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By Michelle Woo
On a Tuesday morning, a day after the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, we woke to a startling image of the gunman, the man who witnesses had said was donning a khaki ammunition vest when he killed 32 people before taking his own life. There he was, plastered on TV channels and online news sites. In a plain, yearbook-like photograph, his eyes stared blankly through thin-rimmed glasses. His lips showed neither a smile nor a frown. And he was Korean.
In the days following the massacre, blurred bits of information about this young man surfaced, though not without difficulty. First came the basics. His name was Seung-Hui Cho. He was 23 and a senior majoring in English at the university. He and his family immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea in 1992. They lived in a townhouse in Centreville, Va., a suburb near Washington.
Through a smattering of details, updated by news sources with increasing momentum, Cho’s family life was beginning to look uncomfortably familiar to many in the Korean community. His parents worked at a dry cleaner, a business that attracts many Korean immigrants. His older sister made good grades and went to Princeton. For some time, the family attended church.
But soon, as those who crossed his path began to describe him, the simple portrait of Cho became distorted, leaving experts scrambling to trace the intricacies of his past for clues to his behavior. Elder relatives in Korea told national reporters that even as a young boy, Cho never spoke. They thought he might be autistic.
Former high school classmates said Cho was sometimes teased for his garbled way of speaking. Virginia Tech senior Chris Davids told the Associated Press that once, when Cho was forced to read aloud, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, “Go back to China.”
In college, Cho seemed to express his internal anguish through writing. After the shooting, two plays he wrote laced with themes of rape and revenge circulated on the Internet. An English professor said she had informed campus police more than a year earlier that she was concerned about the anger Cho expressed in his work.
His college roommates recalled their rare conversations with him. According to The New York Times, Cho would mention an imaginary girlfriend named Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer space. They also said Cho slept with the light on. And he never looked people in the eye.
His behavior went from bizarre to threatening. In class, Cho reportedly took pictures of women from underneath his desk. Virginia Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum said that in 2005, two women contacted campus police to say Cho had made inappropriate contact with them. Cho was asked to speak to a counselor from a local mental health facility and was later issued a temporary detention order committing him to a psychiatric hospital.
Mental health examination documents show that Cho was labeled as a threat to himself, but not to others. That’s how little people knew.
On the morning of April 16, Cho, carrying guns, chains and knives, entered a dormitory hall and killed two people. Then, hours after police began following a wrong lead, Cho stepped inside an engineering building and killed 30 more, before turning the gun on himself.
Two days after the massacre, officials opened a package that Cho had sent to NBC studios in New York. It contained video clips of himself, 43 photographs and an 1,800-word statement expressing his rage. In his videos, he’s wearing the same khaki ammunition vest police would later discover on his blood-drenched body.
In a low, mumbled voice, Cho ranted against rich “brats” with Mercedes and trust funds. He described himself as a figure persecuted like Jesus Christ. He mentions “martyrs like Eric and Dylan,” a reference to the 1999 Columbine high school gunmen.
“You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience,” he said.
The videos provided a glimpse into Cho’s troubled mind that no one — not even family members — had ever seen.
Still, as loved ones of the 32 slain victims struggle to move on from what’s been called the worst slaughter of its kind in our nation’s history, Cho’s actions seem just as inexplicable as they were when he fired his first shot on that fateful Monday morning.
