EPICANTHUS

FALLS CHURCH, VA—Virginia Tech’s student newspaper Collegiate Times has published previously unreleased documents related to the April 16, 2007 murders of 32 university students and faculty by Seung-hui Cho, 23,  including e-mails the Korean American senior wrote professors about his inability to speak in class.

“I don’t know. I’m not all that good at talking. I don’t know,” Cho e-mailed English professor Bob Hicok, Feb. 9, 2006, about his silence in class.

Hundreds of documents, including a campus police report about a complaint filed in December 2005 by a VT coed that Cho, then 21, was harassing her, were published Dec. 19 in the Web edition of Collegiate Times in an article by Editor-in-Chief David Grant.

According to the police report, the young woman said Cho scrawled Shakespearean verse on a marker board attached to her dorm room door on two occasions. The documents show that at least one other female student complained about unwanted attention from Cho.

In response the the harassment complaints, a  judge ordered Cho to be treated at VT’s Cook Counseling Center after he was deemed suicidal.

• Documents Shed Light on Cho’s Past, Collegiate Times
• E-mails Reveal Cho’s Troubles at Virginia Tech, Washington Post
• Documents Concerning Seung-hui Cho, Collegiate Times
• Campus Police Report, Collegiate Times
• Virginia Tech Shootings Archives, Washington Post

According to the documents:

• Faculty members expressed concern about Cho’s inability to communicate in the classroom and wondered if he understood English or was autistic.
• VT English professors Lucinda Roy and Lisa Norris made concerted efforts to penetrate Cho’s wall of silence in meetings, e-mails and by giving him special assignments to substitute for classroom participation.
• Cho e-mailed Prof. Roy a copy of his unfinished novel “The Adventure of Spanky.”
• E-mails reveal Cho was critical of poetry instructor Nikki Giovanni’s teaching style. Giovanni later asked that Cho be removed from her classes.
• Profs. Roy and Norris gave Cho information on how to get counseling. Norris offered to speak for him at the center.
• Cho reported to VT’s Cook Counseling Center, but he was never seen by medical professionals there and the center lost many of his records.
• VT officials never notified Cho’s parents in nearby Centreville of their son’s difficulties in the classroom and in other aspects of student life.

Editor Grant said the paper deleted documents with family-specific information and focused on documents pertaining to Cho and VT’s Policy Group of top adminstrators during and after the shootings.

Some in the university community have criticized Grant’s decision to release the documents without authorization. The families of the shooting victims were given access to 13,700 pages of  materials on Dec. 18. The documents were scheduled to be released to the public on Feb. 1, 2009.

A question still unanswered is how Seung-hui Cho slipped through the educational and mental health systems from the age of eight without getting help.

H/T Huffington Post