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 “I didn’t have to do this.”
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, which was not addressed to a specific person, in Tuesday afternoon’s mail delivery, but it was not opened until Wednesday morning. The network immediately turned the materials over to FBI agents in New York.
The package included an 1,800-word manifesto-like statement diatribe in which he expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even. The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” Capus said in an interview late Wednesday afternoon.
The material does not include any images of the shootings Monday, but it does contain vague references.
“I didn’t have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It’s not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you [molest] — I did it for them,” Cho says on one of the videos.
NBC cooperating with investigatorsCapus said the network was cooperating with Virginia State Police and the FBI, which is assisting the state police.
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.
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 mentions “hedonism” and Christianity, and he talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy.
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”
The production of the videos is uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand him. But they indicate 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.
Chilling photographsThe package also includes 29 photographs. Cho looks like a normal, smiling college student in only the first two. In the rest, he presents a stern face; in 11, he aims handguns at the camera that are “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.
“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 issuedAs 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 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.”
Cho was released, said Dr. Harvey Barker, director of the health center.
“If a person is able, at that moment, to persuade a psychiatrist [and] the hospital treating team that they are OK to be released — I imagine sometimes that does happen,” Barker told NBC News.
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 soughtCampus 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.
In an affidavit seeking the warrant to search the room, 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, teachersHer 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.”
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.
Stephanie Derry, a classmate of Cho’s, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times, that classmates were so horrified that they 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.”
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students
BAGHDAD - Students in Baghdad, where universities have been hard hit by violence, said Monday they were saddened by last week's massacre at Virginia Tech and hung up a banner to express their solidarity with "our brothers in humanity and in pursuing knowledge."
"We want to let the whole world know that we do not support terrorism anywhere," said Yassir Nazar, head of the student union at Baghdad Technology University, who organized the hanging of the banner near the campus gate.
It reads, "We, the students of Technology University, denounce the attack at Virginia Tech. We extend our condolences to the families of the victims who faced a situation as bad as Iraq's universities do. The sanctity of campuses must be protected around the world.'
"We have lost many friends and professors," said Nazar. "But in spite of our wounds, we want to show our solidarity with the students of Virginia Tech who are our brothers in humanity and in pursuing knowledge."
In Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, scores of students have been killed and their campuses targeted by Iraqi insurgents who often regard universities as bastions of Western thought and political activities they oppose.
Dozens of professors, students killed
More than 200 university professors have been killed in the past few years, and thousands have fled the country to teach at universities abroad, said Basil al-Khateeb, spokesman for the Iraqi ministry of higher education.
On Feb. 25, a female suicide bomber triggered a ball bearing-packed charge, killing at least 41 people at a mostly Shiite college whose main gate was left littered with blood-soaked student notebooks and papers amid the bodies.
On Jan. 16, two car bombs exploded as students from Mustansiriyah University lined up for rides home, killing at least 70 people and wounding at least 133.
Baghdad Technology University, which is an annex of Mustansiriyah University, can seem more like a war zone than a college campus, despite its sports fields, modern buildings and a small garden with wooden benches.
Concrete barriers block nearby streets to keep out suicide car bombers. Students from Iraq's complex mix of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians walk peacefully across the campus, but the sound of ambulance and police sirens, military convoys driving past and U.S. helicopters flying overhead is nearly constant.
All students are searched before entering the campus and cell phones — which insurgents sometimes use to set off hidden bombs — are banned. Some students fall behind in their studies or miss exams because attacks or fighting prevent them from reaching campus. Baghdad's frequent power outages also can make it difficult for them to study at home at night.
'Al-Qaida ... does the same thing here'
Although many Baghdad Technology University students regard Americans as much safer and luckier than they are, they were saddened by the tragedy at Virginia Tech, in which 32 people were gunned down by student Seung-Hui Cho.
"We denounce the shooting in Virginia Tech because it targeted students of knowledge," said Hassan Abdul-Karim, a junior engineering major who said he has lost two friends to deadly insurgent attacks in his neighborhood of Baghdad. "Al-Qaida in Iraq does the same thing here in an effort to make ignorance prevail so its ideology can win."
Zahra Hussein, a fourth-year engineering student, said she was shocked by the Virginia Tech killings in a country that is so much more peaceful and secure than Iraq. "For us, such attacks have become normal, even when they target students," she said.
Mohammed Akram, a third-year chemical engineering student, said Iraq has seen many examples of recluses who have become suicide attackers. "But we are determined to complete our studies and do all we can for our country," he said, as several friends standing around him on the campus nodded their heads in agreement.
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