Mean People Suck

Seung-Hui Cho murdered these six people and 26 others because he didn’t feel good about himself.

People were mean to him.

They picked on him.

He was bullied by his classmates in high school.

They “mocked his shyness and the strange way he talked”. According to Chris Davids, Cho almost never talked to anyone and would ignore the attempts by others to talk to him. Davids is a former high school classmate of Cho’s in high school and college.

Davids attended Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia with Cho, and related in an interview how classmates in an English class laughed at Cho when he attempted to read aloud in class.

Too bad, too sad.

But I don’t believe that Cho needs to be painted as a victim of his own demons. Truth is, he was nothing but a homicidal pig of the lowest degree. In fact, calling him a pig is a grave insult to swine everywhere.

In September 2005, Cho was enrolled in Nikki Giovanni's creative writing class. Giovanni said that from the beginning, Cho began “building a wall between himself and the rest of the class.”

She said he wore sunglasses in the classroom and wore a maroon knit cap low over his forehead. She also had problems with his lack of participation in class discussion.

But after a few weeks into the semester, female students began to complain to Giovanni that Cho was taking pictures of their legs under their desks with his cell phone camera. Giovanni told him to stop doing it, but female students were already refusing to come to class.

Apparently the police have asked Giovanni not to disclose the content and nature of Cho’s writing but the little information she did divulge seemed to paint a very creepy portrait of Cho.

Giovanni sent a letter to the department head, Lucinda Roy, who removed Cho from Giovanni’s class.

Roy notified the office of student affairs, the dean's office, and campus police, but each entity said there was nothing they could do so long as Cho had made no overt threats against himself or others.

Ever notice that when it comes to action, police always say “there’s nothing that can be done until the person commits a crime”? Taking inappropriate pictures of people without their consent is an invasion of privacy, and in some jurisdictions, is a crime. I guess not in the academic ivory tower.

Roy began to tutor Cho personally, in fact, she coddled him. She helped him write poetry. Cho told Roy, after much prodding from Roy, that he was “lonely”. He told her he had no friends. Yet, his roommates have said that Cho rejected the friendship that they offered to him.

Both Roy and Giovanni immediately thought of Cho when they heard about the shootings and the description of the shooter.

It seems that a district court in Montgomery County, Virginia ruled that Cho presented "an imminent danger to self or others" in December 2005. That criterion justified a detention order as Cho was stalking two female schoolmates. Also a crime, in most areas, I guess just not in the academic ivory tower. It also justified a mental evaluation by a state doctor, and mandatory outpatient care.

The "Temporary Detention Order" resulted in an evaluation from a psychiatric hospital near Virginia Tech. Cho was escorted there by police after two women reported receiving threatening messages from Cho. Once again, another crime in most areas.

Special Justice Paul M. Barnett certified the finding, and ordered follow-up treatment on an outpatient basis for him.

ABC reports that on the form, a box is checked that Cho “presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.” But a box immediately below that entry was not checked. A check in that box would indicate that the patient, Cho, presented an imminent danger to others as a result of mental illness.

The ABC news story also reports that one of the two women who complained that Cho was stalking her, declined to sign the complaint of charges against him. Police interviewed Cho for the first time and referred the case back to the school's internal disciplinary board.

ABC also reports that “it’s unclear whether any action was ever taken by the school, although Edward Spencer, a school vice president, said that it's not uncommon for a complaint never to reach a full hearing.”

Less than two weeks later, the second woman student, told authorities she received disturbing instant messages from Cho, and asked police to make sure there was "no further contact" from him.

The police spoke to Cho the next day regarding the second complaint. Then, police met with him a third time, "out of concern for Cho” they asked him to speak to a counselor.

The complaints against Cho came during the same timeframe that Lucinda Roy went to Virginia Tech administrators to express her concern about violent themes in Cho's writing.

A few months later, Cho murdered 32 people, and wounded several others because he didn’t feel good about himself.

Or is there more to it?

The snippets of tape that I have seen of Cho’s rants look eerily like the tapes that Hamas & al-Qaeda suicide bombers make of themselves prior to their “martyrdom”.

The name on the return address section on the Express Mail envelope that Cho sent his tape to NBC in is A. Ishmail.

Sounds a little islamic, doesn’t it?