investigators that Karl had recently gone to a shooting range with Emily and Heather, the investigators jumped to the conclusion that Karl was at fault. Heather also told investigators that Karl usually dropped Emily off after the weekend and would drive back to Radford University, where he attended school. This is the ultimate source for the ridiculous statement that the situation was an "isolated incident" and that the killer was driving away from the campus and maybe even out of the state. Where that dramatic latter statement comes from is anyone's guess.

And what of Virginia Tech President Dr. Charles W. Steger? He at first is told that there is an "isolated incident", a murder/suicide, a conclusion which he is entitled to accept at face value in my opinion. It is a known fact that Steger was given this information because he has stated publicly "We initially thought this was a murder/suicide." When he next is informed that there has actually been a double murder, he probably should have asked a couple of questions of Flinchum, like "Uhmm, what happened to the murder/suicide theory?" Instead, he accepts Flinchum's latest soap opera fantasies at face value and decides to delay sending out any general campus-wide e mail out letting students know there was an unsolved double murder on campus. I believe the reason Dr. Steger did not alert the students earlier, and in a more specific e mail other thatn the generalized warning that there has been a "shooting incident" on campus, was because he was too willing to buy into Flinchum's unsupported fantasies in order to avoid some bad PR for Virginia Tech.