Making of a Massacre

Cho was born in South Korea; his parents lived in a grim little two-room apartment in Seoul. Cho's maternal uncle, identified in the Korean press only as Kim, said he was a quiet boy, certainly compared with his older sister, Sun-Kyung. Like tens of thousands of South Koreans, Cho's family immigrated to the United States in 1992 to pursue the American Dream (the Chos have been living in a cream-colored row house in suburban Virginia worth $400,000), but, most important, to get an education for their children. Cho was 8 years old at the time.

It is hard to exaggerate the premium that many Korean immigrants place on admission to highly selective American universities. The Ivy League is preferred. "Local Korean TV [in the United States] will even broadcast who gets into which college," says Jeff Ahn, president of the League of Korean Americans in Virginia. Sun-Kyung went to Princeton and majored in economics (she turned down Harvard). Cho's father worked 12 hours a day as a presser in a dry cleaner to help pay for it, going to the parking lot to eat his lunch while sitting in his car. The elder Cho rarely spoke, except to say how proud he was to have his children in college. (Uncle Kim recalled to Korean reporters that his sister talked a lot about her daughter who went to Princeton, but not much about the son at Virginia Tech.)

Virginia Tech is a fine school, but it's not the Ivy League. (Nor, despite Cho's rants against rich kids, are its students very affluent.) Interested in writing moody and sometimes violent plays and poetry, Cho doesn't appear to have been the dutiful son. A friend of Cho's father told Ahn that he had visited the family when Cho was in high school and had been offended when the boy refused to say hello. "He's supposed to bow his head; instead he just walked down into the basement and played videogames," recounts Ahn. Cho was equally aloof at his affluent, mostly white high school. One classmate, Chris Davids, described to an Associated Press reporter how Cho was mocked in class for reciting an assignment in an oddly guttural accent. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China'."

At Virginia Tech, some of his classmates tried to include him. His suitemates took him to a frat party, and he indulged in drinking games, downing vodka and Kool-Aid and playing beer pong. He was adept, if a bit joyless, at lobbing Ping-Pong balls into cups of beer. "Down to the last shot, he made it, without any expression in his face," one of his suitemates, Andy Koch, tells NEWSWEEK. Cho set up his own groups on Facebook with names like "The Cool Kids" and "Be Cool," though he clearly felt he was not. His dorm room was as affectless as he was—no posters or photos, just bare cinder block.

Most of the time, he hardly spoke. "I would see him walking to class, and I would say 'Hey' to him, and he wouldn't even look at me," Joe Aust, 19, his randomly assigned roommate this year, tells NEWSWEEK. Cho did not appear to have any real friends. He ate alone and rode his bicycle in circles in the parking lot. "He just seemed strange," says Karan Grewal, 21, who shared the same dormitory suite. "He didn't seem dangerous in any way."

And yet there were signs. In the fall of 2005, Cho frightened his English teachers and some of his classmates. Writing about death, surprising other students by sneaking photographs of them (he aimed his cell-phone camera at women from underneath his desk, reportedly), Cho almost never spoke in class himself. When some students began avoiding class because of him, his poetry professor, Nikki Giovanni, interceded. Either, she said, he had to change the sinister content of his poems or drop the class. "You can't make me," Cho responded to her, according to an account that Giovanni gave The Washington Post.