BLACKSBURG, Va., April 16 (UPI) -- Virginia Tech University marked the first anniversary Wednesday of last year's campus shooting spree that took the lives of 32 students and faculty members.
In the year since the massacre occurred, the university has spent more than $10 million responding to the recommendations of a panel charged with studying what went wrong, USA Today reported.
Among the upgrades are an emergency alert system that can send messages in seconds to mobile phones and email accounts and locks that allow classrooms to be bolted from the inside.
Since the start of this school year, a threat assessment team has analyzed the cases of a dozen troubled students.
The school received harsh criticism from the panel for not recognizing the emerging threat of the shooter, student Cho Seung-hui, who had a history of mental illness.
His contact with police, a court order for psychiatric treatment and reports from his professors about violent writing should have marked him as a threat, the panel said.
