Colleges and suicide threats: when to call home?
20.05.12
"Daniel has been acting very suicidal recently, purchasing a $200 pistol, and claiming he'll go through with it," the email read, adding details of a reported previous suicide attempt with pills. "This is not a joke."
By the time Virginia Tech told Daniel's father, William Kim, about that email, it was too late.
A few weeks after it was sent to the school, he spoke with his son for the last time, Daniel indicating all was well and after final exams he'd be home for the holidays.
A few days after that, parked in his car outside a Target store near campus, Daniel fatally shot himself in the head.
"If I'd known, I could have taken him to doctors, get him on medication, make him normal again," William Kim, who owns a Washington, D.C., convenience store, said in a recent telephone interview, grief still echoing in his voice four years after the fact.
Virginia Tech's actions were all the more confounding coming just months after the murder-suicide rampage on the same campus by another student, Seung Hui Cho, which had supposedly prompted campuses nationwide to rethink their previous emphasis on confidentiality in treating troubled students.
Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution