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THU., APR 19, 2007 - 4:12 PM
Former high school classmates say Va. Tech gunman was picked on in
school
MATT APUZZO
Associated Press

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Long before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman
Cho Seung-Hui was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy in
suburban Washington because of his shyness and the strange, mumbly way
he talked, former classmates say.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High
School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South
Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore
attempts to strike up a conversation.

Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and
when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids
recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for
participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that
sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

· UW System to review security

"As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and
pointing and saying, 'Go back to China,'" Davids said.

Cho shot 32 people to death and committed suicide Monday in the
deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. The high
school classmates' accounts add to the psychological portrait that is
beginning to take shape, and could shed light on the video rant Cho
mailed to NBC in the middle of his rampage at Virginia Tech.

In the often-incoherent video, the 23-year-old Cho portrays himself as
persecuted and rants about rich kids.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, who came to the
U.S. at about age 8 in 1992 and whose parents work at a dry cleaners
in suburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you
snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't
enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to
fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

In other developments Thursday:

Gov. Timothy Kaine announced the appointment of an independent panel
to look into the tragedy and how authorities handled it. Police and
university officials have been accused of missing warning signs in
Cho's behavior and failing to safeguard the campus after the gunfire
broke out. The panel will be led by former Virginia State Police
superintendent Gerald Massengill and will also include former Homeland
Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

University officials said that all of Cho's student victims would be
awarded degrees posthumously, and that other students terrorized by
the shootings might be allowed to end the semester immediately without
consequences.

Among the victims of the massacre were two other Westfield High
graduates: Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated
from the high school last year. Police said it is not clear whether
Cho singled them out.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, a member of Cho's graduating class at Westfield
High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school.

"I just remember he was a shy kid who didn't really want to talk to
anybody," she said. "I guess a lot of people felt like maybe there was
a language barrier."

But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told
her they recalled him getting picked on there.

"There were just some people who were really mean to him and they
would push him down and laugh at him," Roberts said. "He didn't speak
English really well and they would really make fun of him."

Virginia Tech student Alison Heck said a suitemate of hers on campus
Christina Lilick found a mysterious question mark scrawled on the dry
erase board on her door. Lilick went to the same high school as Cho,
according to Lilick's Facebook page. And Cho once scrawled a question
mark on the sign-in sheet on the first day of a literature class, and
other students came to know him as "the question mark kid."

"I don't know if she knew that it was him for sure," Heck said. "I do
remember that that fall that she was being stalked and she had
mentioned the question mark. And there was a question mark on her
door."

Heck added: "She just let us know about it just in case there was a
strange person walking around our suite."

Lilick could not immediately be located for comment, via e-mail or
telephone.

Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle
school with Cho, said she was in several classes with Cho in high
school, including advanced-placement calculus and Spanish. She said he
walked around with his head down, and almost never spoke. And when he
did, it was "a real low mutter, like a whisper."

As part of an exam in Spanish class, students had to answer questions
in Spanish on tape, and other students were so curious to know what
Cho sounded like that they waited eagerly for the teacher to play his
recording, she said. She said that on the tape, he did not speak
confidently but did seem to know Spanish.

Wilder recalled high school teachers trying to get him to participate,
but "he would only shrug his shoulders or he'd give like two-word
responses, and I think it just got to the point where teachers just
gave up because they realized he wasn't going to come out of the shell
he was in, so they just kind of passed him over for the most part as
time went on."

She said she was sure Cho probably was picked on in middle school, but
so was everyone else. And it didn't seem as if English was the problem
for him, she said. If he didn't speak English well, there were several
other Korean students he could have reached out to for friendship, but
he didn't, she said.

Wilder said Cho wasn't any friendlier in college, where "he always had
that same damn blank stare, like glare, on his face. And I'd always
try to make eye contact with him because I recognized the kid because
I'd seen him for six years, but he'd always just look right past you
like you weren't there."

Eleven people hurt in the attack remained hospitalized, at least one
in serious condition.

Authorities on Wednesday disclosed that more than a year before the
massacre, Cho had been accused of sending unwanted messages to two
women and was taken to a psychiatric hospital on a magistrate's orders
and was pronounced a danger to himself. But he was released with
orders to undergo outpatient treatment.

Also, Cho's twisted, violence-filled writings and menacing,
uncommunicative demeanor had disturbed professors and students so much
that he was removed from one English class and was repeatedly urged to
get counseling.

On Wednesday, NBC received a package containing a rambling and often
incoherent 23-page written statement from Cho, 28 video clips and 43
photos many of them showing Cho, in a military-style vest and backward
baseball cap, brandishing handguns. A Postal Service time stamp reads
9:01 a.m. between the two attacks on campus.

The package helps explain one mystery: where the gunman was and what
he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire,
at a high-rise dorm, and the second attack, at a classroom building.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," a
snarling Cho says on video. "But you decided to spill my blood. You
forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was
yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said
Thursday that the material contained little they did not already know.
Flaherty said he was disappointed that NBC decided to broadcast parts
of it.

"I just hate that a lot of people not used to seeing that type of
image had to see it," he said.

"I saw his picture on TV, and when I did I just got chills," said
Kristy Venning, a junior from Franklin County, Va. "There's really no
words. It shows he put so much thought into this and I think it's
sick."

With a backlash developing against the media, Fox News said it would
stop running the pictures, and other networks said they would severely
limit their use.

"It has value as breaking news," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey
Schneider, "but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just
repeated ad nauseam."

Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed, Vicki Smith, Sue Lindsey and
Justin Pope in Blacksburg, Va.; Matt Barakat in Richmond, Va.; Colleen
Long, Tom Hays and Jake Coyle in New York; and Lara Jakes Jordan,
Sarah Karush and Sharon Theimer in Washington contributed to this
report.

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