For today's front-page story, three Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters and a deputy news editor spent Wednesday and Thursday in Blacksburg reviewing about 20,000 pages of documents related to the April 16, 2007, massacre of 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty.

The documents are what Tech produced for the legal settlement this year with families of the victims and survivors.

The Times-Dispatch gained access to the documents through a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request. Here's how our journalists pursued the story:

"After the state settled with families of the victims of April 16, their lawyers shared a few of the documents they found in their requests for documents -- some of which suggested that at least one administrator had locked down her offices in the critical minutes before [gunman Seung-Hui Cho] started shooting in Norris Hall, where he would kill 30 people and then himself," according to reporter David Ress, who covered the June 17 settlement.

"The lawyers said these e-mails and a handwritten note showing the first campuswide alert had been toned down were only part of what they'd found in seven boxes of documents."

That information put Ress' investigative instincts into high gear. "I knew The T-D, with our traditional concern for accountability in public office, would want to see what was there," he said.

"And I knew from chatting with one of the parents of the April 16 shooting . . . that getting the truth out about that day was a key motivation for the settlement, which requires the university to compile an archive of documents for public inspection."

So Ress sent a request under FOIA to look at the documents the lawyers were given.

Virginia Tech agreed to make the documents available for three days, beginning Wednesday, or we could get copies of them at 50 cents per page. We chose to go to Blacksburg.

Equipped with their own laptop computers and a fax from the home office, Ress, Carlos Santos, Rex Bowman, and John Hoke headed over to Tech's Burruss Hall on Wednesday morning. Ress, Santos, and Bowman reported from Blacksburg after the shootings last year. Santos is stationed in Charlottesville, Bowman in Roanoke. Ress and Hoke, a deputy news editor, are based in Richmond.

When they arrived at Burruss, there were five boxes waiting along with a Virginia Tech official who was present throughout their two-day visit.

They were told two more boxes would come later. The contents were still being reviewed to make sure confidential materials -- the university president's working papers, student records, and material covered by attorney-client privilege -- were not included.

"There were no indices. No file folders. No organization," Ress said.

Each of them took a box and started reading. Initially, they were looking for documents from the day itself, especially the proceedings of the policy group of senior officials who were deciding how to protect the campus, and any e-mail traffic.

Even for four colleagues, inspecting more than 20,000 pages of documents is a daunting task. Santos said he found the experience fascinating. "Looking at the documents, at times I got an unvarnished glimpse into how school officials reacted during the crisis. That's important because the public needs to know how those entrusted with public safety go about their job."

But about halfway through the first afternoon, Ress said, "We found something else. It was what Sherlock Holmes once called the mystery of the dog that didn't bark. Things that should have been there -- e-mails, notes, reviews of earlier incidents -- simply weren't. We knew because the first document we found was a list of what the lawyers had asked for."

The university told the reporters that exemptions to the FOIA allowed it to keep secret many of the most important documents surrounding the event, such as Tech President Charles W. Steger's e-mails and notes and Cho's school records. "The exemptions cited -- presidential working papers, lawyer/client privilege and federal privacy laws -- made us wonder if the official investigation team got to see everything. They told us they think they saw everything that mattered," Ress said.

One thing was very clear to Hoke. "Virginia Tech from the start was focused on controlling the message in the face of withering media scrutiny. A significant proportion of the documents related to press management," he said.

Bowman, too, was struck by the effort Tech put into protecting its image and managing the message. "Some of the documents included synopses of press reports along with assessments of whether the reports were 'positive,' 'neutral' or 'negative,'" he said.

The reporters found as many questions as answers -- questions about accountability and, possibly, missed opportunities. They found a possible link Cho had to the site of the first killings, at West Ambler Johnston Hall. They also found that there was an unlocked door to Norris Hall that police, racing to get to the site of the massacre, never tried.

The Times-Dispatch's coverage of the initial tragedy and its continuing aftermath aims to give our readers access to all the information possible -- so they can understand what happened and make their own informed decisions about where responsibility rests.
Cheryl Magazine is Sunday editor. Contact her at (804) 649-6850 or cmagazine@timesdispatch.com.