Four months after a 26-year-old walked into Seattle Pacific University and opened fire, killing one student and injuring two others, a junior at SPU has started an online petition calling on local TV stations not to release surveillance video of the shooting. The number of signatories has reached 1,434 in the last ten days—many of them SPU students, staff, and alumni.

Andrew Bell, the student who launched the petition, says he read my piece this summer exploring the legal battle between local TV stations and the university over the release of the video, and looking at whether media coverage of school shootings leads to more of them. The shooting video became subject to public disclosure laws after SPU turned it over to the Seattle Police Department as evidence, but Bell sees no value in journalists releasing or obtaining the footage. "I've been here almost every weekday since the shooting occurred," he told me. "It's still very real to me, and to many of the people that I know."

The new school year began late last month, and Otto Miller Hall, where the shooting took place, reopened. On October 8, The Falcon, the SPU student newspaper, published an article about the case, which is now before the Washington State Court of Appeals.

Bell's petition names KIRO, KOMO, KING, and Q13 FOX and asks them to "withdraw their public disclosure requests, and commit to not show or distribute those tapes online, over the airwaves, or in any other medium." It provides two reasons to do this: (1) Releasing video will lead to copycat crimes (The SPU shooter has said he was inspired by the Columbine and Virgina Tech killers), and (2) Releasing the video will inflict further trauma on the victims.

Several people who signed the petition identify themselves as friends or parents of friends of Paul Lee, the 19-year-old freshman who died in the shooting. A foundation to support mental health treatment has been started in his name.

Selina Chart, an SPU student, added this comment to the petition when she signed: "This video does not need to be released. Students, faculty, staff, family, and friends all know what happened that day. We all are in different stages of healing. We don't need to see this video that will only bring us pain."

"I was actually the one who personally saw Paul outside on the street," writes Abigail Danao, a former SPU engineering student. "I was the last to talk to him. That whole scene gave me enough trauma already. If that video is released, it would just bring back memories... I've been suffering from mild depression and I am really trying the best I can to stop. This petition is really great."

For my piece this summer, I asked editors from each of Seattle's TV stations why they were seeking the video and what they planned to do with it. Only Q13 news director Erica Hill got back to me. "Our access to the video is so that we can evaluate that as journalists," she said. "If we did obtain the video, we would follow our procedures of deciding what, if any, news value there would be in airing it. If there is no news value, we would not. If there is news value, we would communicate the reasons why to our viewers and handle it responsibly."