BLACKSBURG, Va. – The Virginia Tech gunman, who shot and killed 32 people the morning of April 16, had been previously accused of stalking two female students and also raised professors’ concerns about his mental stability from his writings.
Cho Seung-Hui was accused of stalking two separate women in late 2005 with an alarming number of calls and E-mails. At about the same time an acquaintance of Cho’s called police to express concern that he might be suicidal. Cho was later taken to a mental health facility.
An eight-page note was discovered after the shootings in which he laments women, “rich kids” and religion, an official speaking on the condition of anonymity told the Associated Press. The alleged note harkens to comments made by noted poet Nikki Giovanni, a teacher of Cho’s in the university’s English department. According to a CNN interview reported by the AP, she referred to his poetry as “intimidating” and that he possessed “a really mean streak.” Cho’s behavior in class became so troubling, he was eventually removed.
In another class, Cho is reported as having written a screenplay in which characters throw hammers and attack with chainsaws. He wrote another screenplay in which students fantasize about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
On the morning of April 16, Cho opened fire in a Virginia Tech dorm and then, two hours later, shot up a classroom across campus, killing 32 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. He then committed suicide, bringing the death toll to 33.
The massacre took place at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus, beginning at about 7:15 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston, a co-ed dormitory that houses 895 people, and continuing at least two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building about a half-mile away.
Two people were killed in a dormitory room, and 31 others were killed in the engineering building, including the gunman, police said.
The massacre Monday took place almost eight years to the day after the Columbine High bloodbath near Littleton, Colo. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.
Previously, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history was a rampage that took place in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the 28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before police shot him to death.
