They met across the professor's desk. One on one. The chairwoman of the English department and the silent, brooding student who never took his sunglasses off. He had so upset other instructors that Virginia Tech officials asked if she wanted protection. Lucinda Roy declined. She thought Cho Seung-Hui exuded loneliness, and she volunteered to teach him by herself. Roy and others Tuesday helped fill in a dark portrait of the young man who had sought bizarre expression in literature and then massacred 32 fellow students and teachers Monday in the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history. As police closed in, he shot himself.
Angry and depressed
Cho, of Centreville, Va., the son of immigrants who run a dry cleaning business and the brother of a State Department contractor who graduated from Princeton, was described by those who encountered him over the years as at times angry, menacing, disturbed and so depressed that he seemed near tears. He often spoke in a whisper, if at all, refused to open up to teachers and classmates, and kept himself locked behind the facade of a hat, sunglasses and silence. Authorities still are not sure what set him off Monday. Authorities found two three-page notes in his dorm room after the shootings. They weren't suicide notes and provided no clue about why he did what he did. Instead, they were expletive-filled rants against the rich and privileged, even naming people who he thought had kept him down, federal and state law enforcement officials said. Two government officials said he had been treated for mental health problems.
'the question mark kid'
His classmates knew him only as "the question mark kid." On the first day of class last year, when everyone introduced himself, Cho sat sullenly in the back and refused to speak. On the sign-in sheet, he had put only a question mark for his name.
His roommates
Cho was even unknown to the young man who for nearly a year slept just feet away from him. "He was my roommate," said Joe Aust, a 19-year-old sophomore. "I didn't know him that well, though." Aust and another student who shared their suite, Karan Grewal, 21, painted a picture of a loner who ate his meals alone in the dining hall and shunned any attempts at friendship. They never saw him with a girl or any friends. "He was always really, really quiet and kind of weird, keeping to himself all the time," Aust said. "... I tried to make conversation with him in August or so and he would just give one word answers."
Creepy writing
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. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. "When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog on an AOL Web site. Read the plays at tinyurl.com/2as4kc.
Weapons
Cho's choice of weapons and ammunition explained how he could kill and injure so many people so quickly. Once the trigger of a Glock 9 mm is squeezed and the bullet fired, the gun ejects the empty shell casing, chambers a new round and is ready to shoot again immediately. A Walther .22-caliber pistol operates in a similar fashion. Cho's purchase of the Glock, captured on Roanoke Firearms' video surveillance, was unremarkable. The owner described Cho as low-key and clean-cut. "He filled out the paperwork. I sent it to the state police. They gave him a clean bill of health," said owner John Markell. "We're very careful about screening people. We size people up all the time."
Threats
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 threats to Cho.
The injured
By Tuesday afternoon there were still 14 injured victims at four area hospitals, including two at a Level 1 trauma center in Roanoke, one in critical condition and the other in serious condition.
'Ismale Ax'
All at once, the world went searching for the meaning of "Ismale Ax." Those two words were tattooed on Cho's arm. One popular theory spreading across the Web comes from a story in the Koran about Ibrahim and his son, Ismail. In Islam, Ibrahim is known as the father of the prophets and, upset that people in his hometown still worshiped idols and not Allah, he smashed all but one statue in a local temple with an ax. Another theory is tied to James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Prairie, where Ishmael Bush is known as an outcast and outlawed warrior, according to an essay written in 1969 by William H. Goetzmann, a University of Texas history professor. In Cooper's book, "Bush carries the prime symbol of evil - the spoiler's axe," the professor wrote. Cho was an English major at Virginia Tech.
The two-hour delay
Heather Haugh, roommate of the female student killed in the first shootings Monday, said she knew of no connection between Cho and Emily Hilscher, or any reason why he would have launched his rampage on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall. "I've never seen him," she said. " ... Emily didn't know him, as far as I know." Haugh said that speculation that the rampage was triggered by a domestic dispute likely stemmed from the fact that Hilscher's boyfriend was an avid gun user. As police questioned the boyfriend, reports came in of shootings at Norris Hall.
A review
Virginia Democratic Gov. Timothy Kaine Tuesday ordered an independent review of Virginia Tech's handling of Monday's massacre after 24 hours of criticism that the university waited too long to inform students and faculty of a potential danger. Kaine said the investigation will also address questions about whether university officials were warned earlier that Cho was troubled.
Complicated
"In this situation, the shooter was a legitimate student who had an ID card," said Robert Rowan, director of the emergency response team at the University of Maryland's Baltimore campus. "You could easily lock a building with the shooter in it. I'm not sure that would have prevented the situation there." Susan Riseling, chief of campus police at the University of Wisconsin, said, "The concept of a lockdown on a 2,600-acre campus that is open and has a thousand entry points by foot or hundreds by car is not feasible."
Contributing: AP, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, New York Times, Washington Post
