How to head it off?

We at Grossmont College, in El Cajon, Calif., have some information that may have made a difference in the Virginia Tech massacre.

A Grossmont student one October afternoon several years ago walked into a fitness center several miles from campus, raised a rifle, and shot four innocent people dead. Then he killed himself.

The student had been enrolled in a creative writing class at Grossmont. In the class, he wrote a story that was printed in local media as part of the coverage of the murders. The story described almost exactly the shooting scenario that he eventually acted out.

Why didn’t that story send up a very red flag to faculty and campus authorities?

It’s the same question being asked today on the Virginia Tech campus. Their shooter, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, was in a creative writing class. He wrote stories “so disturbing,” reported the Associated Press, “that he was referred to the school’s counseling service.”

“There was some concern about him,” said Prof. Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the Virginia Tech English Department. “Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it’s creative or if they’re describing things, if they’re imagining things or just how real it might be. But we’re all alert to not ignore things like this.”

It doesn’t appear that they were alert enough to know about the Grossmont experience. If they had, Cho might be alive and deep into therapy, and 32 people might be going about their business on a promising spring day.

Is it impossible to tell when someone like Cho is going to snap? Maybe, but it seems like a good idea for campus authorities to give themselves the best chance of preventing massacres like this. Did the Grossmont experience enter any kind of national campus violence prevention database? Apparently not. Might it have been used to create a meaningful – that is, believable enough to call for action – profile of someone who isn’t just imagining things?

There is always going to be a risk of acting against an individual who might have turned out to be just very creative, and otherwise innocent. There is also a risk, as the Virginia Tech president pointed out, of stationing an officer at every doorway, in what is supposed to be an open society. Wherever the decision point falls, it needs all the backup information that experience can provide. Where and how can Grossmont College help to build a dynamic, accessible, national database to give all educators their best chance to act in time? On our campus, we still grieve, that our student turned out to be describing the future.