Virginia Tech Killer Sends Chilling Tape To U.S. Network

The specific nature of Cho Seung-Hui’s motivation for the murders of 32 Virginia Tech staff and students and his subsequent suicide have been the source of great speculation since Monday’s tragedy.

Now it looks like we may soon have a few answers.

Sometime after Cho Seung-Hui killed two people in a Virginia Tech dormitory and prior to the time he returned to a university classroom and opened fire killing 30 more, the 23-year-old English student sent NBC News images and videos dealing with his grievances.

The network has turned the tapes over to the FBI, but has released some of the contents.

There’s a nearly 2,000-word statement that deals with his rage and his need to get even. It’s filled with profanity and hatred and shows him posing with his guns aimed at the camera.

For Canadians, some of the shots are frighteningly familiar. They eerily echo similar photos of Kimveer Gill, the gunman who ambushed students at Dawson College in Montreal last fall.

Other pictures show Cho with a knife pointed at the lens, the same weapon at his own throat, and brandishing a large hammer.

In most of the shots, the killer looks grim and tough, with a giant sneer on his face.

In the most startling of all the photos, Cho is holding one of his weapons against his own temple. 

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” he’s quoted as saying in one of the videos. “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.”

“When the time came, I did it,” he mumbles later. “I had to.”

He rails against the wealthy, insisting they were behind his final actions.

And at one point, in a statement that makes no sense, he admits he didn’t have to do this and then claims that he “did it for his children.”

Cho was never married, had few – if any -girlfriends and did not have any kids.  

The package is time stamped as being mailed at 9:01am, two hours after his inital shooting at the dorm but before he headed to Norris Hall and his date with infamy. It solves the mystery of where he was during that long interval.

“This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation. We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth,” said Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police.

It’s the latest hint about the troubled past of a man who may never be understood.

It was also revealed on Wednesday that Cho was known to police, spent time in a mental institution and had a history of bothering women.

The university’s chief of police, Wendell Flinchum, admitted that in the fall of 2005, two females filed complaints regarding Cho, and said they wanted him stopped.

Flinchum said Cho did nothing to threaten or harm the duo, but said they weren’t comfortable with his contact.

Nether of the women who complained were among Cho’s victims.

After contact with the second woman, an acquaintance of the reclusive English student suggested he might be suicidal.

In the end though, he was so much more than that.

Cho went on a shooting rampage on the university’s Blacksburg, Virginia campus Monday, killing two people before returning later to continue the bloodbath.

When the dust settled, Cho had killed 32 others before taking his own life.

Since the horrific incident, it’s become known that Cho was also admitted to a mental institution for a time.

“Out of concern for Cho, officers asked him to speak with a councillor,” Flinchum said.

“He went voluntarily to the police department. Based on that interaction with a councillor, a temporary detention order was obtained and Cho was taken to a mental health facility.”

A district court in Montgomery County ruled Cho was either a danger to himself or to others — which was necessary to gain the detention order — and he was evaluated by a state doctor and ordered to undergo outpatient care.

But prior to Monday, the only other behaviour reported of Cho was that some of his English assignments were disturbing, and that one professor suggested he receive the counselling that seems to have made so little difference.

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