Seung-Hui Cho

• 1. Introduction

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  Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 others at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the 16th of April 2007. It was the deadliest school shooting in United States history. At the time, it was also the deadliest mass shooting in the country's history. Cho was a student at the university he attacked. He was a legal resident of the United States, but not a citizen.

  Almost everyone who crossed his path in the preceding years had sensed that something was wrong. Teachers, classmates, roommates, campus police, a judge and his own parents each saw a piece of it. Why did those pieces never come together? How did a boy who barely spoke grow into the man who did this? And what did he send to a television network in New York while the day's events were still unfolding?

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• 2. Immigrant Childhood

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  Seung-Hui Cho was born on the 18th of January 1984 in Asan, a city in South Chungcheong Province in South Korea. His family lived for a few years in a basement apartment in Seoul. His father owned a bookstore there, but it earned very little.

  In 1992, when Cho was eight, his father moved the family to the United States. He wanted better schooling and better prospects for his son and daughter. They first settled in Detroit. They then moved to the Washington area after learning it held one of the largest South Korean expatriate communities in the country.

  The family put down roots in Centreville, an unincorporated community in western Fairfax County, Virginia. Cho's parents opened a dry-cleaning business, and the family became permanent residents as South Korean nationals. They joined a local Christian church, and Cho was raised in that faith. Yet a note he later left railed against his parents' strong Christian faith.

  Relatives who had stayed in South Korea worried about the boy from his earliest years. They thought he might be selectively mute or mentally ill, and they said he rarely spoke or showed affection. In an ABC News Nightline interview on the 30th of August 2007, his grandfather described a child who never made eye contact. He never called his grandfather by that title, and he never moved to embrace him.

  In the classrooms of Fairfax County, those early worries were about to acquire a clinical name.

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• 3. Silence at School

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  Poplar Tree Elementary School in Chantilly gave Cho his first American classroom. An anonymous family acquaintance claimed he came home crying and throwing tantrums, insisting he never wanted to return. A former fifth-grade classmate remembered a different boy. By that account, Cho finished the school's three-year program in a year and a half, teachers held him up as an example, and the other students did not dislike him.

  At Ormond Stone Middle School in Centreville, the picture darkened. By the eighth grade he had been diagnosed with selective mutism, a social anxiety disorder that kept him from speaking in particular situations or to particular people. The Virginia Tech Review Panel placed the diagnosis in the spring of that year, when his parents sought medication and therapy for him.

  Westfield High School in Chantilly placed him in special education under the classification of emotional disturbance. He was excused from oral presentations and class conversation, and he received speech therapy. Mental health therapy continued until the end of his junior year. Classmates reportedly bullied him for his shyness and unusual speech, and at least once for his ethnicity. Others remembered a loner who showed little interest when teachers or students tried to include him.

  In 1999, Cho's ninth-grade year, the Columbine High School massacre dominated international news. He was reportedly transfixed by it and idolized the two attackers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. In a school assignment, he wrote about wanting to "repeat Columbine." The school contacted his sister, who told their parents, and Cho was sent to a psychiatrist.

  The question of autism remains unsettled. Two family members and a family friend said the Chos had been told his mutism came from autism. No record of such a diagnosis is known, and the review panel reported that his high school had ruled it out. A clinical psychologist who specialized in selective mutism watched Cho's videos and said he was not autistic and clearly could talk to people. A 2017 paper in The Journal of Psychology, however, cited strong evidence suggesting Asperger's syndrome.

  A pastor at the Centreville Korean Presbyterian Church recalled Cho as a smart student who understood the Bible. The pastor had never heard him speak a complete sentence, and he told Cho's mother he suspected autism.

  Cho graduated from Westfield in 2003. Federal law barred the school from disclosing any record of his disability or treatment without his permission, so it passed none of his history to Virginia Tech.

