From The Beginning to the End
The Elementary German class was under way in Room 207, reviewing German translations of computer parlance. A young man peeked in, saying nothing, and withdrew. Students who noticed him thought that either he was searching for someone or trying to locate his class. He did the same thing across the hall in Room 206, and again in Room 204. Then, Mr. Cho returned to each room, but this time, with his guns out.
Room 204: Fearing the door led to death and recognizing that it could not be locked, student Alec Calhoun, decided to jump out the second story window with his classmates. He saw students ahead of him fall and get injured, screaming in pain. Kevin P. Granata, a professor with an office on the third floor, ventured downstairs to investigate and was killed in the hallway. Gene Cole, a custodian, was talking to his supervisor on the first floor when a secretary came downstairs and alerted them to sounds of gunfire. Mr. Cole took the elevator to the second floor and came upon a wounded woman on the floor and unable to speak. Before he could get to her, the gunman charged out of a classroom, raised his gun and fired five shots at Mr. Cole. All missed.
Room 205: The Issues in Scientific Computing class had heard the gunfire. Zachary Petkewicz had shoved a table against the door and held it shut. Mr. Cho managed to get the door open six inches, but no further. The students could hear him reloading as he retreated.
Room 207: In Elementary German, students had heard noise outside, but dismissed it as construction racket. The door was closed. Mr. Cho opened it, and before it hit the doorstop, he was firing. There was no hope of escaping through windows heresince they were too slim. Sophomore Derek O’Dell slammed the door shut and barricaded it with his foot, leaning against the blackboard to avoid shots coming through the door. Two classmates propped their feet against the door. The others tried shoving the podium over, but it was bolted to the floor. Sure enough, the gunman returned. He got the door open an inch, before the students shut it again. He squeezed off half a dozen shots into the door, and left.
Room 211: Clay Violand, a junior in the Intermediate French class told Professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak to push a desk against the door. She glanced out in the hallway first, and pulled her head back with a look of frozen terror. She shoved a desk against the door, but the barricade did not hold. The professor and nine students were killed. “Shot after shot went off and I never felt anything,” Mr. Violand said. “I played dead and tried to look as lifeless as possible.” The gunman left, but moments later, he returned. Lying still on the floor, Mr. Goddard saw shoes approach, heard additional shots fired, then the shoes stopped next to him. He felt two more bullets rip into him, in the shoulder and buttocks. The shoes moved away, headed toward the front of the room. Somewhere nearby, one more shot rang out. The police had burst through. Mr. Cho had turned his gun on himself. Take a look at the maps and diagrams of the massacre.
Of the 41 people who have taken guns to U.S. schools and opened fire since 1996, 40 of them share one trait. They were born with the Y chromosome. Maleness is the only characteristic that is common to this group, with race — Caucasian — coming in second.
Cho’s Background From the beginning, he did not talk. Not to other children, not to his own family. Everyone saw this. In Seoul, South Korea, where Seung-Hui Cho grew up, his mother agonized over his sullen, brooding behavior and empty face. In church, she told them, she prayed for God to transform her son. In Seoul, there was never much money, never enough time. The Cho family occupied a shabby two-room basement apartment, living frugally on the slender proceeds of a used-book shop. According to relatives, the father, Seung-Tae Cho, had worked in oil fields and on construction sites in Saudi Arabia. In an arranged marriage, he wed Kim Hwang-Im, the daughter of a farming family that had fled North Korea during the Korean War. Their son was well behaved, all right, but his pronounced bashfulness deeply worried his parents. Relatives thought he might be a mute. Or mentally ill. Theymoved to America and lived in a nondescript row house in a modest section of town, friendly but not overly sociable. Jeff Ahn, president of the League of Korean-Americans of Virginia, said the family was uncommonly private among the throbbing Korean-American community of about 200,000 in and around Washington. They shunned the more prominent Korean-language Christian churches, and prayed at a small church outside of town. Westfield High School did not help Seung-Hui Cho surmount his miseries. Classmates recall some teasing and bullying over his taciturn nature. Neighbors would spot him shooting baskets by himself. When they said hello, he ignored them, as if he were not there. “Like he had a broken heart,” said Abdul Shash, a next-door neighbor.
In his junior year, Mr. Cho told his then-roommates that he had a girlfriend. Her name was Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer space and traveled by spaceship, and she existed only in the dimension of his imagination. When Andy Koch, one of his roommates, returned to their suite one day, Mr. Cho shooed him away. He told him Jelly was there. He said she called him Spanky. SpankyJelly became his instant-message screen name. He became fixated on several real female students. Two of them complained to the police that he was calling them, showing up at their rooms and bombarding them with instant messages. They found him bothersome but not threatening. After the second complaint against him in December 2005, the police came by and told him to stop. A few hours after they left, he sent an instant message to one of his roommates suggesting he might as well kill himself. The campus police were called, and Mr. Cho was sent to an off-campus mental health facility.
A judge signed an order deeming him a danger and he was sent for evaluation to Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford, Va. A doctor there declared him mentally ill but not an imminent threat. Rather than commit him, the judge allowed him to undergo outpatient treatment. Officials say they do not know whether he did. In the last few weeks, Mr. Cho’s roommates noticed a few new oddities in this most odd man. He cropped his hair to a military buzz cut. In the evenings, he was working out with a certain frenzy at the gym. Throughout the term, they had not seen him with anyone who might constitute a friend. It was common for him to go to sleep at 9 p.m., unthinkable for a college student, and to awaken at 7 a.m. But lately he had been getting up earlier and earlier, as if there were insufficient time to do what he needed to do.
Officials say they know of no connection between Mr. Cho and Emily Hilscher, and remain baffled about why he began there and why he chose not to end there. Ms. Hilscher’s roommate, Heather Haughn, told police that Ms. Hilscher had a boyfriend, Karl D. Thornhill, a senior at nearby Radford University; Ms. Hilscher had spent the weekend with him at his off-campus townhouse, and he had dropped her off at her dorm that morning. Ms. Haughn also told them that Mr. Thornhill had guns and had been shooting them at a range two weeks earlier. The police went looking for Mr. Thornhill, and found him on the highway, pulled him over and started interrogating him. But he was the wrong man, and the police were at the wrong place.
