The Virginia Tech community remains on high alert after threatening e-mails were sent to students and university employees during the past week believed to originate from the same individual who threatened, via his YouTube page, an attack on the community in October. The administration remains confident the threats are not credible.
The e-mails sent earlier this week, which investigators believed were sent from Italy, included "threats about March 18 as a day of possible action when [the individual] might commit harm," Virginia Tech President Charles Steger stated in an e-mail to the Virginia Tech community Wednesday afternoon.
These threats come about three years after the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history, when student Seung-Hui Cho, of Centreville, Va., killed 32 people on the campus in April 2007.
In October 2009, authorities discovered a YouTube page with the name "nextvirgtechkiller." One read, "The massacre is incoming," and another warned, "Next massacre is incoming," The Washington Post reported last year. YouTube administrators later removed these postings.
Steger assured Virginia Tech students, faculty and employees that the university's police force is working with Virginia State Police, the FBI and the Italian authorities to investigate these threats.
"While we take all threats seriously, these law enforcement authorities do not believe these communications represent a credible threat," Steger stated.
Some students had linked alleged break-ins with the threatening posts and e-mails, increasing the sense of worry on campus, Steger said.
Nevertheless, these rumored connections "are not borne out by the facts," he stated. "All the indicators reviewed by law enforcement do not point to an immediate threat."
The university remained open yesterday, although some students believed classes should be canceled or optional. For example, Brian Carroll, president of Virginia Tech's Student Government Association, criticized the administration for not making classes optional yesterday, according to a letter to that editor from Carroll that was published Wednesday in the Collegiate Times.
"This time, students are legitimately being targeted ... Some of the recipients of those e-mails had their apartments broken into," Carroll wrote.
Steger emphasized that the administration has the safety of students in mind.
"There has been and will continue to be enhanced police presence throughout the university," he stated. "An overabundance of caution is appropriate"
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