Who Was Cho
Seung-Hui?
Bob Orr On The Virginia Tech Shooter
April 17, 2007
Cho Seung-Hui (APTN)
Quote
"He came in, I saw him look normal as usual, no
expression on his face, he didn't seem angry or
you know sad or anything, just the normal look
on his face, just, like the picture."
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Karan Grewal, Cho Seung-Hui's suite mate.
(CBS) Cho Seung-Hui was a lone gunman, with few friends
and no criminal record. Police say the 23-year-old South
Korean-born student acted alone in a shooting spree that
left 32 teachers and students dead, before turning the
gun on himself.
As Bob Orr reports, Cho, a senior English major at
Virginia Tech began his deadly day without warning at
West Ambler Johnston Hall. There, inside a dorm room, he
point-blank shot and killed a man and a woman.
Sources say Cho then quietly returned to his own dorm,
Harper Hall, just a few hundred feet away. And it was
there Cho left behind his only explanation for the
horror that was about to play out.
Hours after the rampage, sources say investigators found
a rambling but threatening letter. Officials decline to
call it a suicide note, but in the letter Cho seemed to
blame others for his perceived problems, charging that
"You made me do this."
"This," as it turned out, would be wholesale slaughter.
Investigators say after stopping at his dorm, Cho then
traveled a half mile across campus, chained closed the
doors at Norris Hall, and began methodically working his
way through four classrooms, shooting students and
teachers at will.
Many have multiple gunshot wounds, a clear sign that Cho
reloaded perhaps more than once before his rage ended in
suicide.
Karan Grewal, who was a suite mate of Cho's, said he saw
him just two hours before the first shooting occurred.
"He came in, I saw him look normal as usual, no
expression on his face, he didn't seem angry or you know
sad or anything, just the normal look on his face, just,
like the picture," he recalls.
Grewal said Cho barely spoke to his own roommates. "I
was shocked. He didn't look like a guy who could really
do that. He wasn't angry. He just appeared to be shy,
not angry," Grewal explains.
Another student, Aimee Fauser, who lives in Harper Hall,
says she and her friends were just lucky not to be in
the line of fire. "They're just shocked that it could
have happened and that somebody so close did something
because he could have come back here between the
shootings. And seems like we missed, dodged a bullet
there," she explains.
Cho, a loner in life, apparently wanted to be anonymous
in death. Sources say he carried no identification on
him during his killing spree. And the serial numbers on
his two handguns had been erased.
But, investigators tell CBS News paperwork in Cho's
backpack allowed them to trace one of his guns – a 9mm
Glock to a recent purchase at a Roanoke gun store.
Police last night carried out a search of Cho's dorm
room and removed letters, papers, and other personal
items.
Authorities also searched Cho's home in northern
Virginia. His neighbors, like his dorm mates, were
stunned to learn that a young man in their midst was
behind the Virginia Tech massacre.
"I would never have thought we would have something like
that originating here in this town and on this street.
This is really shocking. Absolutely," says neighbor
Marshall Main.
There were some troubling signs with Cho: students in
his writing classes say he often wrote violent scenes
they describe as "twisted." He wrote two screenplays
dealing with death and revenge – two things that seem to
have played out Monday on the Virginia Tech campus.
Police still have no clear motive for the killings.
Until the shootings, Cho's only known run-ins with the
law were two speeding tickets he picked up in the past
three weeks.
Authorities are hard pressed to explain how a man with
no criminal past took such an immediate and violent
turn.
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