Gun control debate
- See also: Gun politics in the United
States
The massacre reignited the gun control debate in the United States, with proponents of gun
control legislation arguing that guns are too accessible, citing that Cho, a mentally unsound individual, was able to
purchase two semi-automatic pistols. Proponents of gun rights and the
Second Amendment
argued that Virginia Tech's gun-free
"safe zone" policy ensured that none of the students or faculty would
be armed, guaranteeing that no one could stop Cho's
rampage. Others said that adequate communication between government
entities could have prevented Cho from acquiring the weapons,
without compromising Second Amendment rights.
Background
Law enforcement officials have described finding a purchase receipt for at least one of the guns used in the assault.[100] The gunman had apparently waited one month after buying his
Walther P22 .22 caliber pistol before he bought his
second pistol, a Glock 19.[101] Cho used a 15-round ammunition magazine in the Glock.[102] The serial numbers on the weapons were filed off, but the ATF
National Laboratory was able to reveal them and performed a firearms trace.[102]
Virginia Tech has a blanket ban on possession or storage of firearms on campus, even by state licensed concealed weapons permit holders. However, this policy has been challenged in recent years: In
April 2005, a student licensed in Virginia to carry concealed weapons was discovered possessing a concealed firearm in class.
While no criminal charges were filed, a university spokesman said the University had "the right to adhere to and enforce that
policy" as a common-sense protection of students, staff and faculty as well as guests and visitors."[103]
Virginia bill HB 1572, intended to prohibit public universities from making "rules
or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit … from lawfully
carrying a concealed handgun" was introduced into the Virginia House of
Representatives by delegate Todd Gilbert. The university opposed the bill, which died in subcommittee in January
2006.[104]
Spokesman Larry Hincker responded, "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because
this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."[104]
The sale of firearms to permanent residents in Virginia is legal as long as the
buyer shows proof of residency.[105] Additionally,
though, Virginia has a law that limits purchases of handguns to one every 30 days.[106] Federal law requires a
criminal background check
for handgun purchases from
licensed firearms dealers, and Virginia checks other databases in
addition to the Federally-mandated NICS. Federal law also
prohibits those "adjudicated as a mental defective" from buying guns,
and Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a
gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in
late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment.[107]
| “ |
Virginia state law on mental health disqualifications to firearms purchases, however,
is worded slightly differently from the federal statute. So the form that Virginia courts use to notify state police about a
mental health disqualification addresses only the state criteria, which list two potential categories that would warrant
notification to the state police: someone who was “involuntarily committed” or ruled mentally “incapacitated.”[107] |
” |
The federal law defines adjudication as a mental defective to include "determination by a court, board, commission or other
lawful authority" that as a result of mental illness, the person is a "danger to himself or others."[107] Because of gaps between federal and
Virginia state laws, the state failed to report Cho's legal status to the federal National
Instant Criminal Background Check System, and thus failed to prevent Cho's
purchases.[107] The week following the
tragedy, Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell called for changes in state law to close those gaps.[108]
Historical context
- See also: School shooting and List of school massacres
This incident is the deadliest shooting on a college campus, exceeding the 16 deaths[94] of the University of Texas at Austin shooting by Charles
Whitman in 1966. It is the second deadliest school-related killing in U.S. history, behind the 1927 Bath School disaster which claimed 45 lives, including 38 school children, through the use of
explosives.[94]
With a death toll of 32 victims plus the killer,[94] this is the deadliest single-perpetrator shooting in United States history,
surpassing the Luby's massacre of 1991, in which 24 people were killed.[94] Internationally, it is
surpassed by the 1982 massacre in South Korea of 57 innocent people by off-duty
police officer Woo Bum-kon and the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in the Australian state of Tasmania where 35 people were killed by gunman
Martin Bryant. Although deadlier shootings have occurred in the U.S., they have occurred
during times of war or insurrection that predate WWII, largely involving militias or
military groups.[95]
The shooting has been likened to the Columbine High School
massacre,[96] the 1999 school massacre in which two students killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 24 others before
turning the guns on themselves. In the media package sent to NBC, Cho discussed "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" apparently referring to the Columbine High School gunmen.[35] This massacre occurred just four days before the eight-year anniversary of the Columbine
shooting.
Inaccurate media reports
Many inaccurate media reports were noted following the tragedy:
- Early media reports, notebly Chicago Sun-Times journalist Michael Sneed among several others, had incorrectly identified a
Chinese American and a Chinese
national as the suspected shooter. The erroneous report was released to the public twelve hours before the correct identity of
the gunman was officially disclosed by the Virginia Tech authorities.
- The New York Times incorrectly stated that the package to CBS news was addressed
from "Ismail" [97], when it was actually addressed from
"A. Ishmael". [10] The NYT
mistake was copied by several secondary media sources. [98]
- Upon airing and releasing the videos, NBC claimed that Cho was "railing against Christianity,"
and numerous media reports claimed that Cho “spewed anti-Christian rhetoric.” [99] After the release of the videos, numerous media downgraded this to “mentioned Christianity,” as the
released statements did not contain anti-Christian messages and included self-comparisons to Jesus
and Moses. [10]
-
Main article: List of victims of the Virginia Tech massacre
During the two separate attacks the gunman shot 61 people, killing 27 students and 5 faculty members, and wounding 29.
Perpetrator
-
Main article: Seung-Hui Cho
One of the photographs of Seung-Hui Cho sent to NBC News on the day of the massacre.
The shooter was identified as 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho,[4] a South Korean citizen
with U.S. permanent resident status living in Virginia. An
undergraduate at Virginia Tech, Cho lived in Harper Hall, a dormitory west of West Ambler
Johnston Hall. A spokesman for Virginia Tech has described him as "a loner."[2] Several former professors of Cho have stated that his writing was disturbing,
and he was encouraged to seek counseling.[7][35] He had also been investigated by the university for stalking and harassing female students.[6] In 2005, Cho had been declared mentally ill by a Virginia special justice and ordered to seek
outpatient treatment.[8] According to Cho's grand aunt in South Korea, Cho's parents had offered autism as an explanation for his behavior.[36] However, the notion that autism was the cause of Cho's behavior has been thrown into doubt ("no
records show such a diagnosis").[37][38][39]Cho's flat emotional affect was evident through middle and high school years,
during which he was bullied for speech difficulties.[40] "Relatives thought he might be a mute. Or
mentally ill," reported the New York Times.[41] Cho's underlying psychological diagnosis remains a matter of speculation.
