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Va. Tech stunned by images of gunman

Killer says community has 'blood on your hands' in chilling video message from the grave

BY JOHN RILEY | john.riley@newsday.com

8:18 AM EDT, April 19, 2007

Virginia Tech mass killer Seung-Hui Cho reached out from his grave to lament that "this didn't have to happen" and warned that "I will no longer run" in a bizarre multimedia package received by NBC News Wednesday that he apparently mailed in the two-hour interval between two sets of slayings that took 32 lives and his own on the college campus Monday.

"When the time came, I did it. I had to," said an angry, sneering Cho, who railed about the "debaucheries" of the rich and described the two Columbine High School killers as "martyrs."

He also compared himself to Jesus and flaunted two handguns in a variety of bad-dude poses in a package that included an 1,800-word manifesto, 28 video and audio clips, and 43 still pictures.

The words and images stunned Virginia Tech students.

"I saw his picture on TV, and when I did I just got chills," said Kristy Venning, a junior from Franklin County, Va. "There's really no words. It shows he put so much thought into this and I think it's sick."

The package helped explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second attack, at a classroom building.

"You had 100 billion choices and ways to avoid today but you decided to spill my blood instead," Cho said in one of the more coherent passages aired by NBC.

"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. ... I didn't have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," said Cho, the son of Korean immigrants who reportedly work in a dry cleaning business, in a passage apparently addressed to his victims.

"Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. ... They weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

NBC said the materials were mailed from a post office in Blacksburg, Va., at 9:01 a.m. Monday, between the shooting of two people in a campus dormitory and the later massacre of 30 others in a classroom building that ended in Cho's suicide.

The network said Cho, who used the name "Ishmael" on the receipt, prepared the materials over six days, but it couldn't tell if some were produced on Monday after the first shootings. The originals were turned over to law enforcement.

Cho's diatribes added a new level to the portrait of the 23-year-old senior English major who had struck neighbors, classmates and teachers as a troubled loner long before Monday's rampage, and they emerged as new disclosures about his behavior raised questions about the school's handling of him.

Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum revealed at a news conference that Cho was twice accused of harassing female students and was involuntarily hospitalized because of mental problems in 2005 -- just over a year before the killings.

In separate complaints in November and December of that year, Flinchum said, the women described Cho as merely "annoying" but did not want to press criminal charges. Around that same time, in late 2005, English department faculty also expressed concern to police and administrators about Cho's scary behavior and violent writings.

After police visited Cho on the second complaint, Flinchum said, an "acquaintance" told them that he might be suicidal. Police then obtained an order temporarily detaining Cho in a hospital after a magistrate found on Dec. 13, 2005, that he was "mentally ill" and represented an "imminent danger to self or others." Cho was hospitalized at Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health center in Radford, Va.

Court records, however, showed that a justice approved outpatient treatment for Cho the next day after a medical exam that concluded, "Affect is flat and mood is depressed. He denies suicidal ideation. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment are normal." The hospital declined to comment Wednesday.

Flinchum said that the first harassment complaint was also referred as a disciplinary matter to the school's internal judicial system.

But school officials said that disciplinary and medical records were protected by Cho's privacy rights, and told reporters it was premature to make a "value judgment" on whether the school took adequate measures to protect both Cho and other students.

Deciding what to do with troubled students is one of the most difficult decisions a school faces, freighted with both legal and humanitarian considerations, experts said Wednesday.

"Knowing which students have crossed the line so they're a danger is really a challenge everywhere," said Dr. Alan Glass, a board member of the American College Health Association. "There's just no simple answer."