Professors: Cho was very troubled

BLACKSBURG, VA (WIS) - Investigators in Virginia are still pouring through the background of the 23-year-old responsible for Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech University.

Meanwhile, students and faculty concentrated on the victims last night.

Classes have been canceled for the week, but thousands turned out for a candlelight vigil, students and faculty both hoping Virginia Tech will recover and survive.

Virginia Tech Junior Jessica Galyn said, "Once it starts to hit, you have so many emotions, you don't know how to deal with them."

Blacksburg Resident Chris Lugar said, "You see more anger today than you did yesterday."

A very troubling picture is emerging of the man responsible for the deadliest shooting rampage in US history.

Virginia Tech creative writing professor Lucinda Roy told NBC's "Today" show that Cho Seung-Hui was one of the most disturbed students she had ever seen. Roy says she tried to get help for Cho and wishes more could have been done.

Professors and classmates were alarmed by the violence and perversion in his class writings. One former classmate says he and others were seriously worried that Cho could be a school shooter.

Acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni, who was one of Cho's professors, told CNN that her students were so unnerved by Cho's behavior that she had security check on her room and eventually had him taken out of her class.

One of Cho's suite mates told ABC's "Good Morning America" that he wasn't friendly and would just give one-word answers.

A former classmate says the screenplays Cho wrote for a class they took together were like "something out of a nightmare." Ian MacFarlane says he and other students were seriously worried about whether Cho "could be a school shooter."

A report in South Korea says the family of Cho Seung-Hui struggled in South Korea and moved to the US to seek a better life.

South Korea's largest newspaper reports that Cho Seung Hui's family was poor when they lived in a Seoul suburb and lived in a rented, basement apartment. They came to the US in
1992.

The apartment owner says Cho's father told him it would be better to live in "a place where he is unknown."

Meanwhile, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun held a special meeting to discuss the shooting, as some people expressed shame that a South Korean has been identified as the gunman. Others are worried it might trigger racial hatred.

South Korea has more students studying in the US than any other country does, according to immigration statistics.

College students across the country are holding vigils for those killed Monday at Virginia Tech.

At Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, a student rang a hand-held bell 33 times inside the school's chapel. Student body president Scott Gordon says he and the others at the memorial
Tuesday are keeping the shooting victims "in our thoughts and prayers."

At Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, the services were for victim Daniel O'Neil, who graduated from Lafayette last May and was a grad student at Virginia Tech. School president Daniel Weiss, in a posting on Lafayette's Web site, says O'Neil's death has left a "deep sense of loss in our community."

At the University of Texas, the campus clock tower will remain dark each night through Thursday to honor the Virginia Tech victims. It was from that 27-story tower in 1966 that sniper
Charles Whitman gunned down 16 people.

Until Monday, the deadliest campus shooting in US history took place in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman killed 16 people from the observation deck of a clock tower.

At Columbine High in 1999, two teen-agers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher, then took their own lives.

It's the second time in less than a year that the campus was closed because of a shooting.

Last August, the opening day of classes was canceled and the campus closed when an escaped jail inmate allegedly killed a hospital guard off campus and fled to the Tech area.

Virginia Tech is nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia, about 160 miles west of Richmond. The campus is centered around the Drill Field, a grassy field where military cadets once practiced. The dorm and the classroom building where the victims were shot are on opposites sides of the Drill Field.

Virginia Tech officials have canceled classes for the rest of the week. The school's president says it's to give students a chance to mourn.

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