Shooting at Va. Tech

And what became of that?

 

But don't you think it was the work combined with the personality?

If the outgoing captain of, say, the wrestling team turns this stuff in and the professor asks him about it and he says, "Well, I'm a huge horror fan - Stephen King, the "Saw" series of movies, can't wait to see "Disturbia" when it comes out, either" - you probably accept it.

I just don't think that the plays are that creepy standing alone - just low-rent attempts at the horror/suspense genre.

 

What's really been interesting to me is the tone of it all. Starting with Katie Couric's first shot across the bow at the Monday afternoon press conference, many of the reporters have sounded more like cross-examining prosecutors than journalists. I know there are times when that tone is appropriate, but when you're dealing with administrators who are still trying to count the bodies, it really leaves me cold.

 

I couldn't agree more. While hindsight shows us that there might have been trouble brewing with Cho, I couldn't help but think of the stuff that Brett Easton Ellis not only got published but made him a fortune.

 

Roy is the department head, and she taught Cho one-on-one after he was removed from the class. Giovanni was the professor.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/

Read Giovanni's quote about when she first heard the news.

 

I didn't read the plays – perhaps I should – but as a creative writing major in college, I know I wrote some twisted shit about death, drugs, etc. That doesn't make me a murderer or a drug addict. To say this teacher holds any fault for not doing enough is ludicrous. When expressing your mind through written word, you often are forced to move in directions you do not expect. How could this teacher tell that the Asian kid was writing non-fiction, and not just expanding his mind as a thinker and writer? She couldn't and shouldn't be asked to.

It is only to be expected that the teacher was concerned, and she voiced her concern. End of story. Not sure what else you can do in this situation.

 

I agree.
This is all ex post facto tabloid boogedy-boogedy. I particularly enjoyed the NYDN today, emphasizing in every story that Cho's work was "badly written." Would it have mattered if it was impeccably composed lunacy?
I mean, the Unibomber actually wrote pretty well.

 

Here's some information on the two hour window. Seems they were chasing a bad lead--the boyfriend of the first girl shot. Said boyfriend was at Radford College so it does at least validate that their initial statement that they thought the suspect would have left the VT campus:


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18cnd-virginia.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

 

IMO, the argument that VT could have secured this campus in the 90 minutes or so between the cops arriving at the first scene and the shooting in the engineering building doesn't hold a whole lot of water.

You couldn't lock down a city that size, why would you expect you could lock down a college that size? Especially when most buildings on a college campus are laughibly easy to access and campus security forces are just that, security forces. They aren't cops. Most don't even carry guns.

Short of some sort of civil defense siren system there is no foolproof way to warn 29,000 people that a killer might be on the loose. And even that wouldn't reach everybody you needed to reach.

The people running VT are not without blame in this situation. However you cannot protect 100 percent of the people 100 percent of the time. Anyone who thinks you can is living in fantasyland.

This was a horrible tragedy but even if VT cancels classes the moment they know about the first shooting this kid could still have killed 30+ people, if not more. He was a student. He had access to, at the very least, his dorm. How many people could he have killed there? How many people could he have killed in the library? The student union? The rec center?

 

As the pieces are begin to come together, a couple questions I have are:

What was Cho's connection to Emily Hilscher (the initial victim)? It definitely seems like he targeted her specifically. How did he know her or know of her? Sure doesn't seem from what I've read, he'd be chatting her up and get rejected or rebuffed. Why her?

Did he come back to his room after the first shooting? And if so, did any of his roommates notice anything? My guess is in a 6 person suite, someone would have been around at that time of the morning getting ready for class (ok maybe that's a stretch--back in my college days, not too much was moving at 8am).

 

I believe it said he went back to his room to get more ammunition, and that's when he left the suicide note. I don't know how long he was in there...but if he went to his 2-person bedroom, no one else might have seen him if his roommate was in class. And they all apparently thought he was weird anyway...might not have seemed any weirder.