Redacted
by James A. Bacon
Image from the University of Virginia Special Counsel Review taken from the executive summary.
After more than a year of delays, the University of Virginia has finally released two reports ordered by the Attorney General — one detailing the University Police Department (UPD) response to the Nov. 13, 2022, mass shooting at UVA, and one reviewing the failure of the University’s Threat Assessment Team (TAT), despite abundant red flags, to prevent the tragedy.
The reports provided comprehensive background information about formal policies and administrative structures of the UPD and threat assessment team. But extensive redactions removed almost all content describing how events folded and what specifically went wrong.
The reports recommend some administrative reforms, but literally no names are named in the unredacted portions of the reports. No one is called to account. There is not even a timeline. The public learns almost nothing new about the events that transpired, and no narrative of bureaucratic decision-making is provided to help readers understand the basis for the conclusions.
It would be unfair to describe the redacted reports as worthless. They do contain some useful insights and recommendations. (More about those in a follow-up post.) But they leave important questions unanswered.
Almost eight of the 16 pages in the executive summary of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan report on the threat assessment team were blacked out. Roughly 34 of 43 pages in the executive summary of the Vinson & Elkins report on the University Police were suppressed. Of the approximately 70 exhibits mentioned in the Vinson & Elkins report, only four were identified — and none were attached to the report.
In a note accompanying the release of the reports, President Jim Ryan justified the extensive redactions:
UVA officials initially promised to release the reports shortly after they were delivered in late 2023, but Ryan shortly thereafter withheld them from the public on the grounds that they contained information that might prove prejudicial to the prosecution of alleged shooter Christopher Darnell Jones. When Jones plead guilty, Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney Jim Hingeley said there was no longer cause to hold back the reports.
A question immediately arises: what stopped UVA from releasing the redacted versions of the reports, which have been thoroughly purged of any personal information about the then-alleged (now convicted) shooter, back in 2023? Why not give the UVA community the benefit of the investigators’ analysis to reassure them that the administration was addressing flaws in the system? Half a loaf would have better than none.
More to the point, why was any information withheld?
Consider the 2007 Virginia Tech Review Panel report on the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, a 147-page document (not including attachments). That report, commissioned by then-Governor Tim Kaine, contained a minute-by-minute timeline of events, a comprehensive narrative of the shooting, and 20 pages about the mental health history of the shooter, Seung Hu Cho. Exceedingly personal details of Cho’s medical and psychiatric history — from his heart murmur to his rocky relations with his parents, from his personal correspondence to his hospitalization for mental health illness in college — was laid bare for public viewing. Only one of the attached documents in the report was redacted, and it was unrelated to Cho.
The Quinn Emanuel reports cites requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) as grounds for redacting information about Jones?
Why did HIPPA and FERPA apply to Jones in 2025 but not to Cho in 2007?
A second question goes unanswered: what happened to the Dean of Students Robyn Hadley? UVA tersely announced her resignation with a week’s notice, effective Aug. 1, 2023 — around the time the shooting investigations were drawing to a close but before the final drafts were shared with UVA officialdom. No explanation was given for Hadley’s departure. Although she made history as the University’s first Black female dean, no hagiographic profiles were written of her two years at UVA. Basically, she disappeared down the memory hole.
The 12 required members of the Threat Assessment Team included three departmental representatives who reported to Hadley directly or indirectly: one from Student Affairs, one from the Office of Equal Opportunity & Civil Rights, and one from Counseling & Psychological Services. Did Hadley intervene in the threat assessment process? Was her involvement, if any, a potential liability or embarrassment to the Ryan administration?
The public will never know.
