Warning signs in a loners life

BY JOHN RILEY | john.riley@newsday.com

April 18, 2007

Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech senior responsible for Monday's campus killing spree, was a 23-year-old English major described yesterday as a troubled, cryptic loner who liked to wear sunglasses indoors, wrote twisted plays that set off alarms long before he snapped, and left behind a note railing about "rich kids" and "debauchery" at the school.

"If he sees you, he turns around and goes the other way," Alia Shasha, who has lived next door to Cho's family in suburban Centreville, Va., for seven years, said in an interview with Newsday. "All of high school, I never saw him with a friend. No one knows him. He's a lonely guy. "

"He would just sit and watch us, but wouldn't say anything," classmate Stephanie Derry, who took a playwriting class with Cho, told Virginia Tech's college newspaper. "It was his lack of behavior that really set him apart. He basically just kept to himself, very isolated. "

In one obscenity-filled play he wrote for the class, titled "Richard McBeef," Cho's 13-year-old protagonist obsesses over killing his pedophilic stepfather with a chainsaw and tries to stuff a cereal bar down his throat, only to be struck by a "deadly blow. " In another, titled "Mr. Brownstone," a teacher stalks his students and they fantasize about revenge.

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," wrote another former classmate, Ian MacFarlane, an AOL staffer who posted the two plays on America Online. "The plays had really twisted, macabre violence. ... Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. "

Formative years

Cho came to the United States from South Korea in 1992, and lived as a green card holder with his parents and an older sister - who graduated from Princeton University, according to some news reports - in a townhome development in Centreville, a suburb of Washington, D.C.. Cho's parents, who worked in a dry cleaning business, spoke limited English, but were congenial, neighbors said.

Cho kept to himself, riding a bike or playing basketball by himself. He graduated from nearby Westfield High School in 2003. Fairfax County school officials said that he had been in the Science Club as a sophomore, but had not supplied his picture for his senior yearbook.

Two victims of the killing spree were graduates of the same high school, but there was no indication they were targeted by Cho.

At Virginia Tech, he was sharing a three-bedroom dormitory suite with six other students. Roommate Joseph Aust told the Los Angeles Times yesterday that Cho didn't appear to have any friends, male or female, added no decorations or pictures to his room, worked out every day, and seemed to spend an enormous amount of time downloading music.

"I would come into the room and he'd just kind of be staring at his desk, staring at nothing," Aust said. And Cho didn't seem to want to talk. "He would just give one-word answers, not try to carry on a conversation," Aust said.

Cho kept such a low profile on campus that early yesterday, Virginia Tech officials were having a hard time coming up with any information about him. In a British lit class last year, he was remembered for writing a question mark instead of a name on the first-day sign-in sheet. "We just really knew him as the question mark kid," fellow student Julie Poole told The Associated Press.

But Cho's writings had aroused concerns in the English Department as far back as 2005, when Professor Lucinda Roy became so disturbed by some of what he wrote that she tried to tutor him individually.

In a series of interviews, she said the writing didn't involve threats to kill, but was "very angry. " During the tutoring sessions, he adopted a Michael Jackson-like demeanor, wearing sunglasses indoors with a cap pulled down over his eyes, whispering, taking 20 seconds to answer questions. In class, he took cell phone pictures of her, and she became concerned for her safety.

The 'loneliest person'

Cho was "extraordinarily lonely - the loneliest person I have ever met in my life," Roy told ABC News. She said other English teachers also had concerns about Cho and she let school officials, including the department chair, know there was a problem, but was told that, in the absence of an explicit threat, nothing could be done. Roy urged Cho to get counseling, but said she didn't think he ever did.

Whatever was driving him seemed to pick up velocity in recent weeks. He received a speeding ticket on April 7. He bought one of his two guns, a Glock, within the last month, authorities said. News reports yesterday indicated that he may have started a fire in a dorm room recently. A note about a bomb threat was found near his body Monday, and authorities suspect he may have been responsible for two earlier bomb threats on campus.

On Monday morning, a roommate recalled seeing Cho in boxer shorts at 5:30 a.m., less than two hours before the first shooting, going through his morning ritual - applying lotion, inserting contact lenses and taking medication. "He was, like, normal," Karan Grewal told the Los Angeles Times.

When his body was recovered from the mayhem, according to other news reports, investigators found the words "Ismail Ax" in red ink on one of his arms, and a note in his dorm that ranted against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.

Amid the rhetoric, ABC reported, Cho included the line, "You caused me to do this."

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