|
by Alex Johnson
Pictures From the Manifesto
MSNBC Reporter
Updated: 7:02 p.m. PT April 18, 2007
Sometime after he killed two people
in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in
a classroom building, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package
including photographs and videos Monday morning, boasting, “When the
time came, I did it. I had to.”
Cho, 23, a senior English major at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg,
killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.
NBC News President Steve Capus said
the package arrived in New York late Tuesday night and was delivered to
NBC headquarters about 11 a.m. Wednesday. The letter carrier noticed
that it bore a return address from Blacksburg and alerted NBC security
officers.
Cho’s name was not on the package;
instead, the return address said it came from “A Ishmael.” Investigators
said Cho’s body was found Monday with the words “Ismael Ax” scrawled on
his arm.
There was no indication why Cho
chose NBC News to receive the package, which was immediately turned over
to FBI agents in New York. Capus said NBC News was cooperating with
Virginia State Police and the FBI, which is assisting the state police.
The package included an 1,800-word
manifesto-like statement in which Cho expresses rage, resentment and a
desire to get even. The material is “hard to follow ... disturbing, very
disturbing,” Capus said in an interview late Wednesday afternoon.
The material does not include any
images of the shootings Monday, but it does contain vague references.
And it mentions “martyrs like Eric and Dylan” — apparently a reference
to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers who killed 12 students
and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., eight years
ago this coming Friday.
The material is deeply angry, crying
out against unspecified wrongs done to Cho in a diatribe laced with
profanity.
“I didn’t have to do this. I could
have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It’s not for
me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you f---, I did it
for them,” Cho says on one of the videos.
“When the time came, I did it. I had
to.”
Uneven but carefully produced
materials
Cho apparently took time out of his
rampage to send the package to the network. It bore a U.S. Postal
Service stamp recording that it had been received at a Virginia post
office at 9:01 a.m. ET Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho
shot two people in the West Ambler Johnston residence hall on the
Virginia Tech campus and shortly before he entered Norris Hall, where he
killed 30 more people.
“We probably would have received the
mail earlier had it not been that he had the wrong address and ZIP
code,” Capus said.
Among the materials was a DVD with
27 QuickTime video files, totaling about 10 minutes, showing Cho talking
directly to the camera. He does not name anyone specifically, but he
mentions “hedonism” and Christianity, and he talks at length about his
hatred of the wealthy.
“You had a hundred billion chances
and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says. “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.”
The production of the videos is
uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand
him. But they indicate that Cho had worked on the package for some time,
because he not only “took the time to record the videos, but he also
broke them down into snippets,” Capus said.
At times, Cho can be seen leaning
forward to turn off the camera, suggesting that he shot the videos
himself.
Karan Grewall, one of Cho’s
roommates, said Wednesday night that Cho appeared to have shot the
videos in their shared home.
It looks exactly like our common
areas where we hang out every day,” Grewall told MSNBC-TV’s Joe
Scarborough. “I can’t be sure, but the walls look exactly like our
suite.”
Chilling photographs
The package also includes 43
photographs. Cho looks like a normal, smiling college student in only
the first two. In the rest, he presents a stern face; in 11, he aims
handguns at the camera that are “consistent with what we’ve heard about
the guns in this incident,” Capus said.
Other photographs show Cho holding a
knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table.
“This may be a very new, critical
component of this investigation,” said Col. Steven Flaherty,
superintendent of Virginia State Police, the lead agency investigating
the shootings. “We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze
and evaluate its worth.”
The War Memorial Chapel on the
Virginia Tech campus was kept open through the night for students who
sought a place to reflect about the day.
|
Brittany Dufort, Student: I'm
really like speechless about it. It's such a weird feeling,
something I've never felt before, something that you know you see on TV
the Columbine and all the Amish shooting and stuff, and you think that's
really sad, and you say a prayer that they're in your thoughts for, you
know, a couple of weeks or, you know, whatever, but when it happens to
you you're like, "I can't believe. Am I dreaming? What's it
going to be like tomorrow?" I still don't know what's going to
happen tomorrow and, you know, for the weeks to come. I think it
will hit me real hard when we go back to class, and you're sitting
there, and you're wondering, "Am I safe?"
Kristy Walter, Student: It's
really scary because like anyone could do it. Like he was walking
around campus and nobody really noticed. And he went to two
different buildings. And hopefully people will come closer
together and like support each other through the hard times. I
think they'll make it through okay.
Brandon Stiltner, Student:
There's just all of these things coming at you at once, and you kind of
almost feel like I guess like a deer in the headlights, you don't know
what to do. Like, "Do I run? Do I stand here? I'm
blind." At first I was like I was trying to comprehend, and
everybody was calling at that point. My phone has probably rung
more today than it has all year. I was, and still am, pretty
angry. And it's just senseless. I don't know why anybody
would do it. I don't understand. I don't think there's any
reason whatsoever, any reasoning that can make somebody do this.
|
Detention order issued
As early as 2005, police and school
administrators were wrestling with what to do with Cho, who was accused
of sending inappropriate messages to two female students and was sent to
a mental health facility after police obtained a temporary detention
order.
