Seung-Hui Cho

Seung-Hui Cho
Status	Deceased (suicide)

Template:Koreanname Template:Korean name Cho Seung-hui (Korean: 조승희; January 18, 1984 – April 16, 2007) was the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16, 2007, in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States, according to police reports. He committed suicide after law enforcement officers breached the doors of the building in which he had already killed and wounded many staff and students.

Biography

Cho was born in South Korea. His family lived in Seoul, staying in a rented basement apartment. Landlord Lim Bong-ae states that "I didn't know what (Cho's father) did for a living. But they lived a poor life," Lim told the newspaper. "While emigrating, (Cho's father) said they were going to America because it is difficult to live here and that it's better to live in a place where he is unknown."

Cho emigrated to the United States at the age of eight in September 1992 with his parents and older sister. He was a permanent legal resident of the United States and a South Korean citizen. Cho had a permanent address in Centreville, Virginia, an unincorporated community in western Fairfax County, thirty miles west of Washington, D.C. and a few miles directly south of Washington Dulles International Airport. Cho graduated in 2003 from Westfield High School in the Chantilly community of Fairfax County.

According to Virginia Tech, Cho was an undergraduate majoring in business but switched to English in his senior year.

Virginia Tech massacre

Main article: Virginia Tech massacre

According to television news reports on April 17, Cho left a note criticizing "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans". He supposedly killed two students, Emily J. Hilscher and Ryan C. "Stack" Clark, on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coeducational dorm, around 7:15 AM, although police are not entirely sure if Cho was the perpetrator of that shooting in addition to the later one. Within the next two and a half hours, Cho returned to his room to re-arm himself and then crossed the campus to continue his rampage in a classroom building, Norris Hall, at 9:45 AM. Police identified Cho by matching fingerprints on the guns used in the shootings with immigration materials. The words "Ismail Ax" were found written on his arm in red ink. Police found a receipt for the Glock 19 pistol dated March 13, 2007. Permanent residents in Virginia may legally purchase firearms as long as they provide proof of residency, pass an immediate automated background check, and answer a questionnaire, although Virginia Tech students were forbidden from bringing firearms on campus on threat of expulsion. Cho bought the second weapon, a Walther P22 pistol, on April 13th, 2007.

As police closed in on him in Norris Hall, Cho committed suicide, with a gunshot to his head.

Naming

As Cho was a South Korean citizen, most news sources referred to him as Cho Seung-hui.

ABC News, National Public Radio, and the Los Angeles Times render his name in the Western order as Seung-hui Cho , while most other English-language outlets use Cho Seung-hui [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]. The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University website refers to Cho by the Korean order [9]. The Montgomery County, Virginia Sheriff's Office search warrant used the Western order to describe Cho's name [10].

Motive

No official motive for the shooting spree has been announced by law enforcement agencies.

Early reports indicate that Cho Seung-hui was obsessed with Emily Hilscher (although Emily Hilscher's family did not know of the relationship) and became enraged after being rejected. Hilscher's resident assistant Ryan "Stack" Clark tried to intervene but both were shot by Cho. This is apparently due to a confusion with Karl Thornhill, Hilscher's boyfriend, who was the main suspect in her shooting initially.

Behavior

A university spokesman described Cho as a "loner," and said university officials were having a difficult time finding information about him. A Korean club on campus reported that he rarely joined or talked with them. Some reports state that Cho is believed to have been taking psychiatric medications for depression,, but there is no record of this in federal prescription databases. Cho had earlier been accused of setting a fire in a dormitory and stalking women on campus.

According to a classmate in Cho's 300-level Playwriting class, "Cho was really, really quiet. I can't even remember one word he said the entire semester." Although the class was a workshop class, in which students were encouraged to submit their plays for class discussion, when Cho was asked to comment, "he would just shrug and say nothing." According to the professor who taught the class, Cho never participated in class discussions. "He was just there, I can't even describe it. He would just sit and watch us, but wouldn't say anything. It was his lack of behavior that really set him apart. He basically just kept to himself, very isolated. I remember only once he smiled, but it wasn't very big." Lucinda Roy, one of Cho's professors, described Cho as "an intelligent man" but seemed to be an awkward and very lonely man who never took off his sunglasses, even indoors. By fall 2005, Roy removed Cho from her class after he became angry in the classroom. She said she tried several different ways to help him, including a decision to refer him for counseling.

Roy would not comment at length on Cho’s writings, saying only that in general they “seemed very angry.”