[42] Media outlets routinely compared Cho's motives and
mental state to those of the Columbine killers, despite the fact that Harris and Klebold's motives and mental states
were not even similar to each other.[43]
Early reports had suggested that the killing was the venting of a domestic dispute between the killer and his supposed former
girlfriend Emily Hilscher, whose friends said she had no prior relationship with Cho.[44] In the ensuing investigation, police found a suicide note in Cho's dorm room, which included comments about "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful
charlatans" on campus. On April 18 2007, NBC News received a package from Cho time-stamped between the first and second shooting episodes. It contained
an 1,800-word manifesto,[45] photos, and 27 digitally recorded videos, in which Cho likened himself to Jesus Christ and expressed his hatred of the wealthy.[10]
Some family members of the victims were upset that the photos and video sent by the killer were broadcast and canceled
interviews with NBC in protest. A Virginia State Police spokesman said he was "rather disappointed in the editorial decision to
broadcast these disturbing images,"[46] adding that he
regretted that "[people who] are not used to seeing that type of image had to see it."[47]
Fox News, which replayed NBC's information extensively, defended NBC's release of the materials. Bill O'Reilly asserted that while he sympathized with the victims' families, it was necessary for "evil"
to "be exposed" and to inspire lawmakers to take corrective action.[48]
The American Psychiatric Association, however, urged the media to
withdraw the footage from circulation, arguing that publicizing it "seriously jeopardizes the public’s safety by potentially
inciting 'copycat' suicides, homicides and other incidents."[49] NBC defended itself by stating its staff had intensely debated releasing the footage before
deciding to broadcast it and asserted it had covered this story with extreme sensitivity.[47]
Virginia Tech massacre
The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that unfolded as two separate
attacks about two hours apart on April 16, 2007, on the campus of
the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University in Blacksburg, Virginia,
United States. A gunman killed 32 people[3] and wounded a further 29 before committing suicide,[4] making it the deadliest
mass shooting in modern U.S.
history.[4][5]
The shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was a South Korean who had
moved to the U.S. at age eight. At the time of the shootings, he was a senior majoring in
English at Virginia Tech.[4] He had a history of incidents at the school, including
allegations of stalking,[6] referrals to
counseling,[7] and a 2005 declaration
of mental illness by a Virginia special justice.[8]
Attacks
Aerial photo showing location of Norris and West Ambler Johnston Halls.
- Further information: Virginia Tech massacre timeline
West Ambler Johnston shootings
Cho shot his first victims at around 7:15 a.m. EDT in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a co-ed dormitory that houses 895 students. A young woman, Emily J. Hilscher of Woodville, Rappahannock County,
Virginia, and a male resident assistant, Ryan C.
Clark of Martinez, Columbia County,
Georgia, were shot and killed[4] in Room 4040, the room Hilscher shared with another
student.[9] Cho left the scene and soon thereafter
mailed a package to NBC News, postmarked 9:01 a.m., containing various writings and recordings.[10]
Norris Hall shootings
About two hours after the initial shootings, Cho entered Norris Hall, which
houses the Engineering Science and Mechanics program, and chained the main entrance
doors shut. He went to the second floor and began shooting students and faculty members.[2][11]
By the end of this second attack, 30 people lay dead in four classrooms and a second-floor hallway. Cho then shot and killed
himself.[12] The exact number of
shots fired is estimated at "between 175 and 225."[13]
Five professors died in the attack. Eleven students died in the intermediate French class in Norris Room 211. Nine students
died in an advanced hydrology class in Room 206. Four students died in an elementary German
class in Room 207. One student died in a solid mechanics class in Room 204. [12]
Erin Sheehan, an eyewitness and survivor
of Norris 207, told reporters that the shooter "peeked in twice,"
earlier in the lesson, like he was lost or looking for someone,
before he began shooting. Sheehan said that only four students in the
German class were able to leave the room on their own, with
two of them bearing injuries; the remaining survivors in the class were
severely injured.[14][15][16]
French class students take cover in Holden Hall.
Virginia Tech student Jamal Albarghouti used his mobile phone to capture video footage
of part of the attack from the exterior of Norris Hall; this was later broadcast on many news outlets.[17]
Student Nikolas Macko described to BBC News his experience at the center of the shootings.
He had been attending an issues in scientific computing [1]mathematics class (near the German class) and heard gunshots in the hallway.
At least three people in the classroom, including Zach Petkewicz, barricaded the door using a table. At one point, Macko said,
the gunman attempted to open the classroom door and then shot twice into the room; one shot hit a podium; the other went out the
window. The gunman reloaded and shot into the door, but the bullet did not penetrate into the room. Macko stated there were
"many, many shots" fired. [2] [11]
Cho was found dead in Jocelyne Couture-Nowak's classroom, Room 211, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the temple, having shot himself as police closed in.
In the aftermath, high winds related to the April 2007 nor'easter prevented emergency medical services from using helicopters for evacuation of the injured.[18] Victims injured in the shooting were treated at
Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg, Carilion New River Valley Medical Center in Radford, Carilion Roanoke Memorial
Hospital in Roanoke, and Lewis-Gale Medical Center in Salem.
The
cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when
we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the
bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones
rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying
to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the
police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is
heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were
calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of
reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest
of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the
shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student,
with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential
purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in
America. At a press conference, Virginia’s governor, Tim Kaine, said,
“People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride,
I’ve got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it’s
about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community
heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little
crusade, I say take that elsewhere.”
If the facts weren’t so horrible, there might be something touching in
the Governor’s deeply American belief that “healing” can take place
magically, without the intervening practice called “treating.” The
logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is
the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from
lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco
industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk
about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much
of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental
illness in universities, the problem of “narcissism,” violence in the
media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of
immigrant students, and the question of Evil.
Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to
talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade.
The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than
other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them
to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and
they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and
culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a
lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a
recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies
since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just
as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance
as severe as the first.
In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and
a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already
restrictive, were tightened—it’s now against the law for any private
citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho
Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred
there since. In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of
fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control
movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far
from sufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple of
subsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with far fewer
dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight
people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the
Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeat incident.
So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised
immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil.
There is an American particularity about guns. The arc is apparent.
Forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in
Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blacksburg,
Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make
weapons of mass killing harder to obtain. In fact, while campus
killings continued—Columbine being the most notorious, the shooting in
the one-room Amish schoolhouse among the most recent—weapons have got
more lethal, and, in states like Virginia, where the N.R.A. is
powerful, no harder to buy.
Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neither
relieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Making it
more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, a rational way
to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nations with tight gun
laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat
restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially
no gun laws have a lot of gun violence. (If you work hard, you can find
a statistical exception hiding in a corner, but exceptions are just
that. Some people who smoke their whole lives don’t get lung cancer,
while some people who never smoke do; still, the best way not to get
lung cancer is not to smoke.)
It’s true that in renewing the expired ban on assault weapons we
can’t guarantee that someone won’t shoot people with a semi-automatic
pistol, and that by controlling semi-automatic pistols we can’t reduce
the chances of someone killing people with a rifle. But the point of
lawmaking is not to act as precisely as possible, in order to punish
the latest crime; it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order
to prevent the next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho’s
weapons, are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and
it’s not easy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loaded
semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often
as they are.)
Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and
shotguns—with proper licensing, we’ll live with the risk. There is no
reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At
some point, that simple truth will register. Until it does, phones will
ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why. ♦
What the Killers Want
By Lionel Shriver
Sunday, April 22, 2007; B01
When
Seung Hui Cho shot himself in the head, he so obliterated his features
that he was unrecognizable. Thus there proceeded a brief, merciful
interval during which the identity of the perpetrator of last Monday's
killing spree at Virginia Tech was unknown. He was literally faceless.
Would
that he had remained so. Instead, that strangely slack, absent-eyed
countenance is now permanently burned into our collective cultural
consciousness.
Even more than these gruesomely gratuitous
incidents themselves, I have come to dread the campus shooting's ritual
media aftermath -- a secondary wave of atrocity, all conducted under
the guise of grief, soul-searching concern and an ostensible
determination to ensure that no demented loner ever opens fire on his
classmates again. Yet the bloated photographs on front pages, the
repeating loops of interviews on cable news, the postings of warped
creative writing assignments on the Web, and perhaps above all the
airing of Cho's self-pitying, quasi-messianic video clips on every
network all help ensure that similar incidents will indeed recur -- and
soon.
When researching a depressingly copious array of real-life
campus massacres for a fictional variation on those macabre melees in
my last novel, "We Need to Talk About Kevin," I grew to appreciate that
every school shooter has his own sorry story. Yet the one motivation
that seems to tie all these misguided characters together is a yearning
for media recognition. In an era that has lost touch with the
distinction between fame and infamy, so driving is the need to be
noticed -- for any reason -- that even posthumous attention will do.
Much like those fun-fair photo booths in which one can push one's face
through a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can be sure
that more than one American kid has already mentally snipped out the
zomboid face on those front pages and poked his own mug through the
newsprint instead. Cho's video "manifestos" may stir revulsion in most,
but they will stir envy in a dangerous few.
Moreover, Cho has
deliberately upped the ante; exceeding Dylan Klebold's and Eric
Harris's body count by more than a factor of two on the eighth
anniversary of the Columbine shootings, nearly to the day, was surely
calculated. So how many victims will our next shooter figure he has to
claim in order to merit the same delicious scale of coverage?
Sixty-four?
Despite all the searching-for-an-answer hand-wringing
we have been subjected to this last week, the most obvious ounce of
prevention would be to stop allowing the likes of Cho to play the media
like a piano. As it is, we gave him everything he would have wished
for. In so doing, journalists who claim only to be helping us to
"understand," the better to prevent future rampages, are hypocritical.
Ask any Skinnerian psychologist: Reward behavior, and it rises.
As
a novelist, I covet that "understanding." As a citizen, I resist it.
Pity for Cho's purportedly tormented childhood and fascination with his
psychotic, solipsistic universe only entice other disturbed characters
to make a bid for the same sympathy.
I also get the willies when
I hear that, in response to this single massacre, campuses across the
country are now undergoing "security reviews." Anxious that no one in
the future claim that they, too, should have caught the "warning
signs," school administrators nationwide will be tempted to institute
policies that infuse their institutions with a climate of fear,
suspicion and creative repression so at odds with the purpose of
education.
Consider what we have done to airports. Thanks to
Richard Reid, we're obliged to dump our sneakers on the belt, struggle
to tie our laces on the other end and sacrifice our cigarette lighters
-- since otherwise, so goes the default presumption, we will all set
our explosive shoes on fire. Thanks to a handful of British would-be
terrorists who have yet to be convicted, we travel with humiliating
Ziploc bags of no more than 3 ounces of shampoo, since otherwise we
would obviously combine our full-size Herbal Essences with our
chamomile conditioner and blow out the side of the plane. I doubt I'm
alone in not feeling one whit safer as a result of this theatrical
pretense of "security." Is this what we want to do to our schools?
As
disturbing as Cho's writing may be, I dread yet another wave of
paranoia in American English departments, so that every aberrant poem
or offbeat short story is forensically examined for signs of deviance.
In the supersensitive post-Columbine period, numerous kids were
expelled for writing work that their teachers became convinced
displayed "warning signs." Any student who wrote my own seventh novel,
which climaxes in a grisly school killing with a crossbow, would be
thrown off campus and dragged onto a psychiatrist's couch in a
heartbeat.
As ritualistic as the institutional overreaction to
one high-profile shooting in schools is the brutal casting about for
someone to blame who isn't already dead, a vicious tradition that's now
well underway. The finger of blame is already circling wildly -- at the
campus's police, administrators and teachers. For the first time, it
has even pointed at me. Because Cho, like my own fictional character
Kevin, bought locks and chains to trap his victims in their school
rooms, numerous blogs and even the London Paper have speculated that he
may have been imitating "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Take it from me:
Even such a glancing accusation that the death of 32 people is all your
fault is not an enjoyable experience.
The sole nominally
productive reaction to Cho's rampage is yet another call for stricter
gun control in America. But it's unlikely that going through the
motions of national anguish on this point will bear much fruit. Cho had
no criminal record and had clearly done his planning well ahead, thus
making him capable of lasting out any waiting period. He would surely
have been able to buy a gun in states with even the most rigorous
restrictions in place. Until the United States shifts the burden of
proof -- so that the purchaser has to prove that he needs a gun, rather
than the state having to prove why he can't have one -- American gun
control is destined to be more gesture than substance.
Similarly,
calls for more attentive care for the mentally ill are harmless enough,
unless they translate into a leeriness of anyone who is quiet,
impenetrable, peculiar, hostile and isolated (which well describes me
on a bad day) and into a corresponding over-eagerness to lock them up.
