Making of a Massacre

In another of Cho's plays, called "Mr. Brownstone," a teacher molests his students and robs them. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Falco described Cho's work as "very adolescent, a silly kind of playwriting." In class, Falco and the students "tried to deal with him with kid gloves," says Falco. Interestingly, Falco found Cho's written commentary on the plays of other students to be lucid and thoughtful. Falco even thought he detected in Cho a faint hope of affirmation from other students when they discussed Cho's plays. But it was just "a glimmer."

Falco knew he had a problem. He conferred with Roy, and with another writing professor, Lisa Norris, who also had the troubled Cho in class. Norris told Falco that she had alerted the associate dean of students, Mary Ann Lewis. Norris e-mailed NEWSWEEK to say that Lewis tried to be helpful, but that the administrator had told her that she could find "no mention of mental health issues or police reports" on Cho. (Lewis did not respond to requests for comment.)

Cho had apparently dropped through the cracks of the university bureaucracy. University counseling services at big schools like Virginia Tech get a lot of traffic and do their best to hold their own. Hemming and hawing, university officials struggled last week to explain how Cho's earlier run-ins with the police and mental-health authorities seemed to be missing from his student records. It appears that the police reports were not passed on to the university's counseling program. Administrators talked circumspectly about "looking into things"; Gov. Tim Kaine appointed a commission.

The students knew Cho was trouble. He was memorable, says Anna Brown, 23, who was in his playwriting class. "But not in a good way," she tells NEWSWEEK. Wearing dark clothes, hiding behind dark glasses and a baseball cap pulled low, Cho never showed any emotion. Brown was "disturbed" by the violence and "grotesque jokes" in his plays. "I found myself quite curious as to why he would write something like that because, usually, you take something from your own life and sort of do a spin on it."

Brown recalled walking out of class and joking to her friends that Cho was "the kind of guy who might go on a rampage killing," she says. "He was just off, in a very creepy way."

Buying a gun is easy in Virginia, a state with a strong gun-loving population. There's no waiting period and only a minimal background check. On Feb. 9, Cho walked across the street from the Virginia Tech campus to a pawnshop, where he picked up an Internet-purchased Walther.22, a cheap handgun often used for target practice. (Cho's brush with the mental-health system may not have made it into state-police records. Under federal gun laws, background checks disqualify anyone found to be mentally impaired. The fact that Cho was released and deemed "normal" by the psychiatrist who evaluated him may have kept him off the state police's radar.) He began buying ammo at stores like Wal-Mart, and on March 13, he went upscale. At Roanoke Firearms, he used a credit card to purchase a Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartridges for $571. The semiautomatic, lightweight Glock, a favorite of police and gangbangers alike, can fire five rounds a second. A magazine of ammo, holding up to 33 hollow-point bullets (effective at tearing up internal organs), can be swapped out for another in under two seconds.