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• 4. The Question Mark Kid

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  Cho arrived at Virginia Tech in 2003 as a business information technology major. By his senior year he had switched to English, hoping to become a writer. At the time of the attacks he lived in Harper Hall, sharing a three-bedroom suite with five roommates.

  Student Julie Poole remembered a literature class where the professor found only a question mark on the sign-in sheet where Cho should have written his name. In her words, "we just really knew him as the question mark kid." Cho also used the name Question Mark online, when introducing himself to girls, and in harassing phone calls to a roommate. On those calls he described himself as Cho's brother.

  His roommates Karan Grewal and Joseph Aust said Cho was reclusive and that they avoided him in return. Both said he spoke of an imaginary girlfriend named Jelly. Andy Koch, who shared a room with Cho at Cochrane Hall during 2005 and 2006, said Cho once described Jelly at a party as a supermodel living in space. Aust noticed Cho's sleep schedule turn strange in the last couple of weeks.

  Koch described other episodes. Cho stood in the doorway late at night, taking photographs of him. Over a Thanksgiving break, Cho phoned to claim he was "vacationing with Vladimir Putin" in North Carolina. At one party, Cho sat in a corner of a girl's room and repeatedly stabbed the carpet while his roommates watched. Koch and John Eide searched Cho's belongings and found a pocket knife, but nothing they judged threatening. They gradually stopped speaking to him and told their friends, especially female classmates, to stay away from their room.

  On the 27th of November 2005, a female student reported that Cho had phoned her and visited her room unannounced. Campus police found no actual threats, only annoyance. Two uniformed officers visited Cho that evening and told him not to contact her again. He complied.

  On the 13th of December 2005, a second young woman, a friend of Koch, contacted the police. Cho had messaged her online and written a line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on her door board. Police again warned him off. Neither woman pressed charges.

  Later that day, Cho emailed Koch the words "I might as well kill myself now." Koch and his father alerted campus authorities. Police escorted Cho to the New River Valley Community Services Board, the state mental health agency serving Blacksburg.

  There, a physician named Crouse found Cho "mentally ill and in need of hospitalization." He noted a flat affect and depressed mood, and recorded that Cho denied suicidal thoughts. Cho was held at Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford to await a commitment hearing. He was released on the 14th of December 2005. That same day, Special Justice Paul Barnett certified that Cho "presented an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness" and ordered outpatient treatment.

  That order would resurface on a government form more than a year later.

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• 5. Words and Warnings

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  Poet Nikki Giovanni taught Cho in a poetry class in the fall of 2005 and later had him removed. She found his behavior menacing, his writing intimidating, and said he had a mean streak. He wore sunglasses in class and stayed silent when she tried to draw him into discussion. She said he unnerved female classmates by photographing their legs under their desks and by writing violent, obscene poetry. She told department head Lucinda Roy she would resign before she continued teaching him. Roy then took him out of the class.

  Roy had already taught Cho in Introduction to Poetry the year before. She remembered him as arrogant and obnoxious, yet also deeply insecure. He resisted speaking, and he took cell phone pictures of her. She told him many times to seek counseling, and she began working with him one-on-one. Before long she feared for her own safety. She arranged a duress code with her assistant, the name of a dead professor, to signal that security should be called.

  Roy asked police and the administration for help. The police told her they struggled to act because Cho had made no explicit threat. She described him as extraordinarily lonely, and recalled him saying he had no friends. Other professors also recommended counseling. Some did not learn until later that Cho had been reported to police, and they guessed the information had been privileged and could not be released.

  The Virginia Tech report said Cho seemed to enjoy writing, especially poetry, and tried to get a book published while in college. After the shootings, a former classmate gave AOL two plays Cho had written in 2006, Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone. Playwriting professor Edward Falco confirmed that Cho wrote both in his class. He said they were not good writing but were at least a form of communication. Classmates found them morbid and grotesque.

