BLACKSBURG, Va. – The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a sullen loner who alarmed professors and classmates with his twisted, 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.
News reports said that he may have been taking medication for depression and that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic.
“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, “Richard McBeef,” was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chain saw – in one scene the stepson tries to kill the stepfather by suffocating him with a Rice Krispies treat.
Another, “Mr. Brownstone,” 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,” wrote a former classmate, Ian MacFarlane, an AOL staffer who posted the two plays on the Internet. “The plays had really twisted, macabre violence. … Before Cho got to class that day, we 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, waiting to hear about something he did,” said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. “But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English department, said Cho’s writing was so disturbing that he had been referred to the university’s counseling service.
Rude said she did not know when he was referred for counseling, or what the outcome was.
Cho arrived in the United States as an 8-year-old from South Korea in 1992 and lived as a legal permanent resident. His parents, who are in seclusion refusing to talk to the media, run a dry cleaning business in Centreville, Va., according to federal investigation sources. Cho’s sister is a graduate of Princeton.
“If he sees you, he turns around and goes the other way,” said Alia Shasha, who has lived next door to Cho’s family in suburban Centreville, Va., for seven years. “All of high school, I never saw him with a friend. No one knows him. He’s a lonely guy.”
Cho kept to himself, shooting baskets and riding a bike alone. He graduated from nearby Westfield High School in 2003. Fairfax County school officials said that he had been in the Science Club as a sophomore but had not supplied his picture for his senior yearbook.
Two victims of the killing spree were graduates of the same high school, but there was no indication they were targeted by Cho.
At the Harper Hall dorm, Cho shared a bedroom with Joseph Aust, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering. Aust said he knew barely anything about him, and the two hardly spoke. Aust said when they moved in together, Cho told him he was a business major.
He said Cho didn’t appear to have any friends or a girlfriend. He also didn’t have any decorations, posters or photos in his room, just his laptop, books and clothes. Aust said he tried talking to him a couple of times.
“He would just give one-word answers, not try to carry on a conversation.”
Classmates painted a similar picture. Some said that on the first day of a British literature class last year, the 30 or so students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak.
On the sign-in sheet where everyone else 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.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
