Police on Tuesday morning identified a 23-year-old South Korean-born student from Fairfax County as the man who killed and wounded dozens of Virginia Tech students and faculty in the bloodiest shooting rampage on an American college campus.
Official reports on Tuesday painted Cho Seung-Hui, an English major and Westfield High School graduate, as a troubled loner who alarmed professors and classmates through violent writing and strange, anti-social behavior.
Last year, a professor referred Cho to counseling after he submitted a particularly violent passage in a creative writing class.
“There were problems in those classes,” said Carolyn Rude, a professor in the VirginiaTech English department who taught Cho. Cho, who had no apparent criminal record in Fairfax, never received counseling. State police officials would not confirm whether Cho was involved in criminal incidents on the Virginia Tech campus.
In a short play attributed to Cho and posted on the Internet, Cho describes a woman wielding a chainsaw to fend off an abusive husband and the murder of a 13-year-old boy. Using two semiautomatic pistols, one of which was purchased legally in Roanoke, Va., Cho killed 32 people and wounded 15 at the sprawling Blacksburg campus before taking his own life Monday.
By contrast, acquaintances describe his parents as a quiet, pleasant couple who worked long hours at a local dry-cleaning business.
“They were hard-working,” said Jeff Ahn, president of the League of Korean Americans, Virginia. “They valued education, just like any other parents in this country, and they work sometimes 12, 13 hours a day to send a daughter to Princeton and to send their son to Virginia Tech.”
Cho was not a citizen, but a permanent resident of the United States. Cho’s parents and sister could not be located. Law enforcement authorities searched their Centreville town house Monday night, following an earlier search of Cho’s dorm room in Blacksburg. Marshall Main, a neighbor, said about six police cars drove to the residence at about 10 p.m. Monday, with officers moving in and out of the home and taking pictures. Police would not comment on what was found in the searches, which involved the FBI, Fairfax County and Virginia State Police.
The next day, Fairfax County police fended off a swarm of reporters from Cho’s home, which is less than a mile from the home of Reema Samaha, a victim in the massacre and a fellow Westfield High School graduate. Erin Peterson, who was a classmate of Samaha at Westfield, was also killed by Cho. It is not clear whether Cho targeted these two victims.