The two women complained to campus
police that Cho was contacting them with “annoying” telephone calls and
e-mail messages in November and December 2005, campus Police Chief
Wendell Flinchum said.
Cho was referred to the university’s
disciplinary system, but Flinchum said the woman declined to press
charges, and the case apparently never reached a hearing.
However, after the second incident,
the department received a call from an acquaintance of Cho’s, who was
concerned that he might be suicidal, Flinchum said. Police obtained a
temporary detention order from a local magistrate, and in December of
that year, Cho was briefly admitted to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral
Health Center in Radford, NBC News’ Jim Popkin reported.
To issue a detention order under
Virginia law, a magistrate must find both that the subject is “mentally
ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment” and that the subject is
“an imminent danger to himself or others, or is so seriously mentally
ill as to be substantially unable to care for himself.”
According to a doctor’s report
accompanying the order, which was obtained by NBC News, Cho was
“depressed,” but “his insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor, a
clinical psychologist, noted that Cho “denies suicidal ideations.” Cho
was released.
Under the law, the magistrate could
have issued a stronger detention order mandating inpatient treatment,
but there was no indication Wednesday that such an order was ever
entered. A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans told NBC News that he could
not discuss Cho’s case because of patient confidentiality and privacy
laws, but he said the hospital was cooperating with the investigation.
Otherwise, Flinchum said, there were
no further police incidents involving Cho until the deadly shootings
Monday, first in a young woman’s dormitory room and then at a classroom
building across campus. Neither of the alleged stalking victims was
among the victims Monday.
In addition to the 33 people
confirmed dead, including the gunman, nine people remained in hospitals
in stable condition, hospital authorities said.
Health records sought
Campus police applied Wednesday for
search warrants for all of Cho’s medical records from Schiffert Health
Center on campus and New River Community Services in Blacksburg.
”It is reasonable to believe that
the medical records may provide evidence of motive, intent and designs,”
investigators wrote in the documents.
Police searched Cho’s dorm room
Tuesday and recovered, among other items, a chain and a combination
lock, according to documents filed Wednesday. The front doors of Norris
Hall, the classroom building, had been chained shut from the inside
during the shooting rampage.
In an affidavit seeking the warrant
to search the room, 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 received two other
bomb threats; investigators said they had not connected those to Cho.
Family sought better life in
U.S.
Cho arrived in the United States as
an 8-year-old boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in an
off-white, two-story townhouse in Centreville, Va., a suburb of
Washington, where his parents worked at a dry cleaners. He graduated
from Westfield High School in Chantilly in 2003.
Cho’s family moved to the United
States in search of a better life, said the family’s landlady in South
Korea. The family was poor and lived in a cheap basement apartment on
the outskirts of Seoul, the woman told South Korean television
Wednesday.
Cho had an older sister, Sun-Kyung,
who graduated from Princeton University with an economics degree in
2004, Princeton officials confirmed.
The Princeton student newspaper
reported Wednesday that she is pursuing a career as a State Department
contractor working on the reconstruction of Iraq. It said that Sun-Kyung
Cho was “palpably upset” when it contacted her and that she refused its
requests for an interview.
Student concerned classmates,
teachers
Her brother, however, was described
as a sullen loner by several students and professors. They had long been
alarmed by his class writings — pages filled with twisted,
violence-drenched writing.
Nikki Giovanni, the famous poet who
is a professor at Virginia Tech, said Wednesday that while she did not
fear for her life or the lives of her other students, she had Cho
removed from her class because he was a disruptive force.
“He was mean,” Giovanni told NBC
News’ Peter Alexander. “He was trying to bully me. He was trying to
bully the class, for what purpose I have no idea.
“I wanted him out of my classroom,”
she said.
Lucinda Roy, a co-director of
creative writing at Virginia Tech, said she tutored Cho after that. She
called Cho “a gifted student in some ways. But he was very lonely and
depressed, in my opinion. We didn’t build up a rapport because he wasn’t
the kind of student who would permit that.”
“I think it’s crazy” that there are
no stronger procedures for dealing with seriously troubled students, she
said in an interview with NBC News. “I think there needs to be a change.
We must intervene, and that is all there is to it.”
In a screenplay Cho wrote for a
class last fall, characters throw hammers and attack with chainsaws,
according to fellow students in the class. In another, Cho concocted a
tale of students who fantasized about stalking and killing a teacher who
sexually molested them.
Stephanie Derry, a classmate of
Cho’s, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times, that classmates
were so horrified that they even joked that they “were just waiting for
him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did. But when I
got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive NBC’s Pete
Williams in New York, Jim Popkin in Radford, Va., and Steve Handelsman
in Blacksburg, Va., and MSNBC.com’s Bill Dedman in Blacksburg
contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18169776/
Return to Table of Contents
|
