posted April 18, 2007 07:27 PM            

BREAKING NEWS
By Alex Johnson

MSNBC
Updated: 19 minutes ago
Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package, including photographs and videos, lamenting that “I didn’t have to do this.”

Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.

NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package, which was not addressed to a specific person, in Tuesday afternoon’s mail delivery, but it was not opened until Wednesday morning. The network immediately turned the materials over to FBI agents in New York.

The package included an 1,800-word manifesto-like statement diatribe in which he expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even. The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” Capus said in an interview late Wednesday afternoon.

The material does not include any images of the shootings Monday, but it does contain vague references.

“I didn’t have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It’s not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you f---, I did it for them,” Cho says on one of the videos.

NBC cooperating with investigators
Capus said the network was cooperating with Virginia State Police and the FBI, which is assisting the state police.

The package bore a U.S. Postal Service stamp recording that it had been received at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. ET Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho shot two people in the West Ambler Johnston residence hall on the Virginia Tech campus and shortly before Cho entered Norris Hall, where he killed 30 more people.

“We probably would have received the mail earlier had it not been that he had the wrong address and ZIP code,” Capus said.

Among the materials are 27 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera, Capus said. He does not name anyone specifically, but he mentions “hedonism” and Christianity, and he talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy.

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says. “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.”

The production of the videos is uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand him. But they indicate that Cho had worked on the package for some time, because he not only “took the time to record the videos, but he also broke them down into snippets” that were embedded paragraph by paragraph into the main document, Capus said.

Chilling photographs
The package also includes 43 photographs. Cho looks like a normal, smiling college student in only the first two. In the rest, he presents a stern face; in 11, he aims handguns at the camera that are “consistent with what we’ve heard about the guns in this incident,” Capus said.

Other photographs show Cho holding a knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table.

“This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation,” said Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police, the lead agency investigating the shootings. “We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth.”

Detention order issued
As early as 2005, police and school administrators were wrestling with what to do with Cho, who was accused of stalking two female students and was sent to a mental health facility after police obtained a temporary detention order.

The two women complained to campus police that Cho was contacting them with “annoying” telephone calls and e-mail messages in November and December 2005, campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.

Cho was referred to the university’s disciplinary system, but Flinchum said the woman declined to press charges, and the case apparently never reached a hearing.

However, after the second incident, the department received a call from an acquaintance of Cho’s, who was concerned that he might be suicidal, Flinchum said. Police obtained a temporary detention order from a local magistrate, and in December of that year, Cho was briefly admitted to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, NBC News’ Jim Popkin reported.

To issue a detention order under Virginia law, a magistrate must find both that the subject is “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment” and that the subject is “an imminent danger to himself or others, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for himself.”

According to a doctor’s report accompanying the order, which was obtained by NBC News, Cho was “depressed,” but “his insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor, a clinical psychologist, noted that Cho “denies suicidal ideations.”

Cho was released, said Dr. Harvey Barker, director of the health center.

“If a person is able, at that moment, to persuade a psychiatrist [and] the hospital treating team that they are OK to be released — I imagine sometimes that does happen,” Barker told NBC News.

Under the law, the magistrate could have issued a stronger detention order mandating inpatient treatment, but there was no indication Wednesday that such an order was ever entered. A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans told NBC News that he could not discuss Cho’s case because of patient confidentiality and privacy laws, but he said the hospital was cooperating with the investigation.

Otherwise, Flinchum said, there were no further police incidents involving Cho until the deadly shootings Monday, first in a young woman’s dormitory room and then at a classroom building across campus. Neither of the alleged stalking victims was among the victims Monday.

In addition to the 33 people confirmed dead, including the gunman, nine people remained in hospitals in stable condition, hospital authorities said.

posted April 19, 2007 06:03 PM            

April 19, 2007
Sickness on the left
Ed Lasky

Tom Gross of the National Review's Media Matters blog, brings to our attention a vile article from Counterpunch.

"The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands...

How many of those parents in the audience had also voted for legislators who backed the president's illegal invasion of Iraq? ...

Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? ...

All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as "good" people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description."

posted April 20, 2007 06:49 PM            

The backlash has started. The reaction to NBC News is being reflected in signs appearing on the Virginia Tech campus that say, "Media Stay Away."

Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune notes the strange decision by NBC to put its NBC News logo and the NBC peacock, "in all its multicolored glory," on the videos and photos that it released of Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung Hui. This is one strange network that seems to have no moral compass whatsoever. It fires Don Imus, under pressure from the left-wing Media Matters group, Al Sharpton and its own host, Keith Olbermann, when the words, though offensive, didn't actually hurt anybody in the physical sense. But it then gives a national platform to the hateful words and images of someone who killed 32 people, on the dubious pretext that we need to understand the twisted mind of a demented killer.

Authorities say that NBC's broadcast of the words and images didn't add anything to their investigation of the crime. All it did was anger millions of people by taking the media attention away from the victims and possibly inspiring more threats of violence against students and schools across the country. NBC officials had to know that airing the material would increase the danger of more violence, especially during the week of the anniversary of the Columbine massacre at a Colorado high school. Let us hope and pray that more lives of our precious young people will not be lost because of the reckless and irresponsible actions of NBC.

What NBC did was comparable to Al-Jazeera airing al-Qaeda and terrorist videos. It is not done so that we can understand the mind of a terrorist. It is done in Al-Jazeera's case so that the terrorists can intimidate their intended victims and transmit their propaganda. I don't think NBC wanted more copycat murders to occur as a result of airing the Virginia Tech killer's materials, but it had to know that this would be a risk associated with such a decision. It had to know that more death could follow. But it went ahead anyway.

Make no mistake about it. This was done for ratings and profits. And that is why the NBC News logo and NBC peacock were on the materials distributed to other media. NBC wanted "credit" for this trash. The corporate suits thought that people seeing the NBC brand name on the video would come back to NBC for more updates about the story. For no other reason than that it wanted to be associated in the public mind with the killer's "multimedia manifesto," as anchor Brian Williams called it, the network plastered its brand name and symbol all over this sick material. Of course, it also sends the message to other potential killers that NBC is their network of choice. NBC has become the Al-Jazeera of mass murderers.

The backlash has started. The reaction to NBC News is being reflected in signs appearing on the Virginia Tech campus that say, "Media Stay Away." Family members of victims cancelled their appearances on the NBC Today Show because they were very upset with NBC for airing the material. On Friday, a national day of mourning for the victims, NBC News correspondent Kristen Dahlgren acknowledged on MSNBC that Virginia Tech was at first welcoming to the media but that after the airing of the killer's video tapes, photos and statements, the attitude changed to the point where students and others became "very vocal" against the media and "They want us to leave at this point."

On Thursday, during the day, NBC News issued a statement saying, in part, that "We did not rush the material onto air, but instead consulted with local authorities, who have since publicly acknowledged our appropriate handling of the matter." MSNBC anchors went further on the air, saying that authorities had "cleared" NBC's release of the material. But all of this was a lie. A Virginia State police official was briefly shown on the NBC Nightly News on Thursday night, in a story by correspondent Pete Williams, saying that NBC should not have aired the material. Williams didn't explain the contradiction between what NBC had claimed and what the official said. Reporting from the campus, correspondent Mike Taibbi did say, "What many here want is for the media to go home."

In the Williams story, NBC News president Steve Capus justified the decision to show the material, saying, "I thought we had an obligation" because it would shed light on "what was inside the mind of this killer."

In fact, Virginia State Police Superintendent Steve Flaherty did more than take issue with what NBC had done. He told reporters that he was "rather disappointed" at the network's decision to broadcast "these disturbing images" and that "I'm sorry you were all exposed to these images." He also said, "We already knew why he did this and seeing these pictures makes a lot of pain that we really don't need and the families don't need either."

So the material doesn't tell us anything new, it's very hurtful to the people of the area, and NBC lied about having official approval or clearance to air it.

posted April 24, 2007 01:23 AM            

I think every one should be heard.
Banning someone from public consciousness is not the solution.

Good job NBC.

posted May 02, 2007 03:12 AM              

You know, this got a lot of airplay, despite the fact that around the same time, one of the bloodiest days in Baghdad since the beginning of the war occurred. That did not receive nearly as much coverage.