  About a year before the attack, Cho wrote a paper for an Intro to Short Fiction class about a protagonist who plans a mass murder at a school. In the story, the protagonist never follows through. In March 2006, Cho also submitted a poem titled "Spear me down, Heaven" to Virginia Tech's 22nd Annual Research Symposium and Exposition. It included a wish to annihilate himself.

  CBS News noted that this pattern matched a 2002 Secret Service study conducted after Columbine. That study found the largest group of school shooters showed an interest in violence in their own writings, such as poems and essays.

  Cho's family had tried to help him for years. The review panel documented their efforts from his adolescence. When Cho turned 18 and left for college, they lost legal authority over him. In the summer of 2006, his mother sought help from several churches in Northern Virginia. Minister Dong Cheol Lee of One Mind Presbyterian Church in Woodbridge said members told her Cho had "demonic power" and needed deliverance. Before the church could meet with the family, Cho had gone back to Blacksburg to begin his senior year.

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• 6. Two Buildings, One Morning

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  In February and March 2007, Cho bought two semi-automatic handguns from licensed dealers. He bought the first on the 9th of February and the second on the 13th of March. He passed both background checks because he did not disclose the Virginia court's order for outpatient mental health treatment. In mid-March he practiced at a firing range in Roanoke, about 40 miles from campus. By his own account, he had postponed the attack several times.

  A former FBI agent who consulted for ABC said, "This was no spur-of-the-moment crime. He's been thinking about this for several months prior to the shooting."

  At about 7:15 a.m., Cho entered West Ambler Johnston Hall, a high-rise co-educational dormitory. On the fourth floor he killed two students, Emily J. Hilscher and Ryan C. "Stack" Clark. Investigators later matched his shoes to a blood-stained print in the hallway outside Hilscher's room. They found the shoes and bloody jeans stashed in his own dormitory room. Investigators found no evidence that Hilscher knew Cho.

  Over the next two and a half hours, Cho returned to his room and rearmed. At about 9:45 a.m. he crossed campus to Norris Hall, a classroom building. His only known link to the building was a sociology class on its second floor. He had locked the doors with heavy chains. In a span of nine minutes, he shot dozens of people and killed 30 of them.

  Student Trey Perkins saw him during the shooting and described a man "just without even the slightest emotion on his face." Technicians later found at least 17 empty magazines at the scenes, and investigators concluded he had fired more than 170 shots. When police breached the area of the building where he was attacking the faculty and students, Cho killed himself in room 211 with a shot to the temple.

  Police did not at first say publicly that one man was behind both shootings. Forensic evidence soon confirmed that the same gun had been used at both buildings. They identified Cho by matching fingerprints on the guns to his immigration records.

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• 7. The Package to NBC

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  Between the two attacks, Cho stopped at a post office near campus and mailed a parcel to NBC News headquarters in New York. It was meant to arrive on the 17th of April. An incorrect ZIP code and street address delayed it by a day. NBC received it on the 18th of April 2007 and contacted authorities.

  The sender was listed as "A. Ishmael," though The New York Times reported the spelling as "Ismael." Reports said the words "Ismail Ax" were also scrawled on one of Cho's arms. The internet quickly filled with theories. Some linked the name to Islamic accounts of Abraham and his son Ishmael, though no one reported that Cho was Muslim and he spoke of himself in Christian terms. Others pointed to the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, to Daniel Quinn's books featuring a gorilla named Ishmael, or to the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Prairie. Still others suggested Drum Hadley's poem "The Goat Ranchers," a Bob Marley song called "Small Axe," or an Xbox Live handle. A search found no such handle.

  A likelier source was Cho's own fiction. His short story "Man-Bitches," written in October 2006, features a protagonist named Ax Manson. That character suffers abuse from his father and bullying from his peers.

  The package held a DVD and a printed copy of a PDF file named "axishmiel." That file was a manifesto of about 1,800 words across 23 pages, with 43 photographs of Cho. The disc also held two Word files, a six-minute audio file, and 27 video clips totaling 24 minutes. The PDF was last modified at 7:24 a.m. on the 16th of April, minutes after the first two killings. The audio recording of him reading his statement dated from the 10th of April.

