Campus buzz: 'I bet it was Cho'

IT WAS JUST another early morning in Harper Hall when the sullen Cho Seung-Hui walked past his suite mate about 5 a.m. - two hours before the 23-year-old loner would unleash the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history on the bucolic Virginia Tech campus on Monday.

Karan Grewal, 21, had lived in a three-bedroom suite with Cho and two others since August. Grewal said he had just left the common bathroom when the English major entered.

"It was nothing out of the ordinary," Grewal said. As usual, no words were exchanged.

Grewal didn't see the long vitriolic note in Cho's room, ranting about "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans," which police later found, according to an affidavit.

Thirty-six days earlier, Cho had started to act on the violent fantasies that had so disturbed his playwriting classmates last fall that they feared he could become a campus murderer.

On March 13, a calm Cho showed up at a cream-colored brick building called Roanoke Firearms, in Roanoke, Va., in the shadow of the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains.

Showing a salesman three forms of identification, Cho bought a 9 mm Glock 19 pistol, with two 15-round magazines, and 50 rounds of ammunition. He put the $517 purchase on his credit card.

Store owner John Markell, 58, told reporters that Cho was "about as clean-cut a kid you ever want to see," and that he "didn't act fidgety."

About a week ago, law-enforcement sources told ABC News, Cho bought his second gun, a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol, but didn't say where. Authorities found the receipt for one of the guns in his backpack.

On Monday, Cho, dressed in a short-sleeve tan shirt, a black vest and a maroon Virginia Tech hat, set off on his calculated slaughter of innocents, armed with the two guns whose serial numbers had been filed off.

At 7:15 a.m., he fatally shot two victims inside West Ambler Johnston dormitory. As police cordoned off the 895-student dorm looking for the killer, Cho was crossing the campus of 26,000-plus students.

At 9:50 a.m., Cho reached Norris Hall, an engineering building, where police later found the front doors chained shut. He poked his head inside a German class and fired a fatal bullet into the professor's head and wounded several students.

In an unspeakable rampage, the gunman loaded and reloaded his weapons as he fired repeatedly in three more classrooms and a stairwell, setting off a panic, prompting students to jump from windows on the second and third floors.

In all, 32 students and faculty members were killed and at least 15 injured. Then, the crazed gunman turned a weapon on himself, shooting his face off, and making identification difficult for hours.

Even before the name of the Virginia Tech killer was revealed, students from a playwriting class he attended last year sent messages to each other: "I bet it was Cho."

"Dude, that's exactly what I was thinking," came the reply.

Cho's violent, disjointed, twisted plays were so disturbing that students were reluctant to critique them, as they did with each other.

The 23-year-old senior English major appeared to be obsessed with murder and pedophilia.

Former classmate Ian McFarlane wrote in a blog for AOL, for which he now works, that the plays were "like something out of a nightmare," with "really twisted macabre violence that used weapons I would have never even thought of."

These graphic descriptions of violence sent shivers up the backs of students and worried his playwriting teacher, Lucinda Roy, in fall 2005.

The former chair of the English Department alerted university administrators and police, and took the unusual step of teaching Cho on a one-on-one basis in order to keep him out of the classroom.

Cho was sent for counseling, and some media reports said that he may have been taking an antidepressant.

Police asked Roy not to discuss details of Cho's writings because of the ongoing investigation. According to CNN, she said he did not write about guns or killing people.

Not so. McFarlane posted two scripts by Cho on AOL.com that show otherwise. In "Mr. Blackstone," Cho's characters talk about killing a teacher who is stalking them. And in "Richard McBeef," a mouthy, angry 13-year-old, obsessed with violence and pedophilia, taunts his stepfather and is then killed by him.

Cho was 8 when he and his parents and sister left South Korea for the United States in 1992. They moved to Fairfax County, Va., which has a large Korean population, many Korean businesses, at least two Korean newspapers and the Korean Embassy.

In 1997, his parents, Cho Sung T. and Cho Hyang I., who operated a dry-cleaning business, bought a $145,000 three-story townhouse with beige vinyl shingles in the middle-class Sully Station II, a section of mostly young working people, in Centreville, Va.

Cho graduated in 2003 from Westfield High School in nearby Clifton, where two of his victims had also gone.

Yesterday, South Korea's Foreign Ministry hoped that the deadly rampage by a South Korean native would not "stir up racial prejudice or confrontation."

"We are in shock beyond description," said Cho Byung-se, a ministry official handling North American affairs. "We convey deep condolences to victims, families and the American people."

About 10 p.m. Monday, six police cars pulled up to the Cho home, and officers went to the front and back of the house.

For the next 90 minutes, they took photos inside and outside the house, interviewed Cho's parents and left with several boxes, one with a computer, according to Marshall Main, 82, a retired stockbroker from Media, Pa., who now lives across the street.

Police took the family to an undisclosed location, according to a news report.

Main said the family kept to themselves, much like most immigrants. But Main and his wife would give a neighborly wave to Cho's mother.

"I never even knew their name," he said. "I never saw the son more than three times."

In the four-story, gray stone Harper Hall yesterday, dorm students walked by Cho's suite and shivered, realizing how close they lived to a killer.

Last night two suite mates told CNN that Cho had stalked three female students.

"He never showed interest in talking to any of us," said Grewal, an accounting major. "I tried to talk to him in August and he just shied away."

Grewal said he believed Cho was a foreign-language student with little English fluency. When he saw Cho tap away at his computer laptop, he figured he knew the language.

Cho told his roommate Joe Aust that he was a business major, but Cho was in the creative-writing track as an English major, university officials said yesterday.

"I was surprised to find out he was an English major," Grewal said.

Grewal and Aust didn't even notice their oft-silent roommate was missing yesterday during the unfolding of events.

But when ATF and FBI agents and the Virginia State Police visited the students' suite Monday night, they learned of Cho's fate. The law-enforcement officers separated the roommates and interviewed them individually.

Investigators walked out with brown bags of Cho's possessions by midnight.

"I was in shock. I was really shocked. I could never imagine that it could be him," Grewal said. "I didn't think he was angry." *

The Associated Press and staff writers Simone Weichselbaum and Diana Huynh contributed to this report