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Wait a minute here. Exactly how was the Virginia Tech administration and/or police supposed to determine that a single shooting in a dormitory early in the morning would lead to a massacre two hours later on the other side of campus?
The RAs told the students in AJ to stay in their rooms. This makes sense because they don't want the students to get hurt in the case the gunman is still in the building. The police converged on AJ to try and catch the gunman there, not knowing that he had since left.
As for the email, the police probably wanted time to investigate and create a crime scene before announcing the problem to the rest of the community. They didn't want people showing up at the scene of the crime until they had it secured and they didn't want the gunman to get away while there was a chance he was still near AJ. It is a horrible coincidence that the shooting was announced via email maybe 5 minutes before the gunman killed all of the students in Norris.
Hell, why not just suggest that the 9:26 AM email is the direct causal action of the gunman for killing all of the people in Norris (i.e. gunman read the email and then decided to go on a rampage directly because of it)? It makes as much sense (read: none at all).
Allie Jarett, a resident of AJ, says if they had cancelled class, 30 people would still be alive. Michelle Billman stated no one [had been] notified that something had happened at 7. We went onto a dangerous campus not knowing." Thank you, 20/20 hindsight! What if there was a single murder, the one at 7:15? That would be a tragedy in its own right, but would have it been enough to lock down the campus?
Virginia Tech had something like this happen at the beginning of the school year when William Marvo, a convicted felon, escaped and shot a sherrif's deputy. They locked down the school because an armed convict was known to be on the campus and the school wanted to protect the students. This time, all the school knew was that a girl had been murdered in her room. They could not foresee the gunman making his way over to a building full of classrooms, waiting two hours for people to arrive and sit down, and then go on a shooting spree.
