Tech files show Cho’s teachers were concerned

BY DAVID RESS AND CARLOS SANTOS
Media General News Service
Published: November 3, 2008

When he finally took off his mirrored sunglasses, Seung-Hui Cho’s empty gaze shook his teachers, who had just asked police to be on hand the next time he showed up for poetry class.

“It is a very distressing sight, since his face seems very naked and blank without them,“ English professor Cheryl W. Ruggiero wrote in a memo. “It’s a great relief to be able to read his face, though there isn’t much there.“

Cho’s chilling schoolwork and what his teachers thought of the student who would kill 32 people in last year’s Virginia Tech massacre were gleaned from hundreds of pages of documents the university has refused to make public.

The e-mails, letters and academic records show that while Cho dropped from the radar screens of Tech administrators and mental-health officials for more than a year before April 16, 2007, his professors continued to struggle with his odd, sometimes threatening behavior.

Those accounts are included in 4,000 pages of Tech records the Richmond Times-Dispatch obtained 10 days ago from files prepared for the state’s settlement for victims and their families. Tech withheld many of these records when the newspaper sought them through the Freedom of Information Act this summer. Among the findings:

a story Cho wrote a few months before the massacre talks about shooting students in a classroom;

his parents apparently weren’t surprised to learn he was the killer;

a professor asked police to be on standby in case Cho went to a poetry class where he had scared students.

Cho wrote his classroom-shooting story the fall before the massacre.

“This is it. . . . This is when you damn people die with me,“ Cho has his hero, Bud cry out.

“Everyone is smiling and laughing as if they’re in heaven-on-earth, something magical and enchanting about all the peoples’ intrinsic nature that Bud will never experience,“ Cho wrote, before revealing that Bud had a 9 mm handgun, like one of the weapons Cho used.

That he was angry in his final year was clear. Police are still investigating an online chat-room message from Cho that said: “I’m going to kill people@VT,“ they told families in briefings last month ordered as part of the settlement.

Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Edward F.D. Spencer told families and victims it is easy to connect dots after an event, but he added: “Some dots were missing.“

While Cho was weird and socially inept, so are many students, Spencer said. But the documents show many students and teachers who had contact with Cho thought he was more than just inept.

“I’ve been teaching for 22 years, and I’ve never had another student who even came close to the degree of inwardness and isolation that was obvious in Cho,“ Edward C. Falco, one of Cho’s English professors, wrote shortly after the massacre in a long note included in the documents.

In the documents, handwritten notes from a meeting of top Tech officials report that Cho’s “parents were not surprised it was him” when police came to search his Northern Virginia home.

And an e-mail that landed in Cho’s mailbox April 16 — too late for him to read because he was already on his way to Norris Hall, where he killed 30 people — advises he was about to receive a F in a religion class. Cho had already killed two students in a dorm, and though Tech officials knew of the fatal shooting, they had not yet advised the campus when Cho’s professor sent the notice.

In that class, asked to imagine himself as St. Paul, he wrote: “You [expletive] need to admit your sins, admit you are sacrilegious [expletive] & ask God for forgiveness. I will personally go over to your house & kick the living hell out of you. I mean it. I’m not kidding.“

Cho’s creative writing teachers — English was his major — saw even more of that barely contained anger.

In his junior year, department head Lucinda H. Roy asked police to be on standby in case he showed up at a poetry class.

The teacher, Nikki Giovanni, wanted him out. He secretly took pictures of classmates using his cell phone and presented a paper calling them “despicable human beings . . . before you know it, you’ll turn into cannibals . . . I hope y’all burn in hell.“

“The class is scared by all this,“ said an internal student case summary, a standardized, brief internal Tech report on disciplinary issues.

Dean of Students Tom Brown Jr. noted that he showed Cho’s paper to a counselor “and she did not pick up on a specific threat,“ adding that there was no specific policy about cell phones.

Roy — with Ruggiero beside her for backup after another senior official nervously asked if she planned to meet Cho alone — was able to talk Cho into dropping the poetry class. Instead, Roy offered that she and another professor would tutor him. Cho accepted. But he shrugged off Roy’s suggestion he get counseling.

Cho got an “A” in that tutored class, for work that included a story about a young man named Ax Manson — “a deliberate allusion to Charles Manson?“ a professor’s note on the paper asks. Another note by the professor reads “Go Ax!“ as the young man curses an evil teacher and addict father, a father who slices the young man’s throat to end the story.

But Roy later wrote to the dean of students that she and the other professor responsible for Cho’s independent study “are genuinely concerned about him because he appeared to be very depressed.“

The next semester, another English teacher, concerned by the violence in Cho’s writing, went to talk to Roy. It was only then he learned that Giovanni had insisted he be removed from the poetry class.

“We all saw that he was troubled, and we all recognized the violence in his writing,“ Falco wrote after the shootings in a note to other students in the playwriting class Cho took his final year. “We did all that we thought was reasonable to do.“

At the start of Cho’s senior year, Robert Hicok, another of Cho’s English professors, was also struck by the violent writing, later complaining through a colleague that papers he gave police had never been forwarded to last year’s state investigation panel.

Another of Cho’s English instructors his senior year, Lisa Norris, urged him to seek counseling. She told her associate dean she was concerned about Cho, too.

“I believe he spoke two words during our meeting. Otherwise, all communication was via head nods or head shakes,“ she wrote. “Whew.“

Associate Dean Mary Ann Lewis replied “many faculty members have attempted to deal directly with his situation” and suggested sessions to improve his English language conversation skills might help.

“Do keep writing,“ Norris wrote on Cho’s portfolio of stories, which included the story about Bud and for which he received a “B.“ “Your stories are original & memorable, & you handle violence in interesting ways.“

While the English department tried to help with kind words and only the gentlest criticism, staff in his junior year dorm tried to keep a lid on a situation that was rapidly getting out of hand.

Resident assistants reported he had delusions, blaming a nonexistent twin brother for harassing instant-messages sent to female students and complaining about nonexistent bedbugs, despite a 2 1/2-hour extermination. They suspected him of setting fires in the lounge, disciplinary memos show.

Students who lived nearby started warning others about Cho, and dorm staff said they were worried he might hurt himself or others, a state mental-health department investigator found.

After a second visit by Tech police investigating complaints he harassed female students, Cho told a roommate he might as well kill himself — a threat that, when reported and investigated, landed him in a nearby hospital’s mental-health unit.

He had 15 minutes of a psychologist’s time before the commitment hearing that got him out of the hospital, the documents show.

Cho was released after he promised to seek treatment at the university’s counseling center.

He made one visit, which a state mental-health investigator said had occurred more than an hour before the counseling center received word from the hospital about his suicide threat.

Cho never went back. The center’s records about him are missing.

“Referring to counseling center is like referring to black hole,“ a professor on a high-level university advisory panel complained four months after the massacre.

Counseling center officials say they recall little about him, the documents show. For them, as well, he seems to have been a closed book.

You don’t seem to be your old self, Roy told Cho at one point in the painful session with him about Giovanni’s class, as she recalled the young man from her introductory poetry class a year and half before.

Had anything terrible happened to him lately? she asked.

“No” was all he said, after a long pause.

Roy asked him, “Are you happy here, at Virginia Tech?“

After another long pause, Cho answered, his tone neutral: “Sure.“

“What is that makes you happy?“ Roy pressed.

Yet another long pause.

“Not sure.“