Slips through the cracks

Va. Tech Killer Ruled Mentally Ill by Court; Let Go After Hospital Visit
Cho Had Harassed Two Female Students; Officials Concerned He Was Suicidal
By NED POTTER and DAVID SCHOETZ
April 18, 2007 — - A court found that Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho was "mentally ill" and potentially dangerous. Then it let him go.
In December 2005 -- more than a year before Monday's mass shootings -- a district court in Montgomery County, Va., ruled that Cho presented "an imminent danger to self or others." That was the necessary criterion for a detention order, so that Cho, who had been accused of stalking by two female schoolmates, could be evaluated by a state doctor and ordered to undergo outpatient care.
According to the "Temporary Detention Order" obtained by ABC News, psychologist Roy Crouse found Cho's "affect is flat and mood is depressed.
"He denies suicidal ideation. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder," Dr. Crouse wrote. "His insight and judgment are normal."
That information came to light two days after Cho, a Virginia Tech senior, killed 32 people and then himself in a shooting rampage on the university's campus.
'An Imminent Danger to Himself'
The evaluation came from a psychiatric hospital near Virginia Tech, where Cho was taken by police in December 2005, after two female schoolmates said they received threatening messages from him, and police and school officials became concerned that he might be suicidal.
After Dr. Crouse's psychological evaluation of Cho, Special Justice Paul M. Barnett certified the finding, ordering followup treatment on an outpatient basis.
On the form, a box is checked, showing that Cho "presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness."
Immediately below it was another box that is not checked: "Presents an imminent danger to others as a result of mental illness."
Authorities said they had no contact with Cho between then and Monday's mass killings.
Package Sent to News Media
This afternoon, NBC received a package they believe was sent to the network by Cho. The package includes photographs of Cho holding firearms, as well as a DVD with video and a letter running several pages long.
One of the pictures shows Cho menacingly wielding a hammer. It bears a striking rememblance to a 2003 South Korean film, "Oldboy." The film, an international hit, explores themes of revenge and incest -- themes also apparent in plays Cho had written as a student. However, it is not known if Cho had seen "Oldboy."
The letter received by NBC News is described as angry and rambling---expressing hatred for rich people and elitists. It is described as very similar to the letter discovered in the Cho's dorm room. According to NBC news, it states "this did not have to happen."
The package was mailed at 9:01 a.m. Monday morning at a Blacksburg, Va post office, sources said. Cho allegedly put the package in the hands of a female clerk before leaving. The clerk told us a little while ago she remember seeing Cho and recalls having to look up the zipcode for New York City's Rockefeller Plaza.
It appears that the suspect took the time to mail a package in between his shooting spree---showing a degree of cold-blooded planning.
Sent to Psychiatric Hospital
Police obtained the 2005 detention order from a local magistrate after it was determined by a state-certified employee that Cho's apparent mental state met the threshold for the temporary detention order.
Under Virginia law, "A magistrate has the authority to issue a detention order upon a finding that a person is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment.
Wendell Flinchum, the chief of the Virginia Tech police department, said that it's common for university police to work with state-affiliated mental health facilities instead of on-campus counseling because it is easier to obtain a detention order.
"We normally go through access [appealing to the state's legal system for help] because they have the power to commit people if they need to be committed," Flinchum said at a press conference Wednesday morning.
Cho was taken to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, Va., a private facility that can take 162 inpatients, according to court documents.
It's unclear whether Cho went to the hospital with police on his own or was taken there under protective custody, a possibility under the temporary detention order obtained by police.
One of the young women complained in November 2005 that Cho, then 21, was stalking her, but she declined to press legal charges against him. Police interviewed Cho for the first time and referred the case to the school's internal disciplinary board.
It's unclear whether any action was ever taken by the school, although Edward Spencer, a school vice president, said that it's not uncommon for a complaint never to reach a full hearing.
A second woman student, less than two weeks later, told authorities she received disturbing instant messages from Cho, and asked police to make sure there was "no further contact" from him.
Police spoke to Cho the next day. They say that shortly after, they received a call from an acquaintance of his, expressing concerns that he might be suicidal.
For a third time, police met with him. "Out of concern for Cho, officers asked him to speak to a counselor," Flinchum said. "He went voluntarily to the police department."
The student complaints that brought Cho to the attention of authorities came during the same time that creative writing professor Lucinda Roy went to administrators to voice her concern about violent themes in Cho's writing.
Roy told ABC News that Cho seemed "extraordinarily lonely -- the loneliest person I have ever met in my life."
While the school, citing privacy laws, did not conclusively say that school counselors had ever worked with Cho, they did say that a system for working with outside mental health agencies and local authorities is in place.
"Clearly, mental health professionals have a legal and moral responsibility," when a student presents a possible risk, said Christopher Flynn, head of the university's counseling center. "We have a duty to warn."
But Flynn also said that signs of trouble in Cho's behavior were not a clear indicator that action would follow. "It is very difficult to predict when what someone perceives as stalking, is stalking."
A Loner, Mysterious Even to His Roommates
Seung Cho was quiet -- so quiet that some classmates of his say they never heard his voice in three years. His roommates reported he was distant and private, eating by himself night after night, and watching wrestling on TV.
Cho's roommates say he obsessively downloaded music from the Internet. One of his favorites was the song "Shine," by Collective Soul, which he played over and over
He was early to bed and early to rise, normally in bed by 9 p.m., and sometimes up by 5:30 the next morning. His roommates tell ABC News they would see him in the morning putting in his contact lenses, taking prescription medication and applying acne medicine to his face.
"He pretty much never talked at all," said Joseph Aust, who shared a bedroom with him in a six-person dorm suite in Harper Hall. "I tried to make conversation with him earlier in the year. He gave one-word answers."
"He pretty much never looked me in the eye," Aust said.
In recent weeks his routine had changed. His roommates say he went to the campus gym at night, lifting weights to bulk up. He went for a haircut -- surprising them by coming back to the room with a military-style buzz cut.
Aust and another roommate, Karan Grewal, say they were aware that Cho had pursued women on campus. They said he also seemed to have an imaginary girlfriend, a supermodel named "Jelly."
Students say he seemed as quiet as ever in the days before Monday's rampage.
Trey Perkins, a student who saw Cho during the shooting spree, said it was unreal, "being that close to a monster."
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Professor Had Expelled Gunman From Class