In
all, the cheap hindsight insistence that if we'd had the right rules,
laws and procedures in place, Cho and his unfortunately numerous
predecessors could have been stopped puts me in mind of the film
"Minority Report," in which psychics have visions of homicides yet to
be committed. Thus Tom Cruise and his fellow troopers arrive in the
nick of time to arrest a "murderer" before he has a chance to kill. I
don't trust our psychics in any guise, and I am more afraid of
ham-handed preventive measures than I am of stray lunatics with guns.
Repeatedly
this past week, news anchors have asked the "experts" (one of whom,
hilariously, this mere fiction writer is considered), "What is to be
done?" Even the barmiest answers offer the illusion of control. Get the
answer right, so goes the reasoning, and we will never see headlines of
this sort again. Yet leaving aside the seemingly intractable business
of gun availability in America, the grim truth is that there is nothing
to be done.
A discrete subsection of the human race is insane. A
larger subsection may not be clinically psychotic but is still
sufficiently resentful, vengeful, envious, grandiose and myopically
self-pitying to be dangerous. Even if you zapped every gun off the
planet, these folks could still get hold of knives, baseball bats,
jagged shards of glass or machetes (think of Rwanda). We live in a
world of multiple risks -- traffic accidents, lightning bolts,
avalanches -- and the biggest risk we live around every day is other
people. The unhinged, the angry, the malevolent circulating in our
midst amount to social bad weather. Whenever we walk out the door, we
take the chance that malice will rain on our heads.
Stop giving
these shooters blanket coverage and banner headlines? My personal
choice of solution, but a pipedream; and media censorship would be one
more cure worse than the disease. Tighten up gun laws, and offer more
counseling in schools? Fine. But beyond such common-sense practice,
responding to Monday's massacre with a host of tyrannical and doubtless
ineffectual "security" procedures and "warning sign" codes would bring
no one in Virginia back to life, would make going to school even more
unpleasant and would hand Cho Seung Hui a perverse sort of victory.
Lionel Shriver's new novel, "The Post-Birthday World," was published last month by HarperCollins.
Post a Comment
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Your washingtonpost.com User ID will be displayed with your comment.
Comments: (Limit 5,000 characters)
Comments
that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate
comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally,
entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than
the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block
users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy
policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
April 22, 2007
Before Deadly Rage, a Life Consumed by a Troubling Silence
From the beginning, he did not talk. Not to other
children, not to his own family. Everyone saw this. In Seoul, South
Korea, where Seung-Hui Cho grew up, his mother agonized over his
sullen, brooding behavior and empty face. Talk, she just wanted him to
talk.
“When I told his mother that he was a good boy, quiet but well
behaved, she said she would rather have him respond to her when talked
to than be good and meek,” said Kim Yang-Soon, Mr. Cho’s 84-year-old
great-aunt.
When his parents announced when he was 8 that they were going to
America, their relatives were gladdened. “We thought that it would help
the boy gain confidence if he moved to the United States’ open
society,” said an uncle who asked to be identified only by his last
name, Kim.
And yet when he and others heard from Mr. Cho’s mother, it was the
same dismal story, a buried life of silence. In church, she told them,
she prayed for God to transform her son.
By now, the world knows what Seung-Hui Cho became, how on a gusty, snowy morning last Monday at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., he massacred 27 students and 5 teachers before killing himself.
No one could understand why. On Friday, his sister issued a
statement of apology and sorrow that revealed the family’s own
bewilderment. “This is someone that I grew up with and loved,” she
said. “Now I feel like I didn’t know this person.”
Interviews with investigators, relatives, classmates and teachers
offer inklings of how he progressed from silence to murderous rage, and
show how he meticulously prepared for his final hours.
•
In Seoul, there was never much money, never enough time. The Cho
family occupied a shabby two-room basement apartment, living frugally
on the slender proceeds of a used-book shop. According to relatives,
the father, Seung-Tae Cho, had worked in oil fields and on construction
sites in Saudi Arabia. In an arranged marriage, he wed Kim Hwang-Im,
the daughter of a farming family that had fled North Korea during the
Korean War.
Their son was well behaved, all right, but his pronounced
bashfulness deeply worried his parents. Relatives thought he might be a
mute. Or mentally ill. “The kid didn’t say much and didn’t mix with
other children,” his uncle said. “ 'Yes sir’ was about all you could
get from him.”
In 1984, relatives who had moved to the United States invited the
family to join them. It took eight years to get a visa. In 1992, they
arrived in Detroit and then moved on to Centreville, Va., home to a
bustling Korean community on the fringe of Washington. They found jobs
in the dry-cleaning business and worked the longest of hours. Dry
cleaning is a favored profession among Koreans — some 1,800 of the
2,000 dry cleaners in the greater Washington area are run by Koreans —
because it means Sundays off for church and sparse need for proficient
English, exchanges with customers being brief and redundant.
The goal, of course, was to own one’s own business. But it did not
happen for Seung-Tae Cho. He began as a presser — an 8 a.m.-to-10 p.m.
job — and that is what he is today. His wife worked in the same
capacity until a few years ago, when she accepted a job in a high
school cafeteria so the family could have medical insurance.
They lived in a nondescript row house in a modest section of town,
friendly but not overly sociable. Jeff Ahn, president of the League of
Korean-Americans of Virginia, said the family was uncommonly private
among the throbbing Korean-American community of about 200,000 in and
around Washington. They shunned the more prominent Korean-language
Christian churches, and prayed at a small church outside of town.
High school did not help Seung-Hui Cho surmount his miseries. He
went to Westfield High School, one of the largest schools in Fairfax
County. He was scrawny and looked younger than his age. He was
unresponsive in class, and unwilling to speak.
And that haunted face.
Classmates recall some teasing and bullying over his taciturn
nature. The few times he was required to speak for a class assignment,
students mocked his poor English and deep-throated voice.
And so he chose invisibility. Neighbors would spot him shooting
baskets by himself. When they said hello, he ignored them, as if he
were not there. “Like he had a broken heart,” said Abdul Shash, a
next-door neighbor.
The Korean community of Centreville is a high-aspiring one, and
nothing matters more than bright futures for its children. The area is
speckled with tutoring academies — “Believe & Achieve,” “Ivy
Academy” — high SAT scores and road maps to elite colleges. The local
Korean papers publish lists of students admitted to Ivy League
institutions. Mr. Cho’s older sister, Sun-Kyung Cho, went to Princeton
and made the lists, but not him. She now works as a contractor for the
State Department.