  In the videos, Cho railed against rich kids, materialism and hedonism. He portrayed himself as a victim, saying, "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option." He also mentioned Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Police found a note in his room that criticized "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans," and said "you caused me to do this." Early media reports speculated that he was obsessed with a female student who had rejected him, but investigators found no evidence of it. The review panel judged his motivation largely incoherent.

  NBC chose to broadcast a small portion. On The Oprah Winfrey Show on the 24th of April 2007, NBC News president Steve Capus said the network aired 2 minutes and 20 seconds of 25 minutes of video. It also used just 37 sentences from 23 pages of writing. Virginia Tech students and faculty, and victims' relatives, feared that glorifying Cho could inspire copycats. Peter Read, whose daughter Mary was among the dead, asked the media to stop airing the material.

  Police concluded the package offered marginal help in understanding the crime. Psychiatrist Michael Welner, who reviewed it, said, "These videos do not help us understand Cho. They distort him. He was meek. He was quiet. This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character."

  Roommate Karan Grewal thought the walls in the videos looked exactly like the common area of their suite.

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• 8. The Reckoning

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  Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine appointed a panel to investigate the shootings, and invited former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to join it. He also hired TriData Corporation, the firm that had investigated the Columbine massacre, to study the emergency response. The panel's final report appeared in August 2007. It spent more than 20 pages on Cho's history.

  The report faulted educators, administrators and mental health staff for failing to connect the dots among warning signs that began in Cho's junior year. It said the school's mental health systems failed from lack of resources, incorrect interpretation of privacy laws, and passivity. It called Virginia's mental health laws flawed and its services inadequate. It also faulted Virginia Tech administrators for not acting immediately after the first two deaths. Even so, it held Cho primarily responsible, though his "emotional and psychological disabilities having undoubtedly clouded his own situation."

  Investigators found that the December 2005 treatment order had never been carried out. Neither the court nor New River Valley Community Services monitored whether Cho complied. The agency said no court order had named it as his provider. Christopher Flynn, director of Virginia Tech's Cook Counseling Center, said the court never told his office, and that such an order falls on the individual rather than on an agency. Virginia law would have allowed Cho to be brought back before the court and committed for up to 180 days. He was never summoned.

  The same gap shaped his gun purchases. Virginia's form for notifying state police covered only people involuntarily committed as inpatients or ruled mentally incapacitated. Because Cho was ordered to outpatient treatment, he remained eligible under state law. Virginia officials and legal experts argued that federal law treated the judge's order as an adjudication of mental illness and barred him from buying guns. The panel confirmed he bought both guns in violation of federal law because Virginia's background check requirements were inadequate.

  The panel waited weeks for Cho's medical records, because privacy laws barred Virginia Tech from releasing them even after his death. His family released them on the 12th of June 2007, and the panel obtained more by court order. Years before, he had been prescribed paroxetine and taken off it after a year. An autopsy toxicology test found no psychiatric or illegal drugs in his system.

  Cho's older sister issued a statement of apology through an attorney. She said she felt she had not known the person she grew up with and loved. His grandfather said he could not believe his shy grandson had done such a thing. A 2008 Washington Post follow-up reported that the family had gone into hiding for months. When they returned home, they papered over several windows and kept contact only with an FBI agent and their lawyer.

  Cho's name has since been invoked by others. Wellington Menezes Oliveira, who killed 12 people in a Rio de Janeiro school shooting, called Cho a brother. In 2015, a teenager who set fire to a South Korean classroom said he wanted to leave a record like Cho's. No one died in that fire. Some South Korean internet users, drawing on a 2014 forum, praised Cho as a "general" fighting anti-Korean racism.

  Virginia Tech released Cho's records to the public in August 2009. The panel's own records stayed closed until July 2017.

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