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AP - April 20, 2007
Virginia Tech Shooter a 'Textbook Killer'
By MATT APUZZO and SHARON COHEN
BLACKSBURG, Va. - In high school, Cho Seung-Hui almost never opened his mouth. When he finally did, his classmates laughed, pointed at him and said: "Go back to China."
As such details of the Virginia Tech shooter's life come out, and experts pore over his sick and twisted writings and his videotaped rant, it is becoming increasingly clear that Cho was almost a textbook case of a school shooter: a painfully awkward, picked-on young man who lashed out with methodical fury at a world he believed was out to get him.
"In virtually every regard, Cho is prototypical of mass killers that I've studied in the past 25 years," said Northeastern University criminal justice professor James Alan Fox, co-author of 16 books on crime. "That doesn't mean, however, that one could have predicted his rampage."
When criminologists and psychologists look at mass murders, Cho fits the themes they see repeatedly: a friendless figure, someone who has been bullied, someone who blames others and is bent on revenge, a careful planner, a male. And someone who sent up warning signs with his strange behavior long in advance.
Among other things, the 23-year-old South Korean immigrant was sent to a psychiatric hospital and pronounced an imminent danger to himself. He was accused of stalking two women and photographing female students in class with his cell phone. And his violence-filled writings were so disturbing he was removed from one class, and professors begged him to get counseling. He rarely looked anyone in the eye and did not even talk to his own roommates.
Cho, who killed 32 people and committed suicide at the Blacksburg campus Monday, cast himself in his video diatribe as a persecuted figure like Jesus Christ. Cho, who came to the U.S. at about age 8 in 1992 and whose parents worked at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington, also ranted against rich "brats" with Mercedes, gold necklaces, cognac and trust funds.
Classmates in Virginia, where Cho grew up, said he was teased and picked on, apparently because of shyness and his strange, mumbly way of speaking. Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.
Stephanie Roberts, 22, a classmate of Cho's at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school. But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with him told her they recalled him getting bullied there. "There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him," Roberts said. "He didn't speak English really well and they would really make fun of him."
Cho's great aunt, who lives in South Korea, said Thursday that because he did not speak much as a child and after the family emigrated to the United States, doctors thought he may be autistic. "Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold," Kim Yang-soon said in an interview with AP Television News. "When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism."
Neither school officials, who have his educational records, nor police who have his medical records, have mentioned such a diagnosis this week. Autistic individuals often have difficulty communicating, but such a diagnosis would not necessarily explain his violence.
Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, said she was sure Cho probably was picked on in middle school, but so was everyone else. And it didn't seem as if English was the problem for him, she said. If he didn't speak English well, there were several other Korean students he could have reached out to for friendship, but he didn't.
http://news. yahoo.com/ s/ap/20070420/ ap_on_re_ us/virginia_ tech_shooting
Independent - 19 April 19, 2007
Killer sent photographs and video
to broadcaster between shootings
By Andrew Gumbel
The man who shot dead 32 people at Virginia Tech took time out after committing the first two murders to post pictures and video to a national television network, police revealed yesterday.
Korean-Born English student Cho Seung-Hui sent a CD-Rom containing video footage of himself reading out an 1,800-word profanity-laced tirade about " getting even" and 29 digital photographs of himself brandishing weapons, 11 of which show him pointing a gun at the camera.
NBC Nightly News last night broadcasted excerpts of the video, in which Cho said: "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to avoid today. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
The package helped answer one of the many mysteries surrounding Cho and his motives why there was a two-hour time lag between the first two killings and the rest of them, which took place in a teaching building housing the engineering department.
It surfaced on a day when numerous warning signs that Cho was psychologically troubled and prone to unusual and alarming behaviour were revealed. Campus police disclosed that he had been investigated for the sexual harassment of two students 17 months ago and was admitted to hospital after he was diagnosed with suicidal depression.
One of his teachers threatened to quit her job if he did not get out of her class. The chair of the English department sat down with him and expressed concern to her superiors. The students who reported him complained he had taken inappropriate photographs of them with his phone.
