Making of a Massacre

It takes a while to adjust to getting shot at, certainly if you are a 20-year-old sophomore biology major sitting in German class. At first, Derek O'Dell thought the slight young man dressed in dark clothes and holding a gun was playing some kind of bad joke. Then he saw the shell casings popping out of the pistol as the shooter opened fire. "I saw his eyes, too," O'Dell recalled to NEWSWEEK. "That's probably the scariest thing. There was nothing there, just emptiness almost. Like you can look in people's eyes and you can see life, their stories. But his—just emptiness."

Cho Seung-Hui had a life and a story, but he seemed determined not to share it with anyone, except in dark dreams and then in a final spasm of killing. At Virginia Tech, and possibly at home long before he went away to college, Cho lived in his own bleak little world. He rebuffed the efforts of teachers and roommates to reach out to him and scared away the rest. He imagined a supermodel girlfriend named Jelly, and as her fantasy lover called himself Spanky. Other times he called himself "Question Mark." He slept with his lights on and moaned in his sleep. And yet he was weirdly expressive, scrawling on the wall of his dorm room the yearning lyrics of a song called "Shine." ("Give me a word/Give me a sign/Show me where to look ... Tell me what will I find/Oh, heaven, let your light shine down.")

In between murdering two students a little after 7 a.m. and 30 more shortly after 9:30, Cho went to the post office to mail a package to NBC News in New York (delivered a day late because he had the wrong zip code). The package included a rancid manifesto in which Cho casts himself as a kind of avenging angel against the "Christian Criminals" who have raped and sodomized, humiliated and crucified him and others he describes as the "Weak and Defenseless." He seems to blame the wealthy for his suffering. "You had everything you wanted," he taunts. "Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats? Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs? Your trust fund wasn't enough? Your vodka and cognac weren't enough?"

But his rantings are largely incoherent. He poses as "Ishmael Ax," possibly a reference to Abraham's son, cast from the wicked. He is a terrorist who calls himself an "Anti-terrorist," and pays homage to "Eric and Dylan," the two videogame-addled teenagers who killed 13 students at Columbine High School in 1999 and seemed to set the standard for the depressingly American pattern of school and workplace shootings. (Until Cho came along, the record holder for campus carnage was Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower in Austin and murdered 16 people and wounded 31 others with a hunting rifle.)

Somehow, somewhere, someone planted an evil seed in Cho—if not the Devil himself, then conceivably some stranger or relative. Any private harm done was deeply exacerbated by the feelings of alienation and humiliation a Korean boy can feel caught in the desperate race for academic success.

Cho was trapped in a generational warp, neither quite Korean like his parents nor American like his peers. His parents turned to the church for help with his emotional problems, but he was bullied in his Christian youth group, especially by rich kids. "Cho was a smart student who could understand the meaning of the Bible," recalled his boyhood pastor at Centreville (Va.) Korean Presbyterian Church, who asked not to be identified in an interview with NEWSWEEK to avoid further media inquiries. But the pastor doubted that Cho believed the words. In his diatribe, Cho castigates Christians—and compares himself to Jesus Christ, martyred on the cross. Cho's progression from lonely boy to mass murderer is full of omens and portents and twists—a modern tragedy that might have been avoided, if only anyone had been able to see what he saw with those dead eyes.