When Mr. Cho entered Virginia Tech, which is crouched in the Blue
Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, his parents drove him to school
with guarded expectations. Perhaps he would no longer retreat to video
games and playing basketball alone the way he did at home. Perhaps
college might crack the mystery of who he was, extract him from his
suffocating cocoon and make him talk.
•
Girls figured somewhere in his yearnings, but always from a distance.
In his junior year, Mr. Cho told his then-roommates that he had a
girlfriend. Her name was Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer
space and traveled by spaceship, and she existed only in the dimension
of his imagination.
When Andy Koch, one of his roommates, returned to their suite one
day, Mr. Cho shooed him away. He told him Jelly was there. He said she
called him Spanky. SpankyJelly became his instant-message screen name.
He became fixated on several real female students. Two of them
complained to the police that he was calling them, showing up at their
rooms and bombarding them with instant messages. They found him
bothersome but not threatening. After the second complaint against him
in December 2005, the police came by and told him to stop.
A few hours after they left, he sent an instant message to one of
his roommates suggesting he might as well kill himself. The campus
police were called, and Mr. Cho was sent to an off-campus mental health
facility.
After a counselor recommended involuntary commitment, a judge signed
an order deeming him a danger and he was sent for evaluation to
Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford, Va. A doctor there
declared him mentally ill but not an imminent threat. Rather than
commit him, the judge allowed him to undergo outpatient treatment.
Officials say they do not know whether he did.
His junior-year roommates mostly ignored him because he was so
withdrawn. If he said something, it was weird. During Thanksgiving
break, Mr. Koch recalled, Mr. Cho called him to report that he was
vacationing in North Carolina with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president; Mr. Cho said he had grown up with him in Moscow.
In class, some students thought he might be a deaf-mute. A classmate
once offered him $10 just to say hello but got nothing. He hunched
there in sunglasses, a baseball cap yanked tight over his head.
Sometimes Mr. Cho introduced himself as “Question Mark,” saying it was
the persona of a man who lived on Mars and journeyed to Jupiter. On the
sign-in sheet of a literature class, he simply scribbled a question
mark instead of his name.
But he wrote. Those who read his stories, his poems, his plays — they were the ones who wondered.
English teachers were disturbed by his angry writings and oddness.
In a poetry class in his junior year, women said he would snap pictures
of them with his cellphone beneath his desk. Several stopped coming to
class.
Lucinda Roy, then head of the English Department at Virginia Tech,
began to tutor him privately. She, too, was unnerved. She brought him
to the attention of the counseling service and the campus police
because she thought he was so miserable he might kill himself.
During their private sessions, she arranged a code with her
assistant. If she uttered the name of a dead professor, the assistant
was to call security.
Last semester, he took a playwriting class in which he submitted two
one-act plays, “Richard McBeef” and “Mr. Brownstone,” both foulmouthed
rants. In “Richard McBeef,” a 13-year-old threatens to kill his
stepfather. Steven Davis, a senior in the class, said he finished
reading the play one night, turned to his roommate and said, “This is
the kind of guy who is going to walk into a classroom and start
shooting people.”
•
The first gun he bought was a Walther .22-caliber pistol. He ordered
it from an Internet gun site and picked it up at a pawnshop near campus
on Feb. 9.
Why then? Investigators say they are trying to discover if there was
some precipitating event. Evidently, though, a plan had been hatched
and was in motion.
On March 12, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on
the condition of anonymity, Mr. Cho rented a van from Enterprise
Rent-A-Car at the Roanoke Regional Airport that he kept for almost a
month. The next day, he bought the second gun at Roanoke Firearms,
where he laid out the requisite three pieces of identification: his
Virginia driver’s license, his green card and a personal check. He paid
by credit card: $571 for a 9-millimeter Glock pistol, one of the
store’s best sellers, a favorite for target shooting and self-defense.
He took 50 rounds of ammunition.
On March 22, Mr. Cho showed up at the PSS Range, advertised as
“Roanoke’s only indoor pistol range,” $10 an hour. Mr. Cho spent an
hour practicing and bought four ammunition magazines for the Glock.
Range employees, investigators said, remembered a young Asian man
videotaping himself inside a van in the parking lot.
Over the next few weeks, he fulfilled the rest of his shopping list.
Investigators said he went to the Wal-Mart in Christiansburg on March
31, April 7, April 8 and April 13. During those visits, he bought cargo
pants, sunglasses and .22-caliber ammunition. He also bought a hunting
knife, gloves, a phone item and a granola bar. He visited Dick’s
Sporting Goods for extra magazines of ammunition. He got chains at Home
Depot.
On March 28, he stayed at the MainStay Suites in Roanoke, according
to Ed Wray, the general manager. On April 8, he spent the night at the
Hampton Inn in Christiansburg. Investigators think that some of his
videos were shot in this hotel room, because a gold extension cord for
a lamp that is visible in one of the images resembles one in the room.
All told, investigators calculate that Mr. Cho spent several
thousand dollars getting ready for April 16, most of it charged to a
credit card.
•
In the last few weeks, Mr. Cho’s roommates noticed a few new
oddities in this most odd man. He cropped his hair to a military buzz
cut. In the evenings, he was working out with a certain frenzy at the
gym.
None of his roommates had known him until this academic year. He was
a senior, an English major, and someone who, at 23, was older.
Throughout the term, they had not seen him with anyone who might
constitute a friend. He ate his meals in the dining hall in solitude,
embracing what they took to be a subaltern status they assumed he
preferred.
The six roommates occupied Suite 2120 in Harper Hall, designed in
requisite college bland: a cinderblock common area, three compressed
bedrooms, a single bathroom. Sharing a bathroom lets you learn things
about your roommates, but not everything. They knew that he took
medication but did not know what it was for. He had acne.
It was common for him to go to sleep at 9 p.m., unthinkable for a
college student, and to awaken at 7 a.m. But lately he had been getting
up earlier and earlier, as if there were insufficient time to do what
he needed to do.
It was not yet 5 a.m. on Monday when Joe Aust, a sophomore who
shared Mr. Cho’s room, heard his rustlings. He was already crouched at
his computer, where, from his copious music downloads, he liked to
repeatedly play “Shine,” a song of spiritual longing from the Georgia
alternative rock band Collective Soul.
Karan Grewal, 21, another suitemate, bumped into Mr. Cho in the bathroom. Not a word.
Mr. Cho dabbed moisturizer on his eyes and slid in contact lenses. He brushed his teeth.
The groggy Mr. Aust went back to sleep. When he got up about 7 to prepare for class, Mr. Cho was gone.