University officials said that nothing about his behaviour hinted at the kind of criminal enterprise he carried out. The women who complained to the police never filed charges, and one them described his actions as " annoying" rather than threatening.
The police have confirmed he left behind a typed eight-page note in which he railed against "rich kids" and what he saw as double standards on campus. "You caused me to do this," he wrote at one point. This appeared to be same text as read out in the video.
The New York Times also reported that prescription drugs used to treat psychological disorders were found among his effects. Almost every perpetrator of a mass shooting in the United States in recent years had either been on prescription drugs or had stopped taking them shortly before erupting in violence.
Cho's behaviour first became an issue in November 2005, when his angry, profanity-laced creative writing alarmed a number of English faculty members. Lucinda Roy, then the faculty chair, sent samples of his writing to the campus police and counselling services. Professor Roy also encouraged Cho to seek help. "But I couldn't force him to do it," she said. She felt that he might be suicidal. And she described talking to him as " like talking to a hole ... he was not really there".
Nikki Giovanni, a noted poet who teaches at Virginia Tech, said she became alarmed because Cho's behaviour and writing were causing other students to drop out of her class. "I was willing to resign before I was going to continue with him," she told CNN. She told him to stop writing what he was writing. "He said, 'You can't make me'," she said. "He was writing just weird things. I saw the plays, but he was writing poetry, it was intimidating."
After the complaints by the two female students, Cho spoke voluntarily to the police and was escorted to the Carilion Saint Albans Behavioural Health Centre, a mental health institution.
None of that, of course, provides a motive for the shootings. The two women who complained to the campus police were not among the victims. Neither were any immediately obvious classmates or professors. There is still no explanation, either, of why the shootings began in a residential hall and continued, two hours later, in the teaching building. After the first attacks, campus police suspected the boyfriend of the first victim, Emily Hilscher. The boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, was questioned and remains of interest to the investigation, police said. For the moment, though, they continue to presume that Cho acted alone.
Cho's words
* "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option..."
* "I didn't have to do it. I could have left. I could have fled. But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them..."
* "When the time came, I did it, I had to ... You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today ... you just want to crucify me ... But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
* "Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats ... Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2461395.ece
New York Times editorial - April 19, 2007
The Silence of Politicians
There are myriad questions from the evolving tragedy at Virginia Tech. One is how such a gravely disturbed student as this killer could raise heightened concern among the authorities over a year ago, yet manage to proceed unhindered to take 32 lives. But no less pertinent is the question of how, after detailed tracking of the guns purchased for the ghastly spree, the lethal empowerment of such a troubled individual can somehow be pronounced entirely legal under the laws of a civilized nation.
But it certainly seems legal.
The guns wielded by Cho Seung-Hui were traced through the laissez-faire weapons marts of Virginia and found to be legitimately obtained. So, case closed. At least according to most of the nation’s political leadership, so studiously ducking the morning-after question of whether anything serious can be done, or least proposed, about such an appalling situation. The victims at Virginia Tech represent a mere tenth of 1 percent of the 30,000 gunshot deaths each year.
Yet the implicit, hardly sorrow-free lesson for the nation is that beyond the usual calls for prayers and closure, there’s no sense these days for a politician, particularly one running for president, to get into the risky business of even talking about the runaway gun problem.
No one who tracked the last headline-consuming gun tragedies — the Columbine high school massacre and the Washington, D.C., sniper murders — can be surprised as political leaders slide off their obligation to propose answers, or at least candidly discuss the woeful status quo of gun violence.
After those two sprees, possible remedies were proposed. But none were passed as the gun lobby cracked its whip in Washington. The most that happened were delays in the passage of an egregious proposal, signed a safe time afterward by President Bush, that brazenly denied gunshot victims and plagued cities the right to sue the gun industry for negligence.
Politicians should at least have the guts to tell the nation that retrogression is the state of gun control in America. But Congress’s new Democratic majority is a study in caginess, its leaders obviously mindful of the warning — issued by Terry McAuliffe, the former party chairman who is now a principal in Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — to avoid the subject as a third-rail loser. The question in the ’08 campaign is whether major candidates will dare to speak of Virginia Tech as anything more than an occasion to express grief.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/opinion/19thu3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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