Making of a Massacre

From the hospital, Colin Goddard reached his mother by cell phone. He told her he had been shot. "Come," he said. Anne Goddard, the newly installed CEO of the Christian Children's Fund, flew from Richmond to Blacksburg, Virginia Tech's home, in an executive jet borrowed from a board member. In gusting, 40-mile-an-hour winds, she recalled, "it was the scariest ride of my life." Colin's sister, Emma, tried to calm her mother by getting her to sing "99 Bottles of Beer." Anne found her son badly wounded but alive and even alert from adrenaline. By Thursday, Goddard had gone for a brief walk, a steel rod in his leg. "I never thought I'd be shot three times and still be here. I guess if I can live through something like that, then I can do a whole lot more than I thought I could."

Anna Brown, the playwriting classmate who had found Cho to be ominously "off," was working at her job at the Inn at Virginia Tech when she heard that Cho had been identified as the gunman. "I just started bawling, I started crying. I had this gut feeling that it was him." Andy Koch, Cho's suitemate from 2005-06, was not entirely surprised. After trying to include Cho in parties, Koch had tired of Cho's weird and standoffish behavior and, along with John Eide, begun to snoop in his belongings (they had found nothing more threatening than a pocketknife). "We always said if someone were to shoot the school up, it would be Seung," said Koch, using Cho's given name.

Watching the TV replay the clip of Cho spewing his hateful rant at the camera, Cho's boyhood pastor was in a state of near disbelief. "This is not Seung," he told himself. For one thing, he had never seen Cho complete sentences. "When I asked him to pray, he waited for a minute to start speaking, and prayers were always short, very short," he recalled. He had worried about Cho's getting bullied as a boy. But he had never been rebellious. "I felt him a little autistic and advised his mother to take him to hospital. But she did not agree with me. I now repent for not urging her strongly." (Medical experts say there is no link between autism and violence.)

"We feel hopeless, helpless and lost," said Cho's sister, Sun-Kyung, in a statement last week. "This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel I don't know this person." There had been a time, family friends remembered, when Cho had been just an 11-year-old boy, good at math and basketball, quiet, but still in the range of normal—a boy who still had a future.

Shot in the arm, Derek O'Dell was well enough to walk, though not run, in a Relay for Life at Virginia Tech last Friday. He said he would be back in class on Monday. "Once you're a Hokie, you're always a Hokie," he said, using the school's nickname. But he can't watch the tapes of Cho shown on TV. The memories of the gunman's hollow eyes still haunt.

This story was written by Evan Thomas with reporting from Arian Campo-Flores, Pat Wingert, Daren Briscoe, Catharine Skipp, Lynn Waddell and Jinkeol Park (The Korea Daily) in Blacksburg; and Eve Conant, Holly Bailey and Mark Hosenball in Washington, D.C.

© 2007