Panel Details Red Flags Before Va. Tech Tragedy

Aug 31, 05:00 AM

Current Headlines: By Donna Leinwand and Laura Parker

As Seung Hui Cho moved methodically through Virginia Tech's Norris Hall shooting 30 people, witnesses say he never uttered a word.

That is generally how Cho moved through life -- silent, withdrawn and alone -- until a year before the shootings, when his increasingly anti-social behavior caught the attention of classmates, professors and police, the state panel report on the April 16 massacre says.

The report, released late Wednesday night, found that university officials missed dozens of opportunities to intervene as Cho's mental health deteriorated in the year before the rampage. It also revealed new details about Cho the morning of the shootings.

Tech professors and administrators knew of "numerous incidents" during Cho's junior year that were "warnings of mental instability," Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said at a news conference Thursday. "Connecting some of the mental-health dots might have averted the tragedy."

The report found that Tech officials did not know about Cho's troubled past when he enrolled and had no comprehensive way to share or deal with Cho's difficulties as they emerged, Kaine said.

The review panel also faulted the university for not sending a campus alert between the initial shooting of two students in a dorm room and the rampage two hours later.

At another news conference Thursday afternoon, Tech President Charles Steger said the university did not wait two hours to take action. "There was continuous action and deliberations from the first event until the second," he said.

Cathy Read, stepmother of victim Mary Karen Read, said in an interview that the "failure to connect the dots" can be blamed on "the failure of leadership at the senior levels at Virginia Tech." She added: "People didn't know what to do. They misunderstood what they were allowed to do. They failed to share information."

Read stopped short of calling for Steger's firing, as some other family members have done.

Early signs of problems

The report offers the first detailed look at Cho's psychological history. "What the admissions staff at Virginia Tech did not see were the special accommodations that propped up Cho and his grades" before college, it says.

Family, teachers and counselors interviewed by the panel say that, since childhood, Cho rarely spoke or made eye contact and had no friends or outside interests. In seventh grade, his parents took him to weekly art therapy sessions. He modeled clay houses with no windows or doors, the therapist told the panel.

Shortly after the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, Cho wrote a paper so disturbing that his school called his parents. "Cho's written words expressed generalized thoughts of suicide and homicide, indicating that 'he wanted to repeat Columbine,'" the report says.

A psychiatrist in 1999 diagnosed him with selective mutism, a psychological disorder defined by an unwillingness to speak, and a single episode of major depression.

In high school, teachers noted Cho's withdrawal. They set a special education program that excused him from oral presentations and allowed him to give answers privately.

At Tech, Cho's roommates told the panel they stopped inviting him to parties after he took out a knife and began stabbing the carpet in one girl's room. He called his suitemates on the phone and pretended to have a twin brother he called "question mark." He was known to have stalked at least three women; at least one incident led to police intervention. When the girl declined to press charges, police referred the case to the university's judicial affairs office.

After an English professor read his violent writing and refused to teach him, the dean alerted other departments, including the counseling center. A university team that deals with troubled students discussed Cho but took no action.

The counseling center treated Cho several times but did not follow up when he failed to keep appointments. In December 2005, he was hospitalized after telling a roommate he might commit suicide. He was released the next day, but again, the counseling center did not follow up, the report says. In the spring, Cho submitted an alarming creative-writing assignment about a young man who planned to kill fellow students.

At the start of Cho's senior year, another English professor alerted administrators about him; the associate dean who investigated found no records of mental health issues.

By spring semester, Cho was planning the shooting, the report says. He ordered handguns in February and March . He purchased ammunition in March and April. He videotaped segments of his manifesto on April 8.

A deadly plot unfolds

On April 16, Cho woke early, as he normally did. He left his dorm before 7 a.m. for West Ambler Johnston dorm. There he shot students Emily Hilscher and Ryan Clark, the report says. Back in his room, he changed clothes, signed onto his computer, deleted his e-mails, wiped out his university account and removed his hard drive.

Witnesses say they spotted Cho about 8 a.m. at the university's duck pond. A professor saw him before 9 a.m. at the Blacksburg post office, where he mailed his manifesto to NBC News and a letter to Virginia Tech's English department.

The panel describes the diatribes he recorded on CD as filled with biblical and literary references, but mostly incoherent. "He portrays a grandiose fantasy of becoming a significant figure through the mass killing," the panel said.

Meanwhile, police found a man shot in Hilscher's dorm room and surmised the shooting was a domestic dispute triggered by Hilscher's boyfriend catching her with another man. After locating the boyfriend, questioning him and giving him a field test for gunpowder, police told university officials he was probably not the gunman.

The police acted professionally, the panel said, with "one large and unfortunate exception of having conveyed the impression to the university administration that they probably had a solid suspect who probably had left the campus."

By then, it was too late to alert the campus that the shooter was still at large.

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