THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2007
NEWS
9A
VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING
23-year-old gunman identified
South Korean student described by peers as increasingly violent, erratic
Charles Dharapak/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Virginia Tech students, from left to right: Felix Gabathuler, 20, from Lynchburg, Va.; Michael Bell, 20, from Vienna, Va.; Natasha Shebiani, 19, from Great Falls, Va., and Margaret Riggs, 19, from Vienna, Va., stand with thousands of others in an overflow stadium during the conconervation memorial attended by President Bush following the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va. on Tuesday.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BLACKKSBURG, Va. — The gumman in the Virginia Tech massacre was a sullen loner who alarmed professors and classmates with his twisted, violence-drenched creative writing and left a rambling note in his dorm room raging against women and rich kids.
A chilling picture emerged Tuesday of Cho Seung-Hui — a 23-year-old senior majoring in English — a day after the bloodbath that left 33 people dead, including Cho, who killed himself as police closed in.
News reports said that he may have been taking medication for depression and that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic.
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 on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.
A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity and violence-laced screensplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of," former classmate Ian McFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site. He said he and other students "were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school
shooter."
"We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did," said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. "But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling."
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said Cho's writing was so disturbing that he had been referred to the university's counseling service.
"Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be," Rude said. "But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."
She said she did not know when he was referred for counseling, or
what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws. The counseling service refused to comment.
Cho — who arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., where his parents worked at a dry cleaners — left a note in his dorm room that was found after the bloodbath.
A government official, who spoke of condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to discuss details of the case, said the note had been described to him as "anti-woman, anti-rich kid."
The Chicago Tribune reported on its Web site that the note railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus. ABC, citing law enforcement sources, said that the note, several pages long, explains Cho's actions and says, "You caused me to do this."
Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said there was no evidence so far that Cho left a suicide note, but he said authorities were going through a considerable number of writings.
CAMPUS SAFETY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUSTIN, Texas Campus threats forced lock-downs and evacuations at universities and grade schools in seven states on Tuesday, a day after a Virginia Tech student's shooting rampage killed 33 people.
One threat in Louisiana directly mentioned the massacre in Virginia, while others were reports of suspicious activity in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan.
In Louisiana, parents picked up hundreds of students from Bogalusa's high school and middle school amid reports that a man had been arrested Tuesday morning for threatening a mass killing in a note that alluded to the murders at Virginia Tech.
Schools Superintendent Jerry Payne said both schools were locked down and police arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly made the threat in a note he gave to a student headed to the private Bowling Green School in Franklinton. Both towns are in southeastern Louisiana.
"The note referred to what happened at Virginia Tech," Payne said. "It said something like, 'If you think that was bad, then you haven't seen anything yet.'"
In Rapid City, S.D., schools were locked down after receiving reports of a man with a gun in a parking lot at Central High. No shots were
fired and no injuries were reported, police said. The high school students were taken to the nearby Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, where parents were allowed to pick up their children.
In Austin, authorities evacuated buildings at St. Edward's University after a threatening note was found, a school official said.
Police secured the campus perimeter and were searching the buildings, St. Edward's University spokeswoman Mischelle Amador said. She declined to say where the note was found and said its contents were "nonspecific."
Amador said the university's reaction was not influenced by Monday's attack at Virginia Tech.
"No matter what day or when this would have happened, we will always take the necessary precautions to protect our students, our faculty, our staff, the entire university community," she said.
In Bloomfield Hills, Mich., police attributed a 30-minute lockdown at the exclusive Cranbrow Schools complex in response to jittery nerves following the Virginia slavings.
School officials called police after parents and students reported spotting a 6-foot-tall man in a skirt, high heels, lipstick and a blond wig near a school drop-off area outside Cranbrook's Kingswood Upper School, Lt. Paul Myszenski said. Police were unable to find anyone meeting the man's description.
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