•
Emily Hilscher,
a freshman, lived in Room 4040, near the elevators on the fourth floor
of West Ambler Johnston Hall, one building from Harper. Shortly after 7
a.m., she was killed by bullets from Mr. Cho’s gun. The same fate met Ryan Clark,
one of the dorm’s resident advisers. Mr. Clark is believed to have come
out of his room to investigate the noise, only to stumble into death.
Officials say they know of no connection between Mr. Cho and Ms.
Hilscher, and remain baffled about why he began there and why he chose
not to end there. “The biggest thing for us is Location One,” a law
enforcement official said. “Why Location One? Why did he stop at two
killings there?”
The campus police received a 911 call at 7:15, when the rest of the
campus was still opening its eyes, the thousands of students who
commuted to school not yet on the grounds.
Classes had not begun, and the campus was not alerted to the
dormitory killings. The university police quickly picked up some
information, and the nature of it led them to make a decision and
follow a trail. Ms. Hilscher’s roommate, Heather Haughn, had shown up
at 7:30 to meet her and accompany her to class. Instead, she
encountered the campus police.
One of the things she told them was that Ms. Hilscher had a
boyfriend, Karl D. Thornhill, a senior at nearby Radford University;
Ms. Hilscher had spent the weekend with him at his off-campus
townhouse, and he had dropped her off at her dorm that morning. Ms.
Haughn also told them that Mr. Thornhill had guns and had been shooting
them at a range two weeks earlier.
Based on what she said, the police concluded that they had the most
clichéd script of all — the lovers’ quarrel. They went looking for Mr.
Thornhill, and found him on the highway, driving home from a class.
They pulled him over and started interrogating him.
But he was the wrong man, and the police were at the wrong place.
•
That gave Mr. Cho time, and he had uses for it.
The police know he returned to his dorm room because he accessed
photo files there. He harbored messages of hate, and now was when he
chose to offer them to the world.
He assembled a package, and in it were QuickTime videos of himself,
43 photographs and an 1,800-word statement outlining his place in a
world he saw arrayed against him. Many of the snapshots were of him
brandishing guns — at nothing, at the camera, at himself. One showed
him with a hammer. There was a photo of bullets standing lined up as if
soldiers awaiting inspection.
His rage was brutally transparent in his multimedia screed and
suicide note. He ranted against hedonism and trust funds, against
high-class taste for vodka and cognac. He praised the Columbine High School killers as martyrs, and styled himself a Christ figure.
He said, “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,”
he said. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a
corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you
have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”
He took his package to the small post office a few blocks from the
main gates of campus and arranged with the postal clerk to send it by
overnight mail to NBC in New York. The postage was $14.40. It was
time-stamped at 9:01 a.m. Then, investigators say, he went back to the
dorm to arm himself.
•
At 9:26 a.m., the university issued this e-mail message to the
campus: “A shooting incident occurred at West Ambler Johnston earlier
this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating. The
university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact
Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with
information on the case.”
By then, though, the calculus of the day had already set in motion the next sequence, and there was nothing to stand in its way.
•
Norris Hall is a brown, cavernous, L-shaped classroom building
situated across the drill field on the other side of campus from Harper
Hall. It can be walked from Harper Hall in less than 15 minutes.
Sometime around 9:30, Mr. Cho stepped inside Norris Hall. He was
wearing cargo pants, a sweatshirt, an ammunition vest and a maroon cap,
the school color. He carried a backpack — a receipt for one of the guns
stuffed inside — and he was carrying chains and some knives. On one arm
was inscribed Ax Ismael, a name whose significance has not been
determined but might be a Biblical allusion.
He unfurled the chains and wrapped them around the interior handles
of the doors. The entrance secured, he mounted the stairs to the second
floor and the classrooms. Second period had begun.
•
The stairs he took emptied into the short end of the L, where there
were seven classrooms. Two were vacant, and five were in session: Rooms
204, 205, 206, 207, 211. Gun drawn, he forged into four of them. Inside
of 10 to 15 minutes, forensics evidence concluded, he fired more than
175 rounds in killing 30 people, the worst slaughter of its kind in the
history of the country.
•
The first police officers on the scene forced their way in by
blasting open the front doors with a shotgun. That blast, investigators
believe, alerted Mr. Cho that he had time for only one more shot.
They found his body sprawled in the stairwell. He had turned one of
his guns around and shot himself. The officers shouted, “Shooter down!
Shooter down! Black tag!” Black tag is police code for dead.
And that was all the killing there would be at one mountainside college campus on one awful Monday.
In death, Seung-Hui Cho finally spoke, but it was through the
QuickTime videos received by NBC and broadcast on Wednesday. A pastor
at a Korean church in Centreville watched the tapes on television with
his family. He told the Seoul newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, “All my family
said that was not the Seung-Hui we knew. It was the first time we saw
him speaking in full sentences.”
Reporting was contributed by Choe
Sang-Hun from Seoul, South Korea;
Sarah Abruzzese, Serge F. Kovaleski
and Katie Zezima from Blacksburg,
Va.; Cara Buckley and Suevon Lee
from Fairfax County, Va.; and William
K. Rashbaum from New York.
An Isolated Boy in a World of StrangersCho's Behavior Alarmed Some Who Knew Him; Family 'Humbled by This Darkness'
By David Cho and Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 21, 2007; A01
Warning signs about Seung Hui Cho came early in his life.
Cho
was unusually quiet as a child, relatives said. He did not respond to
greetings. He did not want to be hugged. But when Cho fought with his
older sister, he would punch her with shocking violence.
Kim Yang
Soon, a great-aunt in Korea, said Cho's mother told her the boy had
autism. After the family immigrated to the United States in 1992, when
Cho was 8, Kim would call his mother and ask how the boy was doing.
"She only talked about her daughter," Kim said. "We knew something was
wrong."
Because Cho did well in school, his mother did not seem very determined to get treatment for him, Kim added.
It
is unknown what, if any, help the parents sought for their son before
he attended Virginia Tech, where this week Cho killed 32 schoolmates
and teachers. The Chos left their home in western Fairfax County the
day of the shootings and are staying at an undisclosed location. Only a
few friends are in contact with the family, and most have declined to
talk, upon the Chos' request.
The Chos spoke for the first time
yesterday, releasing a statement to the Associated Press through an
attorney, saying they feel "hopeless, helpless and lost" and "are so
deeply sorry for the devastation" caused by the gunman.
"We are
humbled by this darkness," wrote Cho's sister, Sun Kyung Cho, 25. "This
is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know
this person. . . . My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to
fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much
violence."
