No Tech follow-up on Cho incidents

Virginia Tech documents and timeline

The story of April 16, 2007 second of three parts

Seung-Hui Cho got away easily from his first two shootings on April 16, 2007 -- on the same floor in the same Virginia Tech dorm where he'd frightened a high school classmate 18 months earlier.

The November 2005 incident was the third of 10 episodes of threatening behavior that Tech officials and police noted in their records.

None was followed up, beyond suggesting he seek counseling.

The Tech-shootings records -- many of which are contained in an archive to be opened to the public this month under the state's legal settlement with families and victims -- show the extent to which Cho and his problems were known on campus, a Richmond Times-Dispatch review of the documents has found.

Cho shot 32 students and teachers dead before turning the gun on himself. Tech officials had never been told that he had weekly therapy sessions his first two years of high school in Fairfax County and was preoccupied with suicide and homicide in middle school.

On campus, things appeared to begin unraveling at the start of his junior year in 2005, when he moved to Cochrane Hall. The archived documents provide new details on what has been established as a pattern of alarming behavior by Cho leading up to the shootings. The accounts start with complaints about bug bites that one report suggested could be "more of a mental thing," but also reveal more troubling signs.

In a writing class with poet Nikki Giovanni, he burst out one day, calling other students "despicable" in a paper he read aloud, and added, "I hope y'all burn in hell." Giovanni told Cho in a note she wanted him out and reported the incident to Tech's vice president of student affairs, who in turn advised the school's top discipline official.

Giovanni's department head also took note of Cho's behavior. Lucinda Roy reported in an e-mail to senior student affairs officials that Cho admitted he had been secretly photographing students in at least one other class with his cell phone.

"The class is scared by all this," a Tech disciplinary report said.

Cho's angry paper made the rounds: Dean of Students Tom Brown Jr. showed it to a counselor, but "she did not pick up on a specific threat," he said in an e-mail to Roy. But he told her to warn Cho that similar behavior would be referred to the university's disciplinary authorities.

The exchanges were copied to top officials of the liberal arts college, counseling center and Vice President Zenobia Hikes.

Roy decided to ask Cho to drop the class, and requested police to be on standby in case he refused. The two met, along with English professor Cheryl W. Ruggiero, who was there for backup, and Cho agreed to try independent study instead.

Ruggiero's notes on the meeting do not mention any warning of disciplinary action. Roy told Cho that he must have intended his paper as a satire and offered to help him write a note to the class explaining the work and the cell-phone photos.

Because Giovanni didn't want Cho back in her class, Roy offered to tutor him. She and another professor took on the job.

They gave Cho an "A."

But Roy later wrote to the dean of students that she and the other professor "are genuinely concerned about him because he appeared to be very depressed."

Jerome Niles, dean of the liberal arts college, wrote to say she had acted correctly.

"Bless you, my dear," wrote Mary Ann Lewis, associate liberal arts dean.

Director of Judicial Affairs Frances Keene advised Roy to have Cho contact her if he had any questions about cell phones in class, while the then-head of the counseling center said she'd done an excellent job.

. . .

Back at Cochrane, where residents and resident assistants suspected Cho of setting fires in the lounge, came still more unsettling news.

Cho had tracked down a woman who went to his high school -- but whom he didn't know -- to her room on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston. He'd been sending instant messages, and knew details about her, such as her middle name, which she hadn't shared with people at Tech. It was creepy, she told police later.

At 11:30 one night, he showed up outside her door, wearing aviator sunglasses and the hood of his coat pulled up over his head.

When the woman's roommate asked who he was, he replied: "The question mark kid." He left when she said she was calling the police.

It took Tech police less than 90 minutes to track Cho through a Facebook page. The police read him his rights but didn't arrest him.

"It was like, ha-ha, a joke," Cho told the officers.

Although his high school classmate didn't press charges, the police sent a report to the university's disciplinary office. She told police she was willing to testify at a hearing.

There never was one.

The case was closed.

. . .

Cho's roommate, meanwhile, reported Cho had two knives in his room, and a Tech dorm director learned that he had blamed the harassment of the woman on a nonexistent twin brother.

Students who lived nearby started warning others about Cho, and dorm staff said they were worried he might hurt himself or others, a state mental-health department investigator found.

"My concern is that no one has approached Seung and talked to him about this," Cho's dorm director, Lisa Virga, wrote to Rohsaan Settle, the Tech official in charge of disciplinary matters in the dorms. She made the comment after reporting the knives and background on the harassment incident.

