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Cho’s Family Unaware of His Homicidal Thoughts

August 31, 2007

By Bill McKelway

The private reflections of Seung-Hui Cho's parents and older sister are revealed for the first time in the Virginia Tech investigation report.

"The Chos have said that they will mourn, until the day they die, the deaths and injuries of those who suffered at the hands of their son," the report said.

Cho's parents told panel members in a three-hour interview that they visited him weekly in his first years at Virginia Tech and talked to him on the telephone each Sunday.

In his last conversation with them by telephone just days before the killings, he said nothing of note, they said.

But they seemed barely to know their son's thoughts.

When Cho was an eighth-grader, he wrote about the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, calling the perpetrators by their first names and indicating he wanted to repeat the murders elsewhere.

Just a few years earlier, "he was quiet and gentle and did not exhibit tantrums or angry outbursts," the report said.

His mother told investigators she expressed her disapproval when she found a pocket knife in her son's drawer during his college years.

Yet when panel interviewers, using Cho's sister as an interpreter, talked with the parents, "they appeared shocked to learn that he had written about violence toward others. They knew he had hinted at ideas about suicide, but not homicide," the report said.

The relatives suggested that the son and brother they knew "was startlingly different from the one who carried out premeditated murder."

Cho's isolation deepened because his parents could not speak much English, and when his sister was about to leave home, trouble threatened, the report said.

The parents "feared . . . he would not communicate at all."

Throughout the native South Korean's life, Cho exhibited a great intellect but one that was shadowed by emotional difficulties that seemed increasingly to eat away at him as he grew older, the report said.

He suffered from a condition known as selective mutism that made it almost unbearable for him to speak publicly. A therapist conversed with him through drawings and modeling clay. One of his first creations was a clay house: It had no doors or windows.

Cho received close attention throughout his high school years from his family, guidance counselors, therapists and teachers who helped him through his problems.

He took upper-level science and math courses and honors classes, attained a 3.52 grade-point average and scored well on the SATs.

But that close attention dissipated at Tech, a school of enormous size that was opposite of what his high school advisers recommended.

"What the admissions staff at Virginia Tech did not see were the special accommodations that propped up Cho and his grades," the report noted.

Tech officials said last week that they were never told of Cho's emotional problems, and Cho's family apparently never conveyed his special needs to Virginia Tech teachers or counselors. Legally mandated provisions for special-needs students disappeared in college.

Panel member Roger L. Depue, a forensic behavioral scientist, sums up Cho's end as an increasingly internalized, demonic fall as the world around Cho failed to help.

As graduation approached this spring, Cho felt "fear and dread," Depue writes. Failure and inadequacy awaited him, more damning than his rejected manuscripts or faculty scorn.

Cho "would plan a killing that would go down in history as the greatest school massacre ever," greater than Columbine, Depue said.

"He would be remembered as the savior of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the poor, and the rejected."

Cho convinced himself his evil vengeance would reap good; he would become the savior and punisher.

"In his distorted fantasy world, he himself had actually become that which he seemed to despise most. He had become the instrument for the destruction of human dignity and precious potential."

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.