Had Stewart walked in and immediately found Luck, might the shooting have stopped there? It’s possible, Fox said, but unlikely.
“Once they start shooting, the rage continues,” he said.
Virginia Tech student Seung-hui Cho also had no criminal history, aside from the odd speeding ticket. But there were plenty of people who sensed he was a ticking time bomb.
In her new book, No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech, former English department chairwoman Lucinda Roy writes of her attempts to tutor Cho after his disturbing behavior and macabre writing got him kicked out of class. During their sessions between October 2005 and December 2005, Roy described Cho as someone from whom sadness oozed “like the smell of smoke from a nicotine addict.”
Sitting with Cho between her and the office’s only exit, Roy felt as if she were talking with “an inanimate object.”
“The core of his identity is impenetrable,” she wrote. “His gaze strangely neutered, as if he has spent his entire life ridding it of expression.”
Roy was frightened for herself and for Cho. But she could not have predicted what was to come.
Initially considered more a suicide risk, Cho was ordered to undergo outpatient counseling, but apparently no one followed up.
His anger and feelings of isolation festered until April 16, 2007, when he went on a campus killing spree.
In a recorded manifesto mailed to the media after he killed his first two victims, Cho lashed out at the “brats” and “snobs” with their trust funds, fancy cars, jewelry and cognac. Like Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Colorado, to whom he dedicated his slaughter, Cho declared that he was wreaking revenge for countless slights and indignations — real or imagined.
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” the 23-year-old snarled into the camera lens.
In many cases, there are warning signs of impending attacks that go unrecognized or ignored. But often, Levin said, it is virtually impossible to know that someone bent on suicide has decided to take others with them.
Many people “have all these symptoms, but they never get the disease,” Levin said. “They may be isolated so they have no support systems in place. And, yet, they don’t hurt anybody.”
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