Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho denied harboring suicidal or homicidal thoughts during meetings with school counselors in late 2005, less than two years before killing 32 students and faculty at the Blacksburg campus, newly released records show.
The university on Wednesday posted online Cho’s missing records from the Cook Counseling Center, which contain details of his interviews with counselors before and after he was admitted to Carilion St. Albans psychiatric hospital for saying he wanted to kill himself.
In a Dec. 14, 2005, evaluation following his hospital stay, a counselor wrote that Cho “said the comment he made was a joke” and that he “has no reason to harm self and would never do it.”
Cho killed himself on April 16, 2007, after carrying out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
The records reinforce the picture of Cho as an alienated, anxiety-ridden student struggling with school and personal relationships. Their release was made possible with the permission of Cho’s family.
The center’s former director, Dr. Robert Miller, said he inadvertently took the documents home when he left the job in 2006, discovered them last month, and returned them to the school. The revelation of the missing records prompted survivors of the massacre and victims’ families to call for a state review panel to reopen its investigation of the shooting.
The content of the records “lays to rest unfounded speculation by confirming key facts already established by the Review Panel” and a separate inspector general’s report, Virginia Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski said.
He said the school “remains deeply dismayed by the prolonged unavailability of the records,” and awaits a Virginia State Police investigation into their removal.
