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Teacher had warned about killer
18/04/2007 14:34 - (SA)
Blacksburg, Virginia - The US university stricken by a mass murder faced tough questions on Wednesday about how a South Korean student was able to press on with the massacre.
Police sifted through seized documents that had belonged to 23-year-old Virginia Tech university student Cho Seung-Hui, associate vice-president for university relations Larry Hincker said.
One of Cho's former teachers, Lucinda Roy, told CNN she had warned long before the killings of concern about Cho.
"There were several of us in English who became concerned when we had him in class ... I contacted some people to try to get some help for him," Lucinda Roy, one of Cho's professors, said.
Roy said she privately tutored him for a time, and added that throughout her teaching career she had never seen a student as troubled as Cho.
Virginia state governor Timothy Kaine ordered an independent review of how the university handled the massacre, other US media reported. He said it would look into action taken on Monday and whether Virginia Tech officials had previously been warned that Cho was troubled.
Cho, who came to the United States from South Korea in 1992 when he was eight years old, reportedly left behind a rambling note venting his rage and complaining about "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.
Morbid and grotesque
Fellow students in a theatre scriptwriting class remembered the killer as a quiet classmate who wrote gory dramas in a juvenile tone.
"The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of," wrote former classmate Ian MacFarlane who posted two of Cho's plays on aol.com.
"His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque," student Stephanie Derry told the college newspaper, the Collegiate Times.
"He would just sit and watch us, but wouldn't say anything. It was his lack of behaviour that really set him apart. He basically just kept to himself, very isolated," Derry said.
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