Gerald Massengill, the former Virginia State Police superintendent who was called out of retirement to lead the state’s review of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, died Wednesday.
As head of the state police, Massengill was also in charge of the state’s response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Washington, D.C., sniper attacks in 2002 that left 10 people dead, three of them in Virginia. Massengill was in his early 80s when he died; his exact age wasn’t available.
In a statement Wednesday, Gov. Glenn Youngkin said that Massengill showed “steadfast leadership during pivotal moments” and that he served as “a mentor and inspiration to many in law enforcement.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he was grateful for Massengill’s “decades of service to the Commonwealth, including leading the panel I assembled following the mass shooting at Virginia Tech. He was a dedicated public servant and he will be greatly missed.”
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., issued a statement in which he praised Massengill as “a steady hand during moments of crisis.”
Massengill worked for the state police from 1966 until his retirement in 2003. He was appointed head of the state police by Gov. Jim Gilmore and continued to serve under then-Gov. Warner. In retirement, Massengill was twice called upon by Virginia governors to deal with sensitive problems.
When a scandal rocked the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and the top leadership was forced out, Warner tapped Massengill as the agency’s interim head.
When a Virginia Tech student shot and killed 32 people in 2007, and then killed himself, then-Gov. Kaine called on Massengill to lead a special commission that reviewed every aspect of the massacre and the response to it. The Roanoke Times said the 260-page report the commission produced was “an exhaustive account that spared no criticism. Nor did it echo what others had already said — a sign of intellectual independence. It also made a long list of recommendations, on seemingly every aspect of the shooting.” Although the commission was officially known as the Virginia Tech Review Panel, the report it produced was often called simply “The Massengill Report.”di
In 2019, after another mass shooting in Virginia Beach, the administration of then-Gov. Ralph Northam announced it had conducted a six-week review of the commission’s report and found that the state had fully or partially adopted 74 of its 91 recommendations. Thirteen more were directed at the federal government. Another recommendation was never mandated but was enacted anyway — a recommendation that campus police train for how to deal with active shooters.
That left three recommendations not acted upon. One dealt with a relatively minor organizational matter; another that dealt with the reporting of certain incidents to university officials was found to violate federal privacy laws. The biggest recommendation not implemented dealt with the so-called gun show loophole. The Massengill commission advised: “Virginia should require background checks for all firearms sales, including those at gun shows.” The General Assembly eventually passed a law on background checks, which Northam signed into law, in 2020.