Shortly after 7 o’clock on the morning of April 16, 2007, campus police at Virginia Tech University received word of a shooting in the West Ambler Johnson dormitory. Arriving at the scene, officers found that a resident advisor named Ryan Christopher Clark had been killed, and a freshman named Emily Jane Hilscher had been fatally wounded. The police immediately “locked down” the dormitory, but neither they nor the university administrators took additional steps to secure the campus. Classes were not canceled, no perimeter was set up, and students were not notified of the shooting (or warned to stay home) for almost two hours. Even the lockdown at West Ambler Johnson was apparently lifted within about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, a 23 year old student named Seung-Hui Cho was reloading his weapons and mailing a chilling videotape to NBC News. At about 9:30, Cho entered Norris Hall, a large classroom building, armed with two semi-automatic handguns and 17 magazines of ammunition. He began shooting, murdering 32 people, and wounding another 28, before he committed suicide.
In retrospect, it is easy to see that the campus authorities made an awful mistake. Knowing that a killer was on the loose, they failed to take relatively simple precautions that almost certainly would have limited the carnage. Cho would have found many fewer victims if only Norris Hall hadn’t been so full of students and teachers, yet university administrators allowed classes to convene as though nothing had happened in the Ambler Johnson dorm.
Tragically, however, the investigation followed a blind lead, causing the Virginia Tech leadership team to believe that no one else was in immediate danger. In fact, the police initially turned their attention away from campus, tracking down an innocent man, while Cho continued to make his deadly preparations. Among the first potential witnesses questioned was Hilscher’s roommate, Heather Haugh. She told the police officers that Emily had spent the weekend with her boyfriend Karl, a student at nearby Radford University who lived in off-campus apartment, and that he presumably had brought her back to the dormitory earlier that morning. Although the police knew nothing else about Karl (whose last name I am omitting for obvious reasons), that immediately made him a “person of interest.” Further questioning revealed that Karl was an avid gun owner and had recently taken Emily to a shooting range That that was enough to turn him into the prime, indeed exclusive, suspect. Despite Haugh’s insistence that Karl was not a violent person, the police went racing off to find him – they later stopped his car and searched his home for a murder weapon – leaving the campus essentially unguarded and the unfortunate students uninformed.
How could experienced detectives make such a fatal misjudgment? Far from being irresponsible or negligent, they were in fact pursuing established investigative procedures. Sadly but not inexplicably, their training and instincts took them in precisely the wrong direction because they succumbed to a series of well-documented “cognition errors.”
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