Many people had a glimpse of the deep delusions and festering anger of Jared L. Loughner, but none seemed in a better position to connect the dots than officials at Pima Community College.
After the release of detailed reports on Mr. Loughner’s bizarre outbursts and violent Internet fantasies that the college had kept, the focus has turned to whether it did all it could to prevent his apparent descent into explosive violence last weekend.
In September, Pima had suspended Mr. Loughner and told him not to return without a psychologist’s letter certifying that he posed no danger. But it took no steps to mandate that he have a psychiatric evaluation, which in Arizona is easier than in many states.
Laura J. Waterman, the clinical director of the Southern Arizona Mental Health Corporation in Tucson, criticized Pima officials for not initiating an involuntary evaluation.
“Where does it reach a level where you say this person shouldn’t be a part of any community and we have a responsibility to do something about that?” she said. The clinic, which offers walk-in psychiatric crisis care regardless of a patient’s ability to pay, is one of the agencies Pima students are referred to when they need mental health services, including students who have been suspended like Mr. Loughner.
No record of Mr. Loughner seeking or receiving mental health care has surfaced.
“It is part of our practice to provide students with information of where they can go,” said Charlotte Fugett, an official at the college. “It’s their responsibility to find a practitioner.”
Pima, a low-cost community college with 68,400 nonresidential students, has no mental health center of its own, which at other colleges can make it easier to connect needy students to psychologists and psychiatrists.
Loughner's behavior 'not a crime'
Paul Schwalbach, a college spokesman, said Mr. Loughner’s “behavior, while clearly disturbing, was not a crime, and we dealt with it in a way that protected our students and our employees.”
Pima has introduced policies to deal with disturbed students — similar to ones that swept campuses across the country after several deadly shootings, including the killing of 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007.
Last year Pima overhauled its procedure for campus disruptions, creating a team of senior officials to identify students who pose a threat to themselves or others. The team began meeting the same month that Mr. Loughner was suspended.
Paradoxically, suspending Mr. Loughner may have pushed him further over the edge by adding to his grievances and isolating him from adults who could monitor him, said experts on campus violence.
Gene Deisinger, the director of threat management at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., speaking in general about the dismissal of a disruptive student, said, "We should never treat that as a panacea that increases our safety.
''When Virginia Tech removes a threatening student or staff member - as it does about a dozen times a year - campus police or sometimes a psychologist now monitor the person's progress when it is practical and merited.
Marisa Randazzo, who co-wrote a sweeping 2002 federal study of school violence in the wake of the Columbine shootings, said that most shooters experience a personal loss before their outbursts.
If a school expels a threatening student, “you are now adding to the person’s losses even if you’re within your legal rights to do so,” she said. “At the same time you’re losing your own ability to keep an eye on their behavior or have a positive effect.”
Mr. Loughner, 22, who has been accused of killing six and wounding 14, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, at a Safeway store in Tucson on Saturday, did not return to his former campus or workplace for his shooting spree.
On the hillside West Campus where Mr. Loughner took many of his classes from 2005 to 2010, a group of students on break Wednesday expressed competing views of the college’s handling of him.
Moises Melgarejo, 18, wondered if the act of suspending Mr. Loughner did not leave him precariously unrooted. “He wasn’t going to school, he wasn’t working, he was just sitting at home thinking whatever he was thinking.”
But Tyler Badilla, 20, said he would not have been comfortable around such a student. “What if he had stayed here and it wasn’t Giffords” he attacked?, he said. “What if it was another school shooting?”
Pima’s updated response to threatening students “is a daily balancing act,” said Ms. Fugett, the president of one of Pima’s half-dozen campuses spread around Tucson. “It deals with rights and freedoms of an individual versus the collective good of the whole.”
Threat teams ramped up
The nationwide adoption of campus threat teams — which typically meet once a week on large campuses, often below the radar of students — has been rapid since investigations of the Virginia Tech massacre showed that many people and departments had clear signs of the instability of the shooter, Seung Hui Cho, but no one connected the information.
Virginia passed a law requiring public colleges and universities to establish multidiscipline threat-evaluation teams. So did Illinois after a former student at Northern Illinois University returned to a lecture hall and killed five students and himself in 2008.
Today more than half of the country’s 4,500 colleges and universities “acknowledge the need and have formed some capacity” to formally assess student threats, said Steven Healy, a former Princeton University police chief, who leads training programs in threat assessment under a grant from the Justice Department. On Tuesday he was leading a workshop for 70 educators in Phoenix, which he began with a moment of silence for the Tucson shooting victims.
At Virginia Tech, a group predating the April 2007 killings, called the Care Team, discussed issues like financial aid and family crises with students.
Now the Threat Assessment Team — a national model, whose members include the dean of students; the director of counseling; a university lawyer; and Dr. Deisinger, a psychologist who also holds the title of deputy police chief — meets weekly, discussing 9 to 20 cases. These include students who have made threats to an estranged lover, sometimes online, or more mundane cases of a student who is withdrawn and despondent.
Sanctions can include suspension, but that is a last resort. A campus Web site about the threat team answers a hypothetical question, “Can’t you just make people leave campus if they are a problem?” in this way: “When people remain part of the Virginia Tech community, on-campus resources are available to them, and campus administrators are in contact with them to provide support they might not have if they were removed from campus.”
Finding clues
A finding of Dr. Randazzo’s study of 37 incidents of school violence, “Threat Assessment in Schools,” published by the United States Department of Education and the Secret Service, was that shooters often leave clues that a peer might ignore, but that a concerned adult would notice.
In Arizona, patients can be sent involuntarily for a mental health exam after a concerned party — anyone from a teacher to a parent to a friend — applies for a court-ordered evaluation, which can lead to mandated treatment.
Stella Bay, the police chief for Pima college, said the it could not initiate an involuntary evaluation without evidence that a student poses “an imminent danger.”
“That would be the only way we can do that,” she said.
The assertion seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the state’s laws regarding involuntary evaluations. Ms. Waterman, of the Southern Arizona Mental Health Corporation, said a commitment procedure only required some evidence of danger.
“It’s a broader standard,” she added. “And it costs nothing to make a phone call and talk about it and consult with a professional.”
Since the weekend shootings, the number of applications for such evaluations at Ms. Waterman’s clinic has increased, she said, presumably because of widespread awareness of the issue now.
In fact, Ms. Bay called in a case on Monday about a student at Pima who threatened to cause harm on campus, according to Ms. Waterman.
The police brought the student to a hospital for an evaluation.
This article, "College’s Policy on Troubled Students Raises Questions," first appeared in The New York Times.
