And that was just one of hundreds of opportunities over the years where people could clearly see he was mentally incompetent and unstable, and chose to be “understanding” and “nonjudgmental”, instead of taking control of him and getting him into a situation where he and everybody else would be safe from him. Before he turned 18, certainly his middle school and high school teachers and administrators and counselors could have drawn the line. For crying out loud, this kid wasn’t even put in a special ed program!!! And Va Tech was under no obligation to keep passing an English major for almost 4 years, when his work, at least in his major, consisted of rude and violent garbage presented with a technical level of writing that was barely at middle school level, and zero class participation beyond physical presence.
Any crackdown on this kid’s academic career would have woken his parents and sister up, and I’m sure they would have been cooperative with the recommendations of people in positions of authority. It’s little wonder his family didn’t realize how bad his condition was, when they got 15 years of non-stop signals from Virginia schools that everything was okay, and that their strange son was progressing along the academic ladder at a normal pace, and that he was perfectly welcome in a multi-student suite in a normal college dormitory.
I REALLY REALLY feel awful for this family. I keep having the urge to write them a long letter spelling out in great detail why it’s not their fault, but OUR fault, that this happened. When I hear about the Korean community, both hear and in South Korea, feeling a sense of shame about this, I want to scream “NO! it’s Americans who should be ashamed!” Imagine all the other developed countries this family could have chosen to emigrate to in search of a better life — can you think of any other one that would have allowed a kid in this condition to slide through high school and a very respectable college as if nothing was amiss?