Apr 18 06:24 PM US/EasternBy ALLEN G. BREEDAP National Writer

BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP)
In September 2005, Cho was enrolled in Giovanni's introduction to creative writing class. From the beginning, he began building a wall between himself and the rest of the class.
He wore sunglasses to class and pulled his maroon knit cap down low over his forehead. When she tried to get him to participate in class discussion, his answer was silence.
"Sometimes, students try to intimidate you," Giovanni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. "And I just assumed that he was trying to assert himself."
But then female students began complaining about Cho.
About five weeks into the semester, students told Giovanni that Cho was taking photographs of their legs and knees under the desks with his cell phone. She told him to stop, but the damage was already done.
Female students refused to come to class, submitting their work by computer instead. As for Cho, he was not adding anything to the classroom atmosphere, only detracting.
Police asked Giovanni not to disclose the exact content or nature of Cho's poetry. But she said it was not violent like other writings that have been circulating.
It was more invasive.
"Violent is like, `I'm going to do this,'" said Giovanni, a three-time NAACP Image Award winner who is sometimes called "the princess of black poetry." This was more like a personal violation, as if Cho were objectifying his subjects, "doing thing to your body parts."
"It's not like, `I'll rip your heart out,'" she recalled. "It's that, `Your bra is torn,and I'm looking at your flesh.'"
His work had no meter or structure or rhyme scheme. To Giovanni, it was simply "a tirade."
"There was no writing. I wasn't teaching him anything, and he didn't want to learn anything," she said. "And I finally realized either I was going to lose my class, or Mr. Cho had to leave."
Giovanni wrote a letter to then-department head Lucinda Roy, who removed Cho.
Roy alerted student affairs, the dean's office, even the campus police, but each said there was nothing they could do if Cho had made no overt threats against himself or others. So Roy took him on as a kind of personal tutor.
"At first he would hardly say anything, and I was lucky to get, say, in 30 minutes, four or five monosyllabic answers from him," she said. "But bit by bit, he began to tell me things."
During their hourlong sessions, Roy encouraged Cho to express himself in writing. She would compose poems with him, contributing to the works herself and taking dictation from him.
"I tried to keep him focused on things that were outside the self a little bit," said Roy, who has been at Virginia Tech for 22 years. "Because he seemed to be running inside circles in a maze when he was talking about himself."
He was "very guarded" when it came to his family. But she got him to open up about his feelings of isolation.
"You seem so lonely," she told him once. "Do you have any friends?"
"I am lonely," he replied. "I don't have any friends."
Suitemates and others have said Cho rejected their overtures of friendship. Roy sensed that Cho's isolation might be largely self- imposed.
To her, it was as if he were two people.
"He was actually quite arrogant and could be quite obnoxious, and was also deeply, it seemed, insecure," she said.
But when she wrote to Cho about his behavior in Giovanni's class, Roy received what she described as "a pretty strident response."
"It was a vigorous defense of the self," she said. "He clearly felt that he was in the right and that the professor was in the wrong. It was the kind of tone that I would never have used as an undergraduate at a faculty member."
She felt he fancied himself a loner, but she wasn't sure what underlay that feeling.
"I mean, if you see yourself as a loner, sometimes that means you feel very isolated and insecure and inferior. Or it can mean that you feel quite superior to others, because you've distanced yourself. And I think he went from one extreme to another."
When the semester ended, so did Roy's and Cho's collaboration. She went on leave and thought he had graduated.
When she and Giovanni learned of the shootings and heard a description of the gunman, they immediately thought of Cho.
Roy wonders now whether things would have turned out differently had she continued their sessions. But Giovanni sees no reason for people who had interactions with Cho to beat themselves up.
"I know that there's a tendency to think that everybody can get counseling or can have a bowl of tomato soup and everything is going to be all right," she said. "But I think that evil exists, and I think that he was a mean person."
Giovanni encountered Cho only once after she removed him from class. She was walking down a campus path and noticed him coming toward her. They maintained eye contact until passing each other.
Giovanni, who had survived lung cancer, was determined she would not blink first.
"I was not going to look away as if I were afraid," she said. "To me he was a bully, and I had no fear of this child."