BY: MSNBC and NBC News THRU CEZAR CABANILLAS
The gunman who shot 32 people to death before killing himself at a Virginia university was described Tuesday as a depressed and deeply disturbed young man whose “grotesque” creative writing projects led a professor to refer him for psychological counseling.
A day after the man, a 23-year-old senior English major, carried out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, President Bush joined dozens of state and campus leaders to bring comfort to the students, faculty and staff of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “This is a day of sadness for our entire nation,” the president said.
Thirty-three people were confirmed dead after the bloodbath Monday, including the gunman, whom police identified as Cho Seung-Hui (pronounced Choh Suhng-whee), of Centreville, Va., a resident alien who immigrated to the United States from South Korea in 1992. Nine students remained in hospitals in stable condition Tuesday, MSNBC-TV’s Tucker Carlson reported.
Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said investigators searched Cho’s room in Harper Residence Hall and took away numerous documents. He would not describe the nature of the documents but said there was no evidence that Cho had left behind a suicide note.
The Washington Post and The New York Times, citing law enforcement sources, reported on their Web sites Tuesday night that investigators had found a rambling and somewhat incoherent note in Cho’s dorm room. “It’s sort of a manifesto” attacking rich, spoiled students, one of the sources told The Post.
A second note was found near Cho’s body, also containing obscenities and denunciations of “rich kids,” the source told The Post.
It could not immediately be determined when the notes were written.
In a court affidavit seeking the search warrant, investigators said that when they discovered Cho’s body Monday in the classroom building where most of his victims were killed, they also found a “bomb threat note ... directed at engineering school department buildings.”
Police said Tuesday that there had been bomb threats on campus over the past two weeks but that they had not determined a link to the shootings.
After the shootings, all campus entrances were closed, and classes were canceled for the rest of the week.
Parents ignored administrators’ requestst to stay away for now and flooded into Blacksburg to be with their children, NBC News’ Don Teague reported. Every hotel room within miles of the campus was booked Tuesday.
Man alarmed instructors, classmates
A Virginia Tech professor told NBC News that Cho’s creative writing was so disturbing that she referred him to the school’s counseling service, but he would not go. The professor, Lucinda Roy, the English Department’s director of creative writing, would not comment at length on Cho’s writings, saying only that in general they “seemed very angry.” “I kept saying, ‘Please go to counseling; I will take you to counseling,’ because he was so depressed,” Roy said. But “I was told [by counselors] that you can’t force anybody to go over ... so their hands were tied, too.”
Fellow students in a playwriting class with Cho also noticed the dark and disturbing nature of his compositions. “His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” Stephanie Derry, a senior English major, 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 Krispy treat,” Derry said.
Otherwise, Cho was a young man who apparently left little impression in the Virginia Tech community. Few of his fellow residents of Harper Hall said they knew the gunman, who kept to himself. “He can’t have been an outgoing kind of person,” Meredith Daly, 19, of Danville, Va., told MSNBC.com’s Bill Dedman.
In Centreville, the suburb of Washington where Cho’s family lived in an off-white, two-story townhouse, people who knew Cho concurred that he kept to himself. “He was very quiet, always by himself,” said Abdul Shash, a neighbor. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.
Rod Wells, a postal worker, said that characterization of Cho did not fit the man’s parents, who worked at a dry cleaners. He described them as “always polite, always kind to me, very quiet, always smiling. Just sweet, sweet people.” “I talk to particularly everybody here,” Wells told NBC News. “So I guess nobody had any intimation that he was like that. I don’t think the parents did, because they were quite the opposite.”
by: Chynthia Almansor Naval Correspondence
