Flench 1
Katie Flench
Before He Killed 32
We’ve all heard of “red flags.” They’re the things you’re supposed to notice to help warn
you of danger. We all figure we’re clever enough to spot them. But no one noticed the red flags
for Seung-Hui Cho until it was too late.
***
When Cho and his family emigrated from South Korea, he was 8 years old. Kids at
school pestered Cho about his accent. “Go back to China!” some yelled. Others offered Cho their
lunch money just to hear him talk in broken English. Cho retreated to the background, becoming
a ghostly presence - a fading image of a boy. Cho’s family watched helplessly as their son
withdrew himself from the world. He was always alone, walking the school hallways with his
face down, eyes on the ground. He rarely spoke to anyone.
Psychologists told his parents he had selective mutism and severe social anxiety.
Cho popped up on his teacher’s radar when he turned in a writing piece for class. He
wanted to “repeat Columbine,” it said. A rumor circulated around the school not long after that
Cho had written a “hit list” of students he wanted to kill.
Cho went to see a psychologist who did art therapy with him. He made houses out of clay
with no windows and no doors. A structure closed off from the world; no way in and no way out.
***
April 16, 2007. 5 a.m. Cho is awake in Harper Hall room 2121 where he sits quietly
behind his brightly lit computer screen in boxer shorts and a t-shirt. Cho’s face is empty and
expressionless.
Flench 2
6:47 a.m. Cho is seen waiting outside of the West Ambler Johnston residential hall
entrance.
7:02 a.m. Emily Hilscher swipes her student ID card at the front of West Ambler. The
door unlocks and she heads to her dorm room, number 4040.
7:15 a.m. Hilscher and Ryan Clark, the hall’s Resident Advisor, lie dead in her room,
with fatal gunshot wounds.
7:17 a.m. Cho swipes his own access card to enter back into Harper Hall to change out of
his bloody clothes. He sits back down at his computer and signs into his student email account,
erasing his files and the account.
***
Cho’s parents were concerned when he was accepted into Virginia Tech. He had
maintained impressive grades, but all was under the supervision of counselors who worked one-
on-one with him. His parents drove roughly four hours to visit Cho on campus every week
during his first semester. He was fine, he reassured them. His grades were good, he showed
them. He was adjusting well, they decided. Their Sunday visits turned into a weekly Sunday
evening phone call.
Cho spoke so quietly in class, he was almost always inaudible. Greetings from students
were always returned with silence. But what Cho wasn’t saying out loud, he was writing down
instead. He became so enamored with the written word that he changed his major from Business
Information Technology to English. Suddenly, Cho was spending endless hours behind the blue
glow of the computer screen tapping at his keyboard. He’d bring stacks of books home from the
library all on the art of creative writing and literature.
Flench 3
A New York publishing house received a package in the mail from Cho with his proposal
of a novel. They sent him a rejection letter in return.
Things started to change for Cho after this.
His Poetry teacher, Dr. Nikki Giovanni, felt bullied by Cho. He’d come to class in dark
sunglasses and a dark hat pulled low over his eyes, forcing her to ask him at the start of every
class to remove them. She thought he was an “evil presence.” Students complained to Giovanni
that Cho was taking pictures under the desks of girl’s legs with his cell phone.
Cho went in front of the class one day and read his self-proclaimed “satirical”
composition: “You low-life barbarians make me sick to the stomach that I wanna barf over my
new shoes. If you despicable human beings who are all disgraces to [the] human race keep this
up, before you know it you will turn into cannibals—eating little babies, your friends.”
Only seven of her estimated 70 students showed up after his jarring reading. He was
removed from her class and privately tutored for the remainder of the semester.
***
9:01 a.m. Cho enters a Blacksburg post office with a package in hand. Inside are the
ramblings of a mentally anguished and unstable Cho. They have been recorded on video and
written out in a 1,800 word document.
In the package, Cho talks of "martyrs like Eric and Dylan,” again referring to and
idolizing the Columbine High School gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
9:15 a.m. Cho is seen outside and then inside of Norris Hall. He chains three doors shut
on the three main entrances from the inside.
