Alarm over fantasies of 'the question mark kid'
The gunman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a sullen loner known as “the question mark kid”, who alarmed professors and classmates with his twisted, violence-drenched creative writing.
A chilling picture emerged of Cho Seung-Hui – a 23-year-old senior studying English – after Monday’s bloodbath in Blacksburg 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 US 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 autumn 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 chainsaw. Another was about students fantasising 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 that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of,” former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL website.
He said he and other students “were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter”.
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 counselling service.
Cho – who arrived in the US from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington DC, where his parents worked at a dry cleaners – left a note that was found after the bloodbath.
A law enforcement official who read Cho’s note described it as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion.
“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.
The official said the letter was either found in Cho’s dorm room or in his backpack. The backpack was found in the hallway of the classroom building where the shootings happened, and contained several rounds of ammunition, the official said.
Col Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said authorities were going through a considerable number of writings.
Citing unidentified sources, the Chicago Tribune reported Cho had recently set a fire in a dorm room and had stalked some women.
Monday’s rampage consisted of two attacks, more than two hours apart – first at a dormitory, where two people were killed, then inside a classroom building, where 31 people, including Cho, died. Two handguns – a 9mm and a .22 calibre - were found in the classroom building.
The Washington Post quoted law enforcement sources as saying Cho died with the words “Ismail 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 was hit with two other bomb threats. Investigators have not connected those earlier threats to Cho.
Cho graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, in 2003. His family lived in a two-storey townhouse in Centreville, Virginia.
At least one of those killed in the rampage, Reema Samaha, graduated from Westfield High in 2006. But there was no immediate word from authorities on whether Cho knew the young woman and singled her out.
“He was very quiet, always by himself,” neighbour Abdul Shash said. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and 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 30 or so students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he did not 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.
“We just really knew him as the question mark kid.”
Meanwhile, Virginia governor Tim Kaine said he would appoint a panel at the university’s request to review authorities’ handling of the disaster.
Parents and students bitterly complained that the university should have locked down the campus immediately after the first burst of gunfire and did not do enough to warn people.
Yesterday, US president George Bush and his wife Laura joined thousands of people gathered in the basketball arena for a memorial service for the victims, with an overflow crowd of thousands watching on a jumbo TV screen in the football stadium.
