Tuesday, April 17, 2007 . 4/17/2007
Authorities ID gunman in Va. Tech rampageBLACKSBURG, Va. - A 23-year-old senior from South Korea whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service was behind the massacre of 30 people locked inside a university classroom building in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, the university said Tuesday.
Ballistics tests also found that one of the guns used in that attack was also used in a shooting two hours earlier at a dormitory that left two people dead at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia State Police said.
Police identified the shooter as Cho Seung-Hui (pronounced Choh Suhng-whee), of Centreville, Va., who was a senior in the English Department at Virginia Tech. Cho, a resident alien who immigrated to the United States from South Korea in 1992, lived on campus in Harper Residence Hall.
The bloodbath ended with Cho’s suicide, bringing the death toll from two separate shootings — first at the dormitory, then in a classroom building — to 33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy.
Note listed gunman’s grievances
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department’s director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as “troubled.”
“There was some concern about him,” Rude told The Associated Press. “Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it’s creative or if they’re describing things, if they’re imagining things or just how real it might be. But we’re all alert to not ignore things like this.”
She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.
NBC News’ Pete Williams reported that police had found a note in which Cho listed “random grievances,” but few other details were immediately available. That seemed in keeping for a young man who apparently left little impression in the Virginia Tech community.
Cho’s fellow residents of Harper Hall said few people knew the gunman, who kept to himself.
“He can’t have been an outgoing kind of person,” Meredith Daly, 19, of Danville, Va., told MSNBC.com’s Bill Dedman.
Stephen Scott, a freshman engineering student from Marlton, N.J., said police and FBI agents went through the dorm Monday night showing a picture of Cho and trying to find anybody who recognized or knew him. He did not know whether they were successful.
‘Very quiet, always by himself’
In Centreville, a suburb of Washington where Cho’s family lived in an off-white, two-story townhouse, people who knew Cho concurred that he kept to himself.
“He was very quiet, always by himself,” said Abdul Shash, a neighbor. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.
Rod Wells, a postal worker, said that characterization of Cho did not fit the man’s parents, who, he described as “always polite, always kind to me, very quiet, always smiling. Just sweet, sweet people.”
“I talk to particularly everybody here,” Wells told NBC News. “So I guess nobody had any intimation that he was like that. I don’t think the parents did, because they were quite the opposite.”
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This one really gets to me. They say he was a loner and kept to himself, which is a lot like me. They say he was very quiet, also a lot like me. Given that he is an immigrant, it could be that he didn't fit in very well with other kids his age, and that could have led to him withdrawing, and eventually building up anger. It has also been said, though, that his girlfriend has been cheating on him, and he wanted revenge. I can't see this has being the only reason why he would go off killing 32 people.
What made him do it?
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'I Want to Clear My Name'
He is Asian, he lives in the dorm where the first shooting occurred and he recently broke up with his girlfriend. He also happens to have a Web blog packed with pictures in which he poses with firearms. On the Internet, Wayne Chiang is as good as convicted.
He has received 37,000 hits on his Web site over the past several hours, many containing death threats, he says.
"Right now pretty much the Internet thinks it is me," Chiang told ABC News. "I am just interested in trying to clear my name.
"It was five for five. I was Asian, I lived in [the dorm], I go to V Tech, I recently broke up with my girlfriend, and I collect guns," Chiang, who initially contacted ABC affiliate KNXV, said.
Three separate federal sources have told ABC News Chiang is not a suspect or a person of interest in their investigation.
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From GodHatesAmerica.com:
WBC will preach at the funerals of the Virginia Tech students killed on campus during a shooting rampage April 16, 2007. You describe this as monumental horror, but you know nothing of horror -- yet. Your bloody tyrant Bush says he is 'horrified' by it all. You know nothing of horror -- yet. Your true horror is coming. "They shall also gird themselves with sackloth, and horror shall cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all their heads" (Eze. 7:18).
Why did this happen, you ask? It's simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children. Was God asleep while this took place? Was He on vacation? Of course not. He willed this to happen to punish you for assailing His servants.
This is fucking unbelievable. I am going to assume that this isn't a parody site, seeing as it is very hard to tell with fundamentalist sites such as these.
Why can't these people just mind their own business? It's bad enough that 32 innocent lives were lost. These poor families do not need to hear how some god supposedly "willed this to happen". For one thing, it makes no sense. For another, I'm willing to bet that half of these families were religious in some way or another. If this god was real, why would he punish his own followers? This is certainly no god that I would want to worship.
It is extremely sad that in this day and age people STILL believe in this ancient book and take it literally. Too literally. 0 Comments - Post/view comments