Before Monday, when Cho went on his shooting rampage,
the family's story was not so different from that of other Korean
immigrants.
Seung Tae Cho and his wife, Hyang In, told friends
they came to America for the sake of their children's education. They
settled in a townhouse in Centreville near good public schools. The
father worked long hours pressing pants at a dry cleaner in Manassas.
The mother occasionally went to church.
And when their firstborn,
Sun Kyung, got into Princeton in 1999, it seemed as if all their
sacrifices had paid off. The parents, once adrift in poverty in South
Korea, now had an anchor for the good life in America through their Ivy
League daughter.
Beyond these broad brush strokes of Cho's life
in Fairfax, only bits and pieces have emerged from relatives. The local
ethnic organizations that typically gather Korean immigrants --
churches, social clubs and civic associations -- say the Chos were
largely unknown and disconnected in the Washington area, which is
unusual for the tight-knit community.
"They're like ghosts," said
Ron Kim of the Korean-American Dry Cleaners Association of Greater
Washington. "It is really strange for a family not to be known."
A World of His Own
Cho, likewise, was difficult to know, his classmates in Fairfax said. He often seemed to be in a world of his own.
Students
who knew him as far back as middle school remember a dramatically
uncommunicative boy who never spoke, not even to teachers. Some
remember classmates derisively offering dollar bills to Cho if he would
just talk. The band director would urge him to play his trombone more
loudly and to hold his head up.
"Teachers would call on him, and
he wouldn't respond," recalled Sam Linton, 21, a freshman at New River
Community College near Virginia Tech, who attended classes and shared a
homeroom with Cho at Stone Middle School in Centreville. "He would just
sit there until they would call on somebody else."
James Duffy,
21, a Virginia Tech junior who also attended Stone, said the first time
he ever heard Cho speak was on television Wednesday night, when NBC
aired the recordings he had mailed in the middle of the rampage.
"That was also the first time I ever saw an expression on his face," Duffy recalled.
Other
students recalled that he carried violent writings in his notebooks. He
wore "geeky" clothes, not stylish or popular, the kind his parents
might have picked out, Linton recalled.
When Cho was a sophomore,
he was a member of the Westfield High School Science Club, according to
the school's 2001 yearbook. In his sophomore and junior year portraits,
he is dressed identically: light-colored T-shirt with a plaid
button-down shirt on top.
In Cho's senior year, neither his name nor his picture appears anywhere in the yearbook.
David
Gearhart, 21, a junior at Virginia Tech who attended Stone Middle with
Cho, said Cho's antisocial behavior prompted teasing from other kids.
"We
might have cracked a couple of jokes, nothing to his face for sure.
Nothing very serious. We would just say, 'Did you see Seung say nothing
again today?' Something like that."
Gearhart remembers a friend seeing a paper fall out of Cho's notebook. "It had all kinds of hate writing," he said.
Shame and Blame
Not
since the Los Angeles riots in 1992, when one of the nation's largest
Korean enclaves was ransacked and burned, has an event gripped the
Korean American community like the massacre at Virginia Tech. Several
area Koreans said that when they heard that the shooter was an Asian
American male, they were desperately hoping he was not Korean. Their
hearts sank when police announced the name as Cho Seung Hui.
Investigators
said Cho was a Korean national with a green card and used the Asian
style of putting his last name first, which the news media generally
followed. But Cho had spent nearly twice as much time in the United
States as in Asia. He is part of what Korean Americans call the "1.5
generation" -- children who immigrated to the United States and who
live in both Korean and American cultures but sometimes feel completely
at home in neither.
As his name was broadcast to the world,
Koreans abroad and in the United States struggled with their reactions,
cultural analysts say. The South Korean government expressed fears of a
backlash against all Koreans. Korean pastors and civic leaders who had
no relationship to the family or Virginia Tech apologized on behalf of
the shooter. Academics said the reactions revealed how personal the
shooting has been for Koreans and Korean Americans. It was as if Cho
was one of their own family members. Shame and blame boiled to the
surface.
Cho's isolation as a youth may have been exacerbated by
the strains of the Korean immigrant life, sociologists said. Parents,
working one or two jobs to provide for their families, often have
little time to spend with their children, let alone have meaningful
talks with them. Cultural stigmas make it difficult to deal with the
mental illness or emotional stress of a child.
"Korean immigrants
would feel shame," said Sang Lee, director of the Asian American
Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. "There would be some
reluctance and some hesitancy in admitting [a mental illness] and
openly seeing a doctor."
Josephine Kim, a professor at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the Korean American
community should not feel responsible for an incident it had nothing to
do with. Instead, it should reexamine how it addresses mental health
issues, she said.
"Here is this person at Virginia Tech who may
have been an adult academically, but emotionally and socially, he's
clearly a child who's been stunted," said Kim, who is also a licensed
mental health professional. "He didn't know how to deal with people. He
lived in pure isolation."
Busy Parents, Little Money
Within
his family, Cho did not appear to have a lot of supervision, relatives
and associates of the family said. His parents were busy at work. Money
was tight.
Before immigrating to the United States, his father
ran a secondhand bookstore that never made much money, relatives said.
In a suburb of Seoul, the family rented a three-room basement that was
no larger than 430 square feet. The apartment, now unoccupied and full
of mildew, was the least expensive rental in the building, according to
Korean news reports.
The Chos began to dream of America, but it
took years to get the necessary immigration papers. Much of their
savings were gone by the time they arrived in 1992, according to an
aunt, and they barely made ends meet. Fortunately, they had plenty of
relatives in the United States who could teach the father dry cleaning
skills.
By 1997, the Chos had saved enough to buy a $145,000
townhouse on Truitt Farm Drive in Centreville. Seung Tae Cho changed
jobs several times and recently worked at Green Cleaners in Manassas,
where he pressed pants.
Moon Hee Lee, one of his bosses there,
said the elder Cho never took more than a day off at a time and worked
Monday through Saturday.
"He was working too hard, just working, working," she said.
But
during lunch breaks, over Korean meals, he would often boast of his
daughter. "He was very proud of her. He always talked about her," she
said.
About almost anything else, she said, the family remained quiet.
Others
in the local Korean community, including pastors of the largest Korean
churches, civic leaders and members of the dry cleaners association,
examined their records and talked to associates to see whether the Chos
had any relationship with their groups. So far, none has been found.
Some classmates at Princeton said they couldn't remember Sun Kyung Cho, the killer's sister, ever talking about her family.
