Another Repetition

            Following the press conference, Diane Sawyer, who immediately turned to the issue of notification, again raising the familiar refrain of the 2-hour campus-wide notification window, interviewed President Steger.  Sawyer suggested anonymous parents have just called for Steger to step down because “it is so clear in this window in which notification did not take place, lives could have been saved."[48] Steger replied, “I don’t think you can come to that conclusion at all.  Let me just give you a little bit of background.   As I mentioned, when the first shooting was reported, the police responded within a few minutes.  They closed the dormitory, surrounded it with security forces, cordoned off the road, and notified the students in the building.  All of our information indicated that it was an incident confined to that building.  The second shooting, no one could predict that that was also going to happen that morning.  So, if you talk about locking it down, what is it that you’re going to lock down?   I mean . . . it’s like closing a city.  And it doesn’t happen instantaneously.  So as soon as we had accurate information, we took steps to deal with it.

MS. SAWYER:  So you’re saying you would do it the same way again of that first shooting, without notification?
MR. STEGER: Based on what—well, we notified all the people we thought impacted by that’s.  And it looked like—
MS. SAWYER: But not an email to the whole campus.
MR. STEGER: Not at the—it took us about, actually 30 minutes or so to find one of the witnesses even, to try to figure out what was going on.  At first we thought it was probably a murder-suicide only involving those people."[49]

            Sawyer pressed the issue of notification, “but, in the uncertainty, should you have acted to send out as much notification as possible?"[50] Steger offered a familiar narrative of events here: “Well, the question is, you have all these thousands of people en route.  Now, what are they supposed to do?  You can’t just cordon off the campus, because if you lock up 9,000 in the dorms, they have to be fed, we have to have health services, we have to have security people, all those barricades now [that have to be put out] by the buildings and grounds people.  So it’s not so simple, is my point."[51]