Virginia Tech Incident

On April 17, 2007, a horrific incident occurred at Virginia Tech. It all began when a call was made early in the morning about a shooting incident that occurred in the dorm rooms. There were two students that were shoot and killed that morning. The first responders to the scene believed they had a suspect who happened to be the boyfriend of one of the deceased individuals found murdered. The campus police believed it to be an isolated incident which had ended as soon as it had begun. To their surprise along with thousands of others, they soon realized that the terrible incident had just begun. It was two hours after the bodies were found that the main plot of the incident started to unravel. “Shortly after 9:00 a.m. classes began, Cho entered Norris Hall-which has a mix of classrooms, offices, and laboratories-carrying two semi-automatic handguns, about 400 rounds of ammunition, a hammer, and a knife. He chained the main doors shut from the inside and began entering classrooms on the second floor, shooting anyone he saw” (Davies, 2008). Students placed 9-11 calls telling of the event taken place allowing help to come in minutes. The first responders on this call were those that were still there attending to the murders in the dorm room. After all was said and done 33 people lost their life along with 17 others who were wounded. Cho was among that amount after he took his own life. The shooting at Virginia Tech was an eye opener for many. After the incident, an investigation was led to figure out what happened that day and if things were completed properly. In the conclusion of the investigation there were three concerns of the procedures that took place including “the public safety, the concerns about what was done and not done by top decision makers, and what was done at the scenes of carnage, medical care, and victim-survivor services” (Davies, 2008). There were mistakes from the very beginning of the incident. The Policy Team for the campus never meet to discuss what they should do to alert the campus of the fatal shootings at the dorm rooms. The email about the shooting was sent out …show more content…
Most the agencies acted for themselves and not as a whole to support the innocence involved. The Incident Commander position was held by all the chiefs of the different agencies groups involved. “The lead investigative agencies for the shooting at Virginia Tech were the Virginia Tech Police and the Virginia State Police” (FBI, 2007).There was no true plan set in place. Overall, the responders did a great job in protecting and aiding students on campus on campus that day. The span of control refers to the number of individuals that are under one supervisor. There were a lot of people that responded to the incident that day. The University received help from everyone around. There were a large number of workers from several different agencies that stepped in that day to help. Volunteers from around the state showed up to help even by just comforting the families of the injured or killed in this time of need. They responded quickly and were there to help control the situation. The problem was not setting up an overall decision on what was to take place after the incident and the chaos during with no leadership truly