Sun
Kyung, who now works as a contractor for the State Department, was part
of a 25-member "food co-op," or eating club, during her senior year,
where students met for dinner every night and often stayed for hours
talking about current events and philosophical issues. Those in the
club described her as a driven and focused student.
Francis
Pickering, who was in the same eating club, said Sun-Kyung was a "very,
very hard worker" who seemed to keep to herself, seldom discussing her
family or much about herself.
Another friend said this week that
he was surprised to learn that she had a brother, as she rarely, if
ever, mentioned her family. In a telephone interview, the friend spoke
anonymously because Sun Kyung had passed a message through Princeton's
Manna Christian Fellowship asking her friends not to talk to the media.
Others added that the family appeared to struggle with the media frenzy
and what to say publicly before finally issuing the statement through
Raleigh, N.C., lawyer Wade Smith.
Some relatives said the family has kept its distance even from them.
Sung
Ryol Cho, an uncle who runs a dry cleaner in Anne Arundel County, said
he hasn't talked to the family in years. His wife said she has tried to
call them this week but has received no response.
"We don't know where they are," she said. "We hope they are okay."
Staff
writers Tom Jackman, Robert O'Harrow and Josh White and special
correspondent Joohee Cho in Goyang City, South Korea, contributed to
this report.
David Cho and Joohee Cho are not related to the family of Seung Hui Cho.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wounded20apr20,1,1142020.story
From the Los Angeles Times
MASSACRE AT VIRGINIA TECH: AFTERMATH
For hospitalized students, Hokie spirit marches in
By Adam Schreck
Times Staff Writer
April 20, 2007
BLACKSBURG, VA. — The raindrops had just started falling late Thursday
afternoon in front of Montgomery Regional Hospital when the Marching
Virginians showed up, instruments in hand. Inside,
six of their Virginia Tech classmates — including four who remained in
intensive care — were being treated for gunshot wounds. Three others
were being treated at nearby hospitals. All had witnessed Monday's
carnage firsthand, both in body and in spirit. And so, in full
orange and maroon marching regalia, some three dozen members of the
band raised their tubas, trumpets and trombones toward the patient
rooms above and belted out the Virginia Tech fightsong. From
one of the windows, 19-year-old freshman Hilary Strollo peered out, her
arms clutched across her hospital gown. An IV tube trailed from her
neck. But on her face was a radiant smile. "Let's go!" she called out after one of the songs. True to their school, the band boomed back: "Hokies!" As
other students injured in Seung-hui Cho's shooting rampage were
released from area hospitals Thursday, the community of Blacksburg
continued to grieve — while taking the first steps on a long road of
healing. Six students — three men and three women — being treated at Montgomery Regional were listed in stable condition. "They appear to be heading in the right direction," said Demian Yakel, an orthopedic surgeon treating some of the patients. Four
of the students underwent major surgery when they arrived Monday, Yakel
said. Several arrived with gunshot wounds to the back, legs and
buttocks. "I haven't seen any anger. I haven't seen any shock," he said. "They're all very calm and collected." One
patient remained in serious condition Thursday at Carilion Roanoke
Memorial Hospital; two others at Carilion New River Valley Medical
Center in Christiansburg, Va., were in good condition. Yakel
said that some Montgomery Regional staff members came in to work
without being asked after learning of the shootings on television. And
they are drawing inspiration, he said, from the progress students are
making. "They're holding in there," Yakel said of the staff. "They're all feeding off each other's energy." Still,
there were signs that this community — not just the university campus,
now largely empty — remained severely shaken. The tragedy evoked an
outpouring of support from the town, and several businesses downtown
have posted signs pledging solidarity with the university. But there is
also anger and fear, and an overwhelming sense of innocence lost. A
local mental health association invited residents to what it billed as
the first of several "community grief gatherings" Thursday night.
Turnout was light, but those who attended vented their frustration at
the intense media spotlight, their anger at the university, their
sadness at lives lost and their regret that a mentally ill young man
didn't get the help he needed. And they talked about their guilt —
about loved ones' safety, about not doing enough to help, about
surviving at all. "Everybody here is tied to Tech in some way or
another," whether it's through work, school or church, said Carl Pauli,
a resident of nearby Christiansburg who with his family watched the
band serenade students outside the hospital. "Emotionally this has put
a big black mark on us. Practically, it's put a stop to everything."
adam.schreck@latimes.com
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Where they fell
Here
is where the dead, wounded and the gunman were found Monday after the
shootings at Virginia Tech. The locations indicate where authorities
found the victims or the class they were scheduled to attend at the
time of the shootings.
--
Ambler Johnston dormitory
Killed
Ryan C. Clark, senior
Emily J. Hilscher, freshman
--
Norris Hall
French class, Room 211
Killed
Jocelyne M. Couture-Nowak, French professor
Ross A. Alameddine, sophomore
Austin M. Cloyd, student
Daniel A. Perez Cueva, sophomore
Caitlin M. Hammaren, sophomore
Rachel M. Hill, freshman
Matthew J. La Porte, freshman
Henry J. Lee, studentErin N. Peterson, freshman
Mary Karen Read, freshman
Reema J. Samaha, freshman
Leslie G. Sherman, junior
Gunman Seung-hui Cho took his own life
--
Wounded
Colin L. Goddard, student, shot in leg and shoulder
Kristina Heeger, sophomore, shot in stomach
Kevin T. Sterne, senior, shot in leg
Hilary C. Strollo, freshman, shot in stomach, head and buttocks
--
German class, Room 207
Killed
Christopher James Bishop, German professor
Lauren A. McCain, student
Michael Pohle, student
Maxine Turner, senior
Nicole White, junior
--
Wounded
Derek J. O'Dell, student, shot in arm
Garrett Evans, senior, shot in leg
--
Solid mechanics class, Room 204
Killed
Liviu Librescu, engineering professor
Minal H. Panchal, graduate student
--
Wounded
Matthew R. Webster, student, shot in arm
--
Hydrology class, Room 206
Killed G.V. Loganathan, engineering professor
Brian R. Bluhm, graduate student
Matthew G. Gwaltney, graduate student
Jeremy Herbstritt, graduate student
Jarrett L. Lane, senior
Partahi Lombantoruan, doctoral student
Daniel P. O'Neil, graduate student
Juan R. Ortiz, graduate student
Julia Pryde, graduate student
Waleed M. Shaalan, doctoral student
--
Second-floor hallway
Killed
Kevin P. Granata, engineering science and mechanics professor
--
Note: Complete list of dead, partial list of wounded
--
Sources: Times staff and wire reports.
| | |