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by Shaila Dewan and Marc Santora
April 19, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 18 — Campus
authorities were aware 17 months ago of the troubled mental state of the
student who shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday, an
imbalance graphically on display in vengeful videos and a manifesto he
mailed to NBC News in the time between the two sets of shootings.
“You have vandalized my heart, raped
my soul and torched my conscience,” the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, said in
one video mailed shortly before the shooting at a classroom and his
suicide. “Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generations
of the weak and the defenseless people.”
NBC, which received the package on
Wednesday and quickly turned it over to the authorities, broadcast video
excerpts on “The NBC Nightly News.”
The hostility in the videos was
foreshadowed in 2005, when Mr. Cho’s sullen and aggressive behavior
culminated in an unsuccessful effort by the campus police to have him
involuntarily committed to a mental institution in December.
For all the interventions by the
police and faculty members, Mr. Cho was allowed to remain on campus and
live with other students. There is no evidence that the police monitored
him and no indication that the authorities or fellow students were aware
of any incident that pushed him to his rampage.
Despite Mr. Cho’s time in the mental
health system, when an English professor was disturbed by his writings
last fall and contacted the associate dean of students, the dean told
the professor that there was no record of any problems and that nothing
could be done, said the instructor, Lisa Norris.
The quest to have him committed,
documented in court papers, was made after a female student complained
of unwelcome telephone calls and in-person communication from Mr. Cho on
Nov. 27, 2005. The woman declined to press charges, and the campus
police referred the case to the disciplinary system of the university,
Chief Wendell Flinchum said.
Mr. Cho’s disciplinary record was
not released because of privacy laws. The associate vice president for
student affairs, Edward F. D. Spencer, said it would not be unusual if
no disciplinary action had been taken in such a case. On Dec. 12, a
second woman asked the police to put a stop to Mr. Cho’s instant
messages to her. She, too, declined to press charges.
The police said Mr. Cho did not
threaten the women, who described the efforts at contact as “annoying.”
But later on the day of the second complaint, an unidentified
acquaintance of Mr. Cho notified the police that he might be suicidal.
Mr. Cho went voluntarily to the
Police Department, which referred him to a mental health agency off
campus, Chief Flinchum said. A counselor recommended involuntary
commitment, and a judge signed an order saying that he “presents an
imminent danger to self or others” and sent him to Carilion St. Albans
Psychiatric Hospital in Radford for an evaluation.
“Affect is flat and mood is
depressed,” a doctor there wrote. “He denies suicidal ideations. He does
not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment
are sound.”
The doctor determined that Mr. Cho
was mentally ill, but not an imminent danger, and the judge declined to
commit him, instead ordering outpatient treatment.
Officials said they did not know
whether Mr. Cho had received subsequent counseling.
In Virginia, the examining doctor or
psychologist has to convince a local magistrate that the person “as a
result of mental illness is in imminent danger of harming himself or
others, or is substantially unable to care for himself,” said Richard J.
Bonnie, director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy
at the University of Virginia.
Mr. Bonnie said that it was not a
simple matter to force people into treatment against their will and that
lawyers, patients’ advocates and psychiatrists had debated the question
for decades.
The hospitalization occurred after a
trouble-filled semester for Mr. Cho. In October 2005, a professor of
creative writing, the poet Nikki Giovanni, refused to let him stay in
her class because his writing was “intimidating” and he frightened other
students.
Classmates reported that Mr. Cho was
taking photographs of women under the desks. Lucinda H. Roy, chairwoman
of the English department at the time, tried to intervene, but she, too,
was disturbed by his response. Professor Roy said the reaction was “very
arrogant” with an “underlying tone of anger.”
Much about what Mr. Cho did after
leaving the hospital remains uncertain. Professor Roy said that she had
no contact with him after that date and that she believed he had
graduated.
Last August, Mr. Cho’s parents
helped move him to a dormitory room he shared with Joe Aust, 19, for his
senior year.
His writings grew increasingly
unhinged. He submitted two plays to Prof. Edward C. Falco’s class that
had so much profanity and violent imagery that the other students
refused to read and analyze his work. Professor Falco said he was so
concerned that he spoke with several faculty members who had taught Mr.
Cho.
Ms. Norris, who taught Mr. Cho in a
10-student creative writing workshop last fall, was disturbed enough by
his writings that she contacted the associate dean of students, Mary Ann
Lewis. Ms. Norris said the faculty was instructed to report problem
students to Ms. Lewis.
“You go to her to find out if there
are any other complaints about a student,” Ms. Norris said, adding that
Ms. Lewis had said she had no record of any problem with Mr. Cho despite
his long and troubled history at the university.
“I do not know why she would not
have that information,” she said. “I just know that she did not have
it.”
Ms. Lewis, associate dean of the
College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, said Wednesday night that
she would not comment on Ms. Norris’s statement.
Mr. Cho was allowed to remain in the
seminar but was placed off to the side, where, Ms. Norris said, he did
not speak. She did not share his writings with the class. As the weeks
passed, she added, she noticed a slight change in his writing. Instead
of focusing on children, as he had in the past, his last story was about
adults.
And then he stopped going to class.
“If I had known anything else I
could have done, by god, I would have done it,” Ms. Norris said.
Carolyn D. Rude, chairwoman of the
English department, said faculty members were pro-active, even attending
seminars on helping students in distress, a skill particularly
applicable in an English department, where creative writing teachers had
intimate glimpses into their students’ troubles and temperaments.
But, Professor Rude said, there was
only so much that faculty members, administrators and even the campus
police could do if no crime had been committed.
“There were reports, and urgent
ones, more than once,” she said. “All we can do is notice and report. We
don’t have the powers of the counselors or the justice system. But we do
have the responsibility to let students do their coursework.”
Investigators have not determined
Mr. Cho’s motive or whether he had a connection to any victims, said
Col. W. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of the state police.
The package mailed to NBC, a
composite portrait of Mr. Cho as a pistol-wielding moralist who decried
his audience’s hedonistic taste for vodka and cognac, did not
immediately seem to offer concrete clues. It brimmed with recriminations
and a sense of persecution, and referred to the killers at Columbine
High School in Colorado as martyrs.
“You had a hundred billion chances
and ways to avoid today, but you decided to spill my blood,” Mr. Cho
said in a video. “You forced me into a corner and gave me only one
option.”
The package included 29 photographs,
27 short videos and an 1,800-word diatribe in which Mr. Cho expresses a
desire to get even, though it does not say with whom, according to the
NBC News program. In two photos, he looks like a typical smiling college
student. In 11, he aims one or two handguns at the camera, posing as if
in an action movie.
Several postings on Internet film
sites noticed a similarity between the poses and scenes from “Oldboy,” a
violent 2004 South Korean film.
As he prepared for the shooting, Mr.
Cho filled out paperwork to buy handguns, rented a van and bought the
cargo pants and vest that he wore. He appeared to have made the photos
and videos by himself, a law enforcement official said.
“This kid, over a period of two and
half to three weeks, there was a process where he was working himself up
to this and he stayed for one night at a hotel in the general area, and
that’s where he took the pictures of the gun," said the official, who
insisted on anonymity. “And we’re assuming he made the video there.”
Mr. Cho mailed the package using
Express Mail at 9:01 a.m., two hours after the first shootings, from the
post office at 118 North Main Street, about a mile from his dorm room on
campus, a spokesman for the Postal Service said.
Mr. Cho apparently returned to his
room after the first shootings to assemble the package, which seemed to
have been put together over six days, NBC News reported. The return
address was “A. Ishmael,” similar to the cryptic phrase “Ismael Ax” that
was found written on his arm.
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