Settle noted she wanted to talk about the knives.

There is no follow-up in the records.

. . .

Three days after the dorm director's note, Cho was instant-messaging another female student, who was taken aback hearing from someone she barely knew. Two days later, he scrawled a message -- a quote from Shakespeare -- on the marker board hanging on her dorm-room door.

She called campus police.

They said they'd tell him to leave her alone and told his roommate to tell Cho they needed to talk to him. Police sent Cho an e-mail, too.

An officer found Cho in his dorm room late the next morning and warned him that if the behavior continued he could face criminal charges. There was no report to the university's discipline or dormitory officials, despite the earlier West Ambler Johnston case or his outburst in Giovanni's class.

But that evening, Cho's roommate called police to say he'd just received an upsetting instant message. Cho seemed to be on a downward spiral: "I might as well kill myself," he'd written.

When two Tech police officers went to Cho's room to check on him, Cho told them the message was a joke. But he seemed down, and the officers told him to come with them to the police station and talk to a counselor.

Cho also told counselor Kathy Godbey the message was a joke and denied that he was depressed or anxious or thinking about suicide. He did not want to call his parents.

When Godbey talked to one of the Tech police officers, she learned about the two harassment cases. She contacted one of Cho's suite-mates, who told her about Cho's imaginary twin brother, who he'd said was responsible for some of his bizarre behavior, and that Cho had taken to calling himself "question mark."

She thought Cho was mentally ill, and that he was about to hurt himself or somebody else.

A magistrate agreed and ordered Cho be held for up to 48 hours in a nearby mental hospital to be evaluated.

Campus police took Cho straight there. The next morning, a psychologist spent 15 minutes with him. A hospital social worker called the university counseling center for him, so he could ask for an appointment, which he received. The center has since lost all its records about Cho.

A special judge ordered him to get outpatient treatment, and agreed that the counseling center would be suitable. Neither he nor the area Community Service Board, which is responsible for monitoring mental-health treatment orders, checked to see if Cho received treatment.

The only follow-up:

"Sherry saw him today at 3:00," a counseling center staff member e-mailed colleagues and other officials who had been advised about Cho's hospitalization.

. . .

An undated, handwritten note by a Tech official in summer 2007 concluded "system worked" with Cho's hospitalization, but added, "a thorough review of history with family members, school officials should have taken place."

The note adds that Dean Niles "has clarified policy and procedures to allow for more careful assessment & treatment of at-risk students." It complains that his school and parents never shared information about mental-health problems dating back to 1999. It notes that "several hard copies of counselor notes were inadvertently destroyed."

In testimony to a state investigation panel, the University of Virginia's director of counseling and psychological services said his school follows up when students are hospitalized for mental illness.

. . .

Cho's crisis, whatever it was, seemed to have passed by the start of 2006 -- at least as far as the police, counselors or any Tech officials responsible for discipline and dorm life were concerned.

But that semester, English professor Bob Hicok e-mailed department chairwoman Lucinda Roy with his concerns about Cho. It was only then he learned that Giovanni had insisted he be removed from her poetry class.

In one story for Hicok's class, Cho had his hero, Bud, cry out: "This is it. . . . This is when you damn people die with me," and describes him carrying a 9 mm handgun, like one of the weapons Cho used in Norris Hall, to school.

Another story for the same class ends with one girl telling another: "I'LL KILL YOU. I'LL KILL YOU!"

That same semester, when writing instructor Carl Bean suggested Cho drop his course because his work was not satisfactory, the angry student followed his professor, uninvited, into his office.

Suddenly, startlingly, the student whose constant silence so unsettled his professors was yelling.

Bean never mentioned the matter to Roy or to university judicial affairs officials.

. . .

That fall, professor Lisa Norris told Lewis, the associate dean, that she was worried about Cho because he wouldn't speak in class -- "all communication was via head nods or head shakes," she wrote. "Whew."

"Many faculty members have attempted to deal directly with his situation," Lewis replied.

She suggested sessions to improve his English language conversation skills might help. Later, she told the state investigation panel that she couldn't find any mental-health or police reports about Cho.

The professor gave Cho a "B" for a portfolio that included a story about a young man named Ax Manson -- jotting "Go Ax!" as the young man curses an evil teacher and addict father -- who is killed by the father to end the story. I

"Your stories are original & memorable, & you handle violence in interesting ways," the professor wrote, in giving Cho his "B."

Tomorrow:

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or .