posted April 18, 2007 07:28 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 18, 2007 10:39 PM         

consider this: what is your reaction on reading something like this...one of disgust.

what is a psychotic person's reaction to it: they seek such stuff out !!

so even if this was not publicized by the media, we will still have twisted people, who will seek out twisted stuff to feed their twisted minds. who knows what meaning they read into stuff that others consider 'normal'.

but this might alert people a little more, and may be, just may be, they r able to spot out someone else in their immediate surroundings who appears to have similar inclinations, and a future disaster might be averted. it gives the average person on the street some insight into how a mass-murderer's mind operates.

posted April 18, 2007 11:04 PM         

ILWL - I see what you are saying, and certain people should view the tapes, audio, etc. so that they can research it, and learn more about how to profile this kind of person and THEN tell the public what to watch out for. However, the average Joe on the street...I don't think they need to see all this. I also don't think it helps the grieving people to see exactly what their son/daughter/brother/sister/friend may have seen in their last moments. Instead of the focus being on the victims, the focus is now on him again, and it will be for a while. The media is making him out to be the powerful superstar that he wanted to be. They are giving him what he wanted. Kind of like the ending in the movie "Seven." Damned if you do...damned if you don't.

Most of his rants are jibberish. Unless you are a trained psychologist, there isn't much to analyze. Plus, it isn't showing the public much about what to look out for, because this guy talks more in these videotapes than he did to anyone in his life. He never even spoke to his roommates.