***
Flench 4
Creative Writing Professor Carl Bean took Cho aside after his class one day. He told Cho
maybe he should drop his class.
Silent and staring while Bean spoke, Cho barely flinched. But he followed Bean to his
office afterwards and suddenly began yelling that he did not want to drop the class. Bean was
shocked to hear the loud voice coming from one that had been so utterly silent all semester.
Cho’s grades plummeted. His erratic and violent behavior increased.
He stabbed another female’s doom room carpet with a knife during a party.
He sent several “stalker-like” IM’s to two females from campus. He scrawled on one
girl’s dorm room dry erase board:
By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am
My name, dear saint is hateful to myself
Because it is an enemy to thee
Had I it written, I would tear the word.
He showed up at another’s door. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Question Mark.”
The girls filed complaints about Cho to the Tech Campus Police who told him to leave
the young women alone. He did.
In February and March, Cho bought his weapons. A .22 caliber Walther P22 handgun, a
9mm Glock 19 handgun, ammunition, and a hunting knife. He spent hours at an indoor gun
range practicing. He started going to the gym.
Cho called his parents the night before the planned massacre for their weekly Sunday
night phone call. How were they doing? No, he didn’t need any money. His parents said “I love
you.” They hung up.
Flench 5
***
9:40 a.m. – 9:51 a.m. Cho’s eleven minute shooting spree kills an estimated three people
per minute. He starts with room 206. He shoots the professor and opens fire on the other
students. He kills nine and wounds three more.
Crossing the hall, Cho enters room 207. He shoots the teacher and then targets the rows
closest to the front of the classroom. He walks down the aisles, shooting others as he passes then
exits the room. Cho fires bullets through the door of room 205 in an attempt to get through the
barricade of student’s tensed bodies. He is unable to get in and moves on.
In room 211, Cho pushes against the table that is against the door, nudging it open
enough to walk through. He goes up and down the aisles, shooting students as he passes.
Cho returns to room 207. Students push their bodies against the door and Cho beats on it,
opening it an inch. He fires shots around the door handle then leaves. Returning to room 211,
Cho enters the French class and goes up and down the aisles again, shooting at the students as
they lay on the ground.
Cho goes into the hall to reload his gun. A janitor sees him and flees down the stairs.
In room 204, another barricade has been set up. Cho fires through the door and straight
through the body of engineering professor Liviu Librescu. Ten students escape through the
second story window. Two are shot before they can make it through. Cho returns to 206 and
shoots more students.
9:50 a.m. Meanwhile, downstairs the police use a shotgun to blast through the key lock
of a fourth entrance to Norris Hall. They follow the sounds of Cho’s guns as he fires them.
9:51 a.m. Police find the bodies of the massacred teachers and students, and at the head
of the classroom of room 211, they find the body of Cho, with a bullet hole in his head.
Flench 6
***
In a story submitted for class the year before, Cho wrote about a morning in the life of a
character named Bud, an outcast who awoke early, put on black jeans, a strappy black vest with
many pockets, a black hat and large dark sunglasses:
At school he notices “students strut inside smiling, laughing, embracing each other….A
few eyes glance at Bud but without the glint of recognition. I hate this! I hate all these
frauds! I hate my life….This is it….This is when you damn people die with me.…”
***
Word Count 1,495
Sources:
http://www.roanoke.com/vtinvestigation/wb/wb/xp-130177
http://www.governor.virginia.gov/TempContent/techPanelReport.cfm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549092/The-roommates-story.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Story?id=3541157&page=2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/20/AR2007042002366.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seung-Hui_Cho
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/6563451.stm
http://articles.cnn.com/2007-04-18/us/vtech.shooting_1_cho-seung-hui-msnbc-com-videos?_s=PM:US
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18201501/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/30/AR2007083002199_2.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/265874/Virginia-Tech-Shootings-Complete-Report-of-the-Governors-
Review-Panel