Posted on 08/30/2007 1:56:44 PM PDT by FortWorthPatriot
RICHMOND, Va. - The gunman responsible for the April massacre at Virginia Tech was a sickly child — shy, frail and leery of physical contact by the time he was 3. His teachers said he began showing suicidal and homicidal tendencies by the eighth grade.
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A new report that provides the most comprehensive look yet at Seung-Hui Cho also shows his parents, teachers and mental health counselors wove a safety net that held him together through most of high school.
Then, in his junior year, Cho declared "there is nothing wrong with me" and turned away from treatment, the report says. Because he was about to turn 18, his parents decided they could do little to stop him. His teachers made accommodations for his painful shyness, and he graduated with the grades and test scores that got him into Virginia Tech.
But there his support system fell apart, and unbeknownst to his family, he grew increasingly anti-social.
"What the admissions staff at Virginia Tech did not see were the special accommodations that propped up Cho and his grades," including private sessions with teachers that spared him public speaking, said the report issued late Wednesday by a panel that investigated the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Despite "the system failures and errors in judgment that contributed to Cho's worsening depression, Cho himself was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health," the report said.
"While Cho's emotional and psychological disabilities undoubtedly clouded his ability to evaluate his own situation, he, ultimately, is the primary person responsible for April 16, 2007," the report said. "To imply otherwise would be wrong."
If Cho's family in Centreville had known of his troubles in Blacksburg, the report concludes, they might have been able to intervene — and perhaps to prevent the rampage that left Cho and 32 others dead.
"We would have taken him home and made him miss a semester to get this looked at," his family told the panel's investigators.
Cho was born in South Korea and emigrated with his family to Maryland at age 8. They moved to Virginia a year later.
Cho and sister Sun were isolated by language barriers early on, and Cho remained quiet and withdrawn but had normal interests — basketball, TV, nonviolent video games, talk shows and action movies.
His relationship with his father was strained. He spoke little to either parent, and avoided eye contact. Campus acquaintances described the same behavior at Virginia Tech.
At the urging of teachers, he went to counseling and art therapy before starting seventh grade and was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. He rebuffed his parents' suggestions that he take part in more extracurricular activities, remaining withdrawn.
In March 1999, the eighth-grader began drawing tunnels and caves that a therapist said could signify depression, or worse. A month later, after the murders at Columbine High School in Colorado, he wrote a paper saying he wanted to repeat the attacks — an exercise he would repeat in the spring of 2006 with a fictional tale that hinted at what was to come.
He was diagnosed in therapy with selective mutism, an anxiety disorder characterized by consistent failure to speak when speech is expected. Sufferers sometimes show "passive-aggressive, stubborn and controlling traits," the report said. Antidepressant drugs helped, and a year later, he was taken off the medication.
At Westfield High School, educators set up an individualized program to help him cope with mutism. He kept his counseling appointments and got good grades, graduating in June 2003 with a 3.5 grade point average in the honors program.
A school guidance counselor urged him to choose a small college close to home, but Cho was determined to attend Virginia Tech. The counselor offered Cho the name of a person to call if he had trouble adjusting, but Cho never called.
The first few years at college were uneventful. He requested a new freshman roommate after finding his first one too sloppy. His parents visited regularly, and his grades were good.
In his sophomore year, he moved in with a senior who was rarely home. He grew interested in writing and began to think about switching his major from business information systems to English. He submitted a book idea to a publishing house, which rejected it.
Panel member Roger L. Depue, who oversaw the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, called Cho's intelligence "his strongest attribute," but said he lacked any social skills.
"One of the big problems with being a loner is that one does not get helpful reality checks from people who can challenge disordered thinking," Depue wrote.
As late as the spring of 2005, Cho exhibited no behavioral problems. But serious problems surfaced in the fall.
Letters home trickled off. He clashed with English teachers, wearing dark glasses, hats and scarves to class and writing violent, disturbing papers. Roommates gave up on trying to befriend him after he stabbed a carpet in a girl's room.
In November and December 2005, female residents complained of annoying instant messages, e-mails and phone calls. Cho was referred to counseling. After campus police told Cho to stop contacting one woman, he told his roommates, "I might as well kill myself now."
That triggered a psychiatric evaluation, an overnight stay and several brief phone sessions with counselors.
After that, the report says, English professors, university administrators and others missed several opportunities to share information and get Cho help.
___
Associated Press writer Michael Felberbaum contributed to this report.
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Perhaps this will end the streamlining of retards and the mentally ill into the public school systems. These “special needs” cases need to be educated in separate facilities which can handle their developmental issues including those who show homocidal tendencies.
Va Tech's campus-wide gun ban dates to 2005.
No one could do anything about him because he was part of “diversity” at the University.
see my reply #6
Great. We’ll loose the homicidal on the retards and mentally ill.
The violent have NO place in a mainstream school. The others? It did me no harm to go to school with mentally retarded kids. My son is high-functioning autistic, which was one aspect of Cho’s illness, but he is not violent and neither are most autistic people. He graduated HS and is attending community college this fall.
Should we have him put in a loony bin, or just lock him in the basement?
Mrs VS
He was in the loony bin for one night, should’ve been there a lot longer.
My daughter is starting 6th grade at our local middle school.
We just had her orientation.
I had no idea that there is a seperate PTA for the “special needs” children called SEPTA. It operates just like the PTA.
Heh. Yeah. Just like in all them Orwell books.
I saw the headline and thought it was about Margaret Cho the “comedienne.”
Miss a semester? I think the parents have missed the boat.
Since almost everyone is second guessing the actions of those who knew Cho before he became a mass murderer, I wonder what would have happened to Cho if he had sought counseling for his violent tendencies from a priest.
My son went to high school with this freak. He did better than Cho did in high school and he is mentally stable, but got rejected by Virginia Tech. I wonder why.
You are of course intentionally misinterpreting my argument. Par for course for those parents who have a special needs child. After all, god forbid they and their child’s self esteem be shattered with the idea that they’re different and perhaps they shouldn’t be included in regular classes due to the distractions they present.
OF COURSE nonviolent special needs kids should be protected from those who may have violent tendencies. Teach them all separaretly and by their need. They way it should be and the way it was.
If you do not like the “retards” at your kids public school might I suggest private school.
Have a good day!
Sorry, buddy. There are some kids with special needs who can be mainstreamed without disrupting the class, and there are others who should have their own classrooms or their own schools, but it needs to be decided case by case. I’m not arguing for mainstreaming all of them but you do seem to be arguing for isolating all of them.
I’d say I benefitted from sharing classes with some retarded kids when I was growing up. They were nice kids, not disruptive. There are a lot of people with cognitive problems in the world, from the baggers at the supermarket, to my cousin’s daughter with Downs’, to elderly relatives with dementia, to some of my patients. It’s their world too; you might as well learn to deal with them.
Mrs VS
When it comes to educating the young, the intelligent and normal should not have to suffer due to the “feelings” of the “special” or to fulfill their “need to be accepted” or their parent’s wish for normalcy. And yes I’d argue for their isolation and against mainstreaming preceisly because they would do better in an environment that caters to them rather than one that drags down a class of regular kids. By your standard you could care less what type of education anybody gets as long as everyone’s included in it.
To return to the article mentioned, if nutcase Korean boy HAD been singled out and entered into a special needs program, I’d bet money his lunacy would have been documented quite awhile before he ever got to VT. But hey his parents got to sweep their conerns under a rug cause good little Cho was “just like all the other boys and girls.”
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