According to professor Nikki Giovanni who taught Cho in a poetry class in 2005, Cho was "extraordinarily lonely—the loneliest person I have ever met in my life." She said that he whispered, took 20 seconds to answer questions, and took cell phone pictures of her in class. After becoming concerned with his behavior and the themes in his writings, the professor started meeting with Cho to work with him one-on-one. She said she was concerned for her safety when she met with him. After notifying the legal authorities about his behavior, the professor urged Cho to seek counseling, but he refused. Giovanni called the idea that Cho was troubled "crap" and described him as "mean." When informed of the massacre she remarked, "I knew when it happened that that's probably who it was," and "I would have been shocked if it wasn't."

Neighbor Abdul Shash described Cho as "very quiet, always by himself," and said he spent a lot of time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him. Fellow student Julie Poole said that on the first day of a literature class last year the students introduced themselves one by one, but when it was Cho's turn, he did not speak. The professor, she said, looked at the sign-in sheet and where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. "We just really knew him as the question mark kid," Poole added.

According to an interview of both his roommates, John and Andy, on CNN, Cho listened to Collective Soul's "Shine" repeatedly. In the interview, Andy describes two homoerotic, male-male stalking incidents involving Cho and himself: 1) Cho standing in the unlocked doorway of his room late at night taking photographs and perhaps other prurient activities, and 2) repeated harassing cellphone calls by Cho claiming to be Cho's brother, "Question Mark". John declined to describe Cho as "mean", conflicting with some other first-hand accounts Furthermore, as reported in the interview by Gary Tuchman, Cho's roommates revealed that he spoke of an imaginary girlfriend named "Jelly" who referred to him as "Spanky."

Criminological classification

The incident is the deadliest shooting on a college campus, exceeding the sixteen deaths of the University of Texas shooting of 1966; and is the second deadliest school-related killing in U.S. history, behind the 1927 Bath School disaster which claimed forty-five lives, including thirty-eight school children, through the use of explosives.

With a death toll of thirty-two victims plus the killer, this is the deadliest single-perpetrator civilian shooting in United States history, surpassing the Luby's massacre of 1991, in which twenty-four people were killed. Internationally, it is surpassed by the 1982 massacre of fifty-seven South Koreans by off-duty police officer Woo Bum-Kon and the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in the Australian state of Tasmania where thirty-five people were killed by gunman Martin Bryant.

Attributed writings

Cho wrote plays under the name Seung Cho. The head of the Virginia Tech English Department quoted a colleague, Lucinda Roy, as describing Cho as "troubled." Others have raised questions about his online writing, and are searching for clues in a Facebook or Myspace account. One such MySpace account has been found, although its authenticity has not been independently verified.

Richard McBeef

Roy was concerned about an assignment that Cho turned in last year (2006), a short one-act play he wrote entitled "Richard McBeef". It is about a 13-year-old boy, John, who accuses his stepfather, Richard McBeef, of molesting him and murdering his father, who apparently died in a boating accident. John repeatedly says he will kill Richard, at one point using his stepfather's picture as a dartboard. The two, along with Sue, John's mother and Richard's wife, start a violent argument. The mother ends the argument, brandishing a chainsaw, seemingly out of nowhere. The play ends with John attempting to shove a cereal bar in his step-father's mouth after berating Richard for not being able to support Sue as evidenced by a less than sterling job record. Finally, his step-father, in desperation, strikes out at John with "a deadly blow" .

Mr. Brownstone

In a second play attributed to Cho, titled "Mr. Brownstone", three 17-year-olds named John, Jane, and Joe are gambling at a casino while discussing their deep hatred of their 45-year-old mathematics teacher, Mr. Brownstone. John proclaims twice that he wants to kill Mr. Brownstone. Jane wishes for Mr. Brownstone to die and that she wants to watch him bleed. The three students sing the lyrics to "Mr. Brownstone" by Guns N' Roses, focusing on how they are "gonna kick him on down the line." At the end of the play, John wins a five million US$ jackpot. Mr. Brownstone appears and convinces the casino officials that the students attacked him and stole the five million dollar ticket from him. The casino officials give the winning ticket to Mr. Brownstone and order the students to be removed from the casino. The play ends with the three students threatening revenge.

Reactions to Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone

Ian MacFarlane, a former classmate, stated, "When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of." MacFarlane and his colleagues "were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter."

According to a classmate in Cho's 300-level play-writing class, Cho's "writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque."

According to an unnamed professor who taught Cho, Cho's work was characterized as "very adolescent" and "silly", with attempts at "slapstick comedy" and "elements of violence."

See also

• Virginia Tech massacre
• School shooting
• Massacre

External links

• BBC profile of Cho Seung-Hui
• Text of "Richard McBeef" from TheSmokingGun.com
• Text of Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone on aol.com
• Search warrant for Cho's on-campus residence