The Virginia Tech killer had a habit of intimidating classmates, writes Denis Stauntonin Blacksburg
After 20 years teaching creative writing at Virginia Tech, poet Nikki Giovanni has seen her share of troubled and difficult young people, and the 63-year-old, who sports a "Thug Life" tattoo in memory of rapper Tupac Shakur, is not easily fazed. But Giovanni had only been teaching Cho Seung-Hui for a few weeks before she told the English department that he had to leave her class.
"I was willing to resign before I was going to continue with him," she said yesterday.
Giovanni's problem was less with Cho's writing, which others have described as morbid and disturbing, than with his behaviour in class, which other students found intimidating. Cho would arrive at each class wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap, which he would remove reluctantly when Giovanni asked him to and would sit in silence, occasionally taking photographs of other students with his mobile phone.
"A couple of students absolutely quit coming to class and I was trying to find out what was I doing wrong here. They said: 'You know, he's taking photographs of us. We don't know what he's doing and it's very strange.' I thought it had to be dealt with," Giovanni said.
Giovanni never suspected that Cho would resort to the violence that saw him killing more than 30 people on campus this week, but she was in no doubt that there was something profoundly malevolent about the quiet 23-year-old.
"I know we're talking about a youngster, but troubled youngsters get drunk and jump off buildings. Troubled youngsters drink and drive. There was something mean about this boy. I've taught troubled youngsters. I've taught crazy people. It was the meanness that bothered me. It was a really mean streak," she said.
Despite Giovanni's decision to expel him from class and the complaints to police from two women students about his pestering calls and e-mails, few of Cho's fellow students thought of him as anything other than quiet, lonely and a little creepy.
Karan Grewal, who shared a suite of rooms with Cho since last August, knew so little about the young Korean that he thought he was studying business rather than English. Grewal said he tried talking to Cho when they first moved in together, but gave up after Cho refused to respond to the most routine conversational gambits.
Grewal assumed that Cho could not speak English well and that he was lonely but essentially harmless, never showing any sign of anger or engaging in arguments with other students.
"He showed no emotion ever - no happiness, no sadness, no anger," Grewal said.
Born in South Korea, Cho moved to the US with his parents in 1992, when he was just eight years old. The family lived first in Detroit and later moved to Centreville, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC, where Cho's parents worked as dry cleaners.
His sister, Sun-Kyung, studied economics at Princeton and is now working as a contractor for the US state department. At high school Cho was already viewed as a loner who seldom spoke and paused for 10 or 20 seconds before answering questions from teachers.
His decision to major in English at Virginia Tech was unusual in itself because the university, as its name suggests, specialises in subjects such as engineering, veterinary science and other applied disciplines.
Joe Eska, who teaches in the English department but did not know Cho, told me that most students decide to major in English only after they have become disenchanted with a science subject.
"Their parents might have pressured them into doing something like engineering, but after a few semesters they find it's too demanding or they start falling behind and they transfer to a major they prefer. That's usually English because they don't have to learn another language," he said.
Cho always sat alone in the cafeteria and Grawel said he spent most of his time at the dormitory typing on the computer or in his room playing music, often by Nirvana and Led Zeppelin. One song he played again and again was Collective Soul's Shine, a plaintive rock song with lines such as "Teach me how to speak/Teach me how to share/Teach me where to go/Tell me will love be there".
One of Cho's teachers was so disturbed by some short plays he wrote that she referred him to a university counsellor and he was admitted voluntarily to a mental health unit in late 2005 after two women students complained about "annoying messages" he sent them.
Campus police spoke to Cho after the complaints but there were no formal charges against him and he attracted little attention during the past 18 months.
Lucinda Roy, a former head of Virginia Tech's English department, said that Cho was "quite a gifted student in some ways" and she was concerned about what she saw as signs of depression.
Like everyone else at the university who is mourning Cho's victims this week, however, Roy never succeeded in getting through to the strange, silent young killer.
"It was almost like talking to a hole, as if he wasn't really there half the time," she said.