Blacksburg, Va. – The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a loner who alarmed professors and classmates with his violence-drenched creative writing and left a rambling note raging against women and rich kids.
A chilling picture emerged Tuesday of Cho Seung-Hui – a 23-year- old senior majoring in English – a day after the bloodbath that left 33 people dead, including Cho, who killed himself as police closed in.
News reports said that he may have been taking medication for depression and that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic.
Despite the many warning signs that came to light in the bloody aftermath, police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set Cho off on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
“He was a loner, and we’re having difficulty finding information about him,” school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity- and violence-laced screenplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chain saw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
“When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence,” former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote on a blog. He said he and other students “were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”
“We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something,” said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. “But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”
Cho alarmed Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class she taught in fall 2005, Giovanni said. Cho took pictures of students during class and wrote about death, she said.
“Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made all of us pay attention closely. None of us were comfortable with that,” she said.
Days later, only seven of Giovanni’s 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked students why the others didn’t show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho.
“Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something,” she said.
She told Cho he needed to change the type of poems he was writing or drop her class. Giovanni said Cho declined to leave and said, “You can’t make me.”
Giovanni said she appealed to then- chairwoman Lucinda Roy, who then taught Cho one-on-one.
Roy, 51, said she urged Cho to seek counseling and told him she would walk to the counseling center with him. He said he would think about it.
Roy said she warned school officials. She said they were responsive and sympathetic but indicated that because Cho had made no direct threats, there was little they could do.
An eight-page rant
Cho – who arrived in the U.S. as a boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., where his parents worked at a dry cleaners – left a note that was found after the killings.
A law enforcement official who read Cho’s note described it Tuesday as a typed, eight-page rant against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus. The official spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
“You caused me to do this,” the official quoted the note as saying.
Cho indicated in his letter that the end was near and that there was a deed to be done, the official said. He also expressed disappointment in his own religion and made several references to Christianity, the official said.
Young-Hwan Kim, president of the Korean Campus Crusade for Christ, said his group had tried repeatedly to get Cho involved in its activities.
“We had no contact throughout four years,” Kim said. “We could not reach out to him.”
Citing unidentified sources, the Chicago Tribune reported Cho had recently set a fire in a dorm room and had stalked some women.
Not even Cho’s suitemates knew him well. “He was always really, really quiet and kind of weird, keeping to himself all the time,” said Joe Aust, a 19-year-old sophomore who shared a room with Cho in their six-person suite. “Just antisocial, didn’t talk to anybody. I tried to make conversation with him in August or so, and he would just give one-word answers and not try and carry on the conversation.”
He said it was a creepy quietness.
“I would notice a lot of times, I would come in the room and he would kind of be sitting at his desk, just staring at nothing,” he said.
A suitemate said he saw Cho enter the bathroom early Monday. “He was, like, normal,” Karan Grewal, 21, said.
According to school officials, Cho even took time to post a deadly warning on a school online forum.
“im going to kill people at vtech today,” they said he wrote.
Inscription on arm
Monday’s rampage consisted of two attacks, more than two hours apart – first at a dorm, where two people were killed, then inside a classroom building, where 31, including Cho, died.
Law enforcement sources said Cho died with the words “Ismale Ax” in red ink on one of his arms, but they were not sure what that meant.
According to court papers, police found a “bomb threat” note – directed at engineering school buildings – near the victims in the classroom building. In the past three weeks, Virginia Tech had two other bomb threats. Investigators have not connected those earlier threats to Cho.
Cho graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., in 2003. His family lived in a two-story townhouse in Centreville. His parents are in seclusion. Cho’s sister, Sun Cho, graduated from Princeton University with a degree in economics in 2004 and works as a State Department contractor.
His only previous contact with the law was a recent speeding ticket, federal sources said.
“He was very quiet, always by himself,” former neighbor Abdul Shash said. Shash said Cho would not respond if someone greeted him.
Classmates painted a similar picture. Some said that on the first day of a British literature class last year, the students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak. On the sign-in sheet where all the others had written their names, Cho had written a question mark.
“Is your name ‘Question mark’?” classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.
“He didn’t reach out to anyone. He never talked,” Poole said. “We just really knew him as the question mark kid.”
Two handguns – a 9mm and a .22-caliber – were found in the classroom building. One law enforcement official said Cho’s backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9mm pistol. Cho held a green card, meaning he was a legal permanent resident and eligible to buy a handgun.
Roanoke Firearms owner John Markell said his shop sold the Glock and a box of practice ammo to Cho 36 days ago for $571. “He was a nice, clean-cut college kid,” Markell said. “We won’t sell a gun if we have any idea at all that a purchase is suspicious.”
The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and McClatchy Newspapers contributed to this report.
A KILLER’S WORDS
Police say that Cho Seung-Hui apparently did not leave a suicide note, but that they recovered many pages of writing from his dorm room.
One paper was described as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion.
“You caused me to do this,” he reportedly wrote in the note.
The note railed against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on campus, according to the Chicago Tribune.
FROM CHO’S PLAYS
Ian MacFarlane, a former classmate and current AOL employee, posted two plays on AOL.com that the online service said it had verified as being written by Cho.
“Richard McBeef”
In this play, a 13-year-old boy accuses his stepfather, Richard McBeef, of pedophilia and of murdering his natural father. He expresses nonstop hatred for him and sits alone in his room, smiling as he tosses darts at McBeef’s portrait.
JOHN
I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die … You don’t think I can kill you, Dick? You don’t think I can kill you?”
Hearing the boy’s accusations, his mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. Later, the boy shoves a cereal bar down the stepfather’s throat. Finally losing his patience, McBeef hits the boy and kills him.
“Mr. Brownstone”
In this play, three high-school students go to a casino, complaining about their abusive teacher.
JOHN
I’d like to kill him.
JANE
I’ll be (expletive) if he doesn’t die. I wish the old fart would have a heart attack and drop dead like old people are supposed to.
JOHN
Make room for the new generation, you old fart!
The students win a $5 million jackpot, but the teacher turns them in for being underage and then claims the winnings for himself.
