Gunman Was a Troubled Student Who Ate Alone and Worried Professors and Classmates

By THOMAS BARTLETT and ELYSE ASHBURN

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He was the proverbial loner. He often ate by himself. He rarely talked or made eye contact. He took medication for depression. A professor described him as "troubled"; one of his suitemates called him "weird."

Details dribbled out Tuesday about Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech English major responsible for the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history. On Monday morning he calmly gunned down 32 students and faculty members before killing himself, leaving the campus and the nation stunned and grief-stricken.

Cho Seung-Hui, 23, is identified by police as the gunman (Virginia State Police, AP Images)

Many of the details that emerged were mundane and probably meaningless. Is it significant that Mr. Cho liked to download both rock and classical music? Or that he enjoyed playing basketball and video games? Probably not.

But several people who knew Mr. Cho said there were warning signs. In fact, Lucinda Roy, co-director of Virginia Tech's creative-writing program and former chairman of the English department, was at one point so concerned about Mr. Cho that she contacted the police and university officials to express her fears, she said in an interview with CNN.

She also referred Mr. Cho to a counseling service. After worrying that he wouldn't attend counseling sessions, Ms. Roy even begged the counseling service to intervene and force him to get help.

"I've been teaching for 22 years, and there've only been a couple of times when I thought that this is a really, really worrying thing," Ms. Roy told reporters. "And this was one of them."

A former classmate of Mr. Cho's was also fearful. Ian MacFarlane, who has since graduated from the university, was in a playwriting course with Mr. Cho. Mr. MacFarlane wrote in a blog post that his first thought after hearing about the shooting was: "I bet it was Seung Cho" -- the name he used for class assignments.

Mr. Cho's writing was "like something out of a nightmare," according to Mr. MacFarlane, who posted two of Mr. Cho's plays online. They are bizarre and juvenile, not to mention violent and hateful. In one, titled Richard McBeef, a teenage boy tries to choke his stepfather, only to be killed himself. In the other play, titled Mr. Brownstone, a character fantasizes about killing his high-school teacher: "I wanna watch him bleed like the way he made us kids bleed," the character says.

In a note found inside his dorm room, quoted by the Chicago Tribune, Mr. Cho railed against "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans" on the campus. The full text of that note has not been released.

It appears that Mr. Cho may have been planning the massacre for more than a month. According to the Associated Press, he went to a Roanoke, Va., gun shop five weeks ago and walked out with a Glock 19 handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition. Mr. Cho also used a .22-caliber handgun in the slayings.

Sources told the Chicago Tribune that the words "ISMAIL AX" were written in red ink on one of Mr. Cho's arms. The significance of the markings was not known.

Mr. Cho's parents, who immigrated from South Korea, live in Centreville, Va. They work at a dry-cleaning business there, according to The Washington Post.