Was Cho Seung-hui American?
Until April 16, 2007, Cho Seung-hui (pronounced Joh Sung-Wee. His family name is Cho) was an ordinary, albeit weird 23-year-old from Centreville, Virginia, 30 miles from Washington, DC, close to Dulles International Airport.
He was the son of Korean immigrants who ran/worked in a drycleaning business in Centreville. His brother -- some media reports say sister -- a graduate of Princeton, worked for the State Department. The family moved to the US in 1992 when Cho was eight. Before moving to the US the family was not too well off and rented a basement apartment in Seoul. According to their Seoul landlord they sought a better life and anonymity in America according to many news reports.
Cho graduated from Westfield High School, Chantilly, Fairfax County, Virginia, where incidentally two of his victims Erin Peterson and Reema Samaha, of Lebanese extraction, also went to school. At Westfield his classmates remember him as a loner and a sullen, extra quiet type hiding from the world in silence.
Were there any indication that Cho was troubled?
Cho switched his major from business to English in his senior year at Virginia Tech (he joined VT in 2003) and his behaviour in poetry and writing classes was considered pretty odd by his fellow students.
He rarely ever spoke and refused to answer when spoken to. Classmates cannot even remember a time when he said anything at all and his lack of conversation and blank expression brought him notice. He also never took off his sunglasses.
Instead his bizarre, violent writings drew the attention of his professors. His writing was loaded with anger and spewed hate. He spoke to his professors in a whisper, taking time to answer, and took pictures of them on his cell phone. His poetry was so distressing that his teachers found themselves unable to teach him. Attendance dipped at classes Cho attended because his writing scared away fellow students. Instead Lucinda Roy, the director of creative writing at Virginia Tech, volunteered to take him one on one, although with not too much success.
Samples of his writing are posted all over the net and are testimony to his anger. A one act play called Richard McBeef focuses on a vicious conversation between a boy and his stepfather that disintegrates into the foulest language and then ends in violence and death.
Others described him as lonely and so depressed that he often seemed close to tears. He claimed to be seeing a counsellor but his professors were never sure.
He only ever spoke to his roommates on messenger, played solo basketball and listened to grunge band Collective Soul's Shine repeatedly, whose lyrics run to stanzas like this one:
Oh, heaven let your light shine down (x4)
I'm going to let it shine (x2)
Heavens little light gonna shine on me
Yea yea heavens little light gonna shine on me
Its gonna shine, shine on me
Its gonna shine, come on in shine
The Korean American youngster had by all accounts an odd /no relationship with women. He was never seen with a girlfriend or a girl. Classmates reported that he took photos of women in public spots. Although it was initially reported that the source of his rage was a girlfriend who jilted him, later reports said that Emily Jane Hilscher, who he shot in her dorm two hours before his second killing spree was not seeing him. A note left in his room has no real message but meanders between complaints against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans".
Cho, who killed himself after killing 32 people, was found with the words Ismail Ax tattoed on his arm. Ismail Ax is one of the top searches on the Internet at the moment and does not seem to have a definite meaning.
Did Cho's teachers realise he was capable of killing 32 people on a single day?
While the mood of his writings disturbed his professors there was not too much to indicate that Cho was considering violence.
Roy discussed her fears with campus authorities but nothing in Cho's poetry or work suggested that he was contemplating murder nor was there any reason for the police to keep tabs on him.
Where are his parents now?
According to various media reports his parents are in shock and have been hospitalised. Korean newspapers have put out reports that his mom, and also his father, attempted suicide but this story is apparently unfounded.
