Gunman: "Now You Have Blood On Your Hands"
The search of the Virginia Tech gunman's dorm room and backpack produced eight pages of notes that law enforcement sources characterize as a "suicide note," reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr. Cho Seung-Hui also sent photographs, videos and writings to NBC in New York before he died in the massacre that left 33 people dead, authorities said.
"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui said in an harsh, emphatic voice, in a video excerpt shown on NBC Nightly News. "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."
Orr reports the writings found in Cho's dorm "appear to be a manifesto" and are "a rambling diatribe against people of privilege," says one law enforcement official. As the official put it, "He (Cho) just seemed to hate everybody." The notes, he continued, "are page after page of single-spaced rantings."
This contradicts Tuesday's statement by the Virginia State Police that no suicide note was found.
The notes are hard to read and to follow, say officials. "Every other word is 'f---'," one official said. Cho raises no race issues, but focuses mostly on class and privilege, railing against "rich people who have Mercedes, gold, and trust funds."
The notes end with the phrase, "We'll soon be together." Police sources don't know who the "we" is referring to or if it's a specific reference.
The materials sent to NBC appear to have been mailed in the two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire in a high-rise dormitory and the second fusillade, at a classroom building, according to the time stamp on the package, NBC reports.
NBC said it turned the package over to authorities on Wednesday.Click here for an interactive gallery of the victims.
"This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation. We're in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth," said Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police.
The package included 29 photos, 11 of them showing Cho aiming handguns at the camera, NBC reports. Some of the pictures showed him smiling. Some showed him brandishing two weapons at a time, one in each hand. Another showed him swinging a hammer two-fisted.
It also included an 1800-word manifesto with sentiments similar to the dorm room notes. The document "rants against rich people and warns that he wants to get even," according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case. Much of Cho's rant is incoherent and laced with profanity, and he rails against hedonism and Christianity, NBC reports.
The package was sent by overnight delivery but did not arrive at NBC until Wednesday's mail. It had apparently been delayed because it had the wrong ZIP code, NBC said.
An alert postal employee brought the package to NBC's attention after noticing the Blacksburg return address and a name similar to the words reportedly found scrawled in red ink on Cho's arm after the bloodbath, "Ismail Ax," NBC said.
"I didn't have to do it. I could have left. I could have fled," Cho says in the video. "But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you (expletive). I did it for them."
Cho also makes references to the Columbine High massacre and the teenage killers, according to NBC.
NBC said it immediately turned the package over to authorities on Wednesday.
If the package was indeed mailed between the first attack and the second, that would help explain where Cho was and what he did during that two-hour window.
Earlier Wednesday, it was reported that two women students had complained in 2005 to campus police about Cho.
Sources would not say if Cho's dorm room notes contained any names. Previously, it had been reported that Cho mentioned one or two women students in his notes.
According to Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum, in November of 2005, he made contact with a female student through telephone calls and in person. The student called it "annoying" but declined to press charges.
In December 2005, Cho, an English major, sent instant messages to a second woman. He made no threats, Flinchum said, but the student complained. Officers spoke to him at that time.
Neither of the two women who complained about Cho in 2005 was among Monday's victims.
An acquaintance of Cho later contacted authorities concerned he might be suicidal, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. It was at that point he was taken voluntarily to a mental health facility, Carilion Saint Albans Behavioral Health Center in Christiansburg, Va. But a day later, a medical evaluation found Cho's "insight and judgment" normal and he was approved for outpatient treatment.
Because Cho went to the facility voluntarily, the incident did not show up on Cho's background check, allowing Cho to buy the two guns he needed to carry out the killings.
Cho's creative writing also disturbed his fellow teachers and some of his instructors.
In one of the plays he wrote, "there was a character where the father raped the son and the son was going to get back at him by killing him. And it became very brutal and graphic, and vulgar with the language, Sara Stevens, a Virginia Tech junior, said on CBS News' The Early Show (
). "And there was another play about how he was going to get revenge on a teacher who had given him low marks."But police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set off Cho on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
"I had classes with him for three years, and he was known as being expressionless. He usually sat in class and I never heard him speak once in three years," Stevens, a former CBS intern, told Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.
Other classmates say that on the first day of a British literature class last year, students took turns introducing themselves. When it was Cho Seung-Hui's turn to speak, he said nothing.
The professor then looked at the sign-in sheet, and noticed that Cho had written a question mark instead of his name. The professor asked, "Is your name 'question mark?'" A classmate, Julie Poole, says Cho offered little response.
She says he then spent much of the class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating.
Poole says, "We just really knew him as the 'question-mark kid.'"
"He made me so nervous," Stevens said.
"I saw some poetry and he seemed to be very angry," Lucinda Roy, the English department's director of creative writing, said on The Early Show.
"I didn't feel that the students felt safe. They expressed to their faculty member some discomfort. And she said that she wasn't comfortable teaching him anymore," Roy said, so she tutored him herself.
She notified the university's counseling service and police department about Cho's behavior.
"They were very concerned, and their response was immediate in terms of trying to help. And then they seemed to hit a wall where there are all these legal issues," Roy said. "So unless he'd issued an actual threat, I was told he never said he was going to do harm to himself or someone else in an explicit way."
"We certainly are always sensitive to the issue of potential violence. It is very difficult to predict when what someone perceives as stalking is stalking, and then how it might translate into violence later. In general that's a very difficult thing to predict," Dr. Chris Flynn, director of the school's Cook Counseling Center, said at a news conference Wednesday. "Clearly if anyone had any warning about a violent incident, people would have stepped in and acted.
Flynn said there have been cases where the school has sent students home or suggested that parents come get them, reports CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers
"Everyone's concern at Virginia Tech is the emotional, physical, spiritual health of the student. We do everything we can to protect that," he said.
Attorney Sheldon Steinbach says federal law gives schools the right to do what they need to do — whether it's call the parents, call the police or expel the student — if he or she could be a threat to others.
"Surely when a student is disturbed so that he or she is a threat to him or herself or to the academic community, one must act," says Steinbach, who was former counsel to the American Council on Education.
Roy said she tried to get Cho to go to counseling voluntarily, but he resisted. News reports said that Cho may have been taking medication for depression, although no medication was found in his room.
"It was very strange. If you were to say something to him, it would take him about 10 to 20 seconds to say anything back, so there would be a long, long pause. And then when he did speak, he spoke only in a whisper, so you'd have to lean in to hear what he was saying," Roy added.
Karan Grewal shared a suite with Cho, and saw him just two hours before the massacre started.
"He came in. Looked as normal as usual, no expression on his face. Didn't seem angry, sad, anything. Just a normal look on his face. Just like the picture," Grewal told CBS News.
"He was my roommate," Joe Aust, 19, told The New York Times. "I didn't know him that well, though."
He added: "He was always really, really quiet and kind of weird, keeping to himself all the time," he said. "I tried to make conversation with him in August or so and he would just give one word answers and not try and carry on the conversation."
The emerging portrait of Cho, the quiet loner whose writing sent out alarms, is one that fits almost to a "T" a U.S. Secret Service profile of the typical school shooter, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews.
In a study done after the Columbine massacre, the Secret Service studied 37 school shootings to learn the patterns of the school-aged assassins.
Most school attacks, the report said, come from loners with some kind of grievance, adds Andrews. "Many attackers felt bullied," ...or persecuted by others....and "more than half had revenge as a motive."
Cho arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., where his parents worked at a dry cleaners.
In other developments: