The 23-year-old Virginia Tech student who turned classrooms into killing fields Monday was the subject of at least two stalking complaints more than a year before his deadly rampage, campus police said Wednesday.
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The complaints against Cho Seung-Hui were never followed up because the women he allegedly harassed considered him “annoying,” not threatening, campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said in a briefing.
Neither of the women who reported Cho to police were injured in Monday’s attacks. In the first instance, campus police referred Cho to the university disciplinary system. A month later, police returned to Cho’s dorm to warn him from contacting the second woman.
Later that day, an acquaintance reported that he was suicidal. Access, a Blacksburg mental health clinic, evaluated Cho and he spent up to two days at Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Radford in December 2005.
The next encounter police had with Cho was Monday, when they found his body lying amidst nearly three dozen others on the second floor of Norris Hall.
His former roommate Joseph Aust, of Westminster, Md., told “Good Morning America” that Cho’s behavior became even more erratic in the weeks before the rampage. Cho was usually an early riser, but he began getting up at 5:30 a.m. He came home in the early afternoons and slept through the night, Aust said.
“I tried to make conversation with him earlier in the year when he moved in,” Aust said. “He would just give one-word answers and stay quiet. He pretty much never looked me in the eye.”
CNN broadcast interviews with two of Cho’s ex-roommates. The ex-roommates said that Cho invented a girlfriend for himself, even going so far as to invent pet names. She was “Jelly” and he was “Spanky,” the roommates said.
Cho’s teachers also lined up to say that the senior’s writings were twisted.
“It was not bad poetry,” poet Nikki Giovanni, one of his professors, told CNN on Wednesday. “It was intimidating. At first I thought, OK, he’s trying to see what the parameters are. Kids curse and talk about a lot of different things. He stayed in that spot.”
Flinchum said the police were shown Cho’s writings that teachers considered disturbing, but they “did not express any threatening intentions or allude to criminal activity.”
It’s unclear what pushed Cho over the edge. But by the time school authorities learned his purpose, it was too late. Authorities sent out an e-mail alert, a recorded phone message on campus phones and broadcast warnings that there was a shooter on campus.
But that was two hours after two students were shot dead in a dormitory. A student told The Examiner Wednesday that at least one professor in Norris Hall had received the e-mail warning, but Cho was already on the second floor of the building.
