Gunman in massacre contacted NBC News
‘This didn’t have to happen,’ says message mailed between shootings
By Alex Johnson
Cho Seung-Hui in a photograph he sent this week to NBC News.Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package, including photographs and videos, lamenting that “this didn’t have to happen,” the network said Wednesday.
Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.
NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package in Wednesday morning’s mail delivery and immediately turned the materials over to FBI agents in New York.
The package included a long, “rambling, manifesto-like statement embedded with a series of photographs,” Capus said. The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” he said.
It did not include any images of the shootings Monday, but it did contain “vague references,” including “things like ‘this didn’t have to happen,’ ” Capus said in an interview late Wednesday afternoon.
“NBC Nightly News” planned to show some of the material Wednesday night.
Capus said gloved NBC security personnel handled the package very carefully as soon as it arrived. The network immediately called the FBI and turned it over.
The package bore a U.S. Postal Service stamp recording that it had been received at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. ET Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho shot two people in the West Ambler Johnston residence hall on the Virginia Tech campus and shortly before Cho entered Norris Hall, where he killed 30 more people.
“We probably would have received the mail earlier had it not been that he had the wrong address and ZIP code,” Capus said.
Shooter speaks on camera
Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera, Capus said. He does not name anyone specifically, but he talks at length about religion and his hatred of the wealthy.
The production of the videos indicated that Cho had worked on the package for some time, because he not only “took the time to record the videos, but he also broke them down into snippets” that were embedded paragraph by paragraph into the main document, Capus said.
The package also includes several photographs showing Cho in different locations, sometimes posed against a white, cinderblock wall. In some of the photographs, Cho is holding handguns “consistent with what we’ve heard about the guns in this incident,” Capus said.
Other photographs show Cho holding a knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table, Capus said.
“This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation,” said Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police, the lead agency investigating the shootings. “We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth.”
Detention order issued
As early as 2005, police and school administrators were wrestling with what to do with Cho, who was accused of stalking two female students and was sent to a mental health facility after police obtained a temporary detention order.
The two women complained to campus police that Cho was contacting them with “annoying” telephone calls and e-mail messages in November and December 2005, campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.
Cho was referred to the university’s disciplinary system, but Flinchum said the woman declined to press charges, and the case apparently never reached a hearing.
However, after the second incident, the department received a call from an acquaintance of Cho’s, who was concerned that he might be suicidal, Flinchum said. Police obtained a temporary detention order from a local magistrate, and in December of that year, Cho was voluntarily but briefly admitted to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, NBC News’ Jim Popkin reported.
To issue a detention order under Virginia law, a magistrate must find both that the subject is “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment” and that the subject is “an imminent danger to himself or others, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for himself.”
According to a doctor’s report accompanying the order, which was obtained by NBC News, Cho was “depressed,” but “his insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor, a clinical psychologist, noted that Cho “denies suicidal ideations.”
Under the law, the magistrate could have issued a stronger detention order mandating inpatient treatment, but there was no indication Wednesday that such an order was ever entered. A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans told NBC News that he could not discuss Cho’s case because of patient confidentiality and privacy laws, but he said the hospital was cooperating with the investigation.
Otherwise, Flinchum said, there were no further police incidents involving Cho until the deadly shootings Monday, first in a young woman’s dormitory room and then at a classroom building across campus. Neither of the alleged stalking victims was among the victims Monday.
In addition to the 33 people confirmed dead, including the gunman, nine people remained in hospitals in stable condition, hospital authorities said.
Health records sought
Campus police applied Wednesday for search warrants for all of Cho’s medical records from Schiffert Health Center on campus and New River Community Services in Blacksburg.
”It is reasonable to believe that the medical records may provide evidence of motive, intent and designs,” investigators wrote in the documents, according to The Associated Press.
Police searched Cho’s dorm room Tuesday and recovered, among other items, a chain and a combination lock, according to documents filed Wednesday. The front doors of Norris Hall, the classroom building, had been chained shut from the inside during the shooting rampage.
Other items that were seized included a folding knife; two computers, a hard disk and other computer disks; documents, books, notebooks and other writings; a digital camera; compact disks; and two Dremel tools, which are rotating tools used for cutting, sanding and other applications.
In an affidavit seeking the search warrant, 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 had received two other bomb threats; investigators said they had not connected those to Cho.
Family sought better life in U.S.
Cho arrived in the United States as an 8-year-old boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in an off-white, two-story townhouse in Centreville, Va., a suburb of Washington, where his parents worked at a dry cleaners. He graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly in 2003.
Cho’s family moved to the United States in search of a better life, said the family’s landlady in South Korea. The family was poor and lived in a cheap basement apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, the woman told South Korean television Wednesday.
Cho had an older sister, Sun-Kyung, who graduated from Princeton University with an economics degree in 2004, Princeton officials confirmed.
The Princeton student newspaper reported Wednesday that she is pursuing a career as a State Department contractor working on the reconstruction of Iraq. It said that Sun-Kyung Cho was “palpably upset” when it contacted her and that she refused its requests for an interview.
Student concerned classmates, teachers
Her brother, however, was described as a sullen loner by several students and professors. They had long been alarmed by his class writings — pages filled with twisted, violence-drenched writing.
Nikki Giovanni, the famous poet who is a professor at Virginia Tech, said Wednesday that while she did not fear for her life or the lives of her other students, she had Cho removed from her class because he was a disruptive force.
“He was mean,” Giovanni told NBC News’ Peter Alexander. “He was trying to bully me. He was trying to bully the class, for what purpose I have no idea.
“I wanted him out of my classroom,” she said.
Lucinda Roy, a co-director of creative writing at Virginia Tech, said she tutored Cho after that. She called Cho “a gifted student in some ways. But he was very lonely and depressed, in my opinion. We didn’t build up a rapport because he wasn’t the kind of student who would permit that.”
“I think it’s crazy” that there are no stronger procedures for dealing with seriously troubled students, she said in an interview with NBC News. “I think there needs to be a change. We must intervene, and that is all there is to it.”
Referred for counseling
Cho’s writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the university’s counseling service, said Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English Department.
In a screenplay Cho wrote for a class last fall, characters throw hammers and attack with chainsaws, according to fellow students in the class. In another, Cho concocted a tale of students who fantasized about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
“His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” Stephanie Derry, a classmate of Cho’s, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times. “I remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play, the boy threw a chainsaw around and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispie treat.”
Derry said classmates even joked that they “were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did. But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”
Despite the many warning signs that came to light in the bloody aftermath, police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set Cho off.
Cho left notes that were found after the bloodbath castigating fellow students, investigators said. One of them said, “You forced me do this,” NBC News’ Chris Clackum reported Wednesday, but it could not immediately be determined when the notes were written or whether they referred specifically to Monday’s events.
4/18/2007 6:27 PM