Virginia Tech Killer a Bullied Autistic
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These are the two most telling articles I’ve read on Cho’s background and mental state. The first is from AP/Yahoo on how Cho fits the “textbook” shooter profile, and the second is from The Mirror, which interviews various members of Cho’s extended family in Korea. When read in combination, the biological/ psychological and social factors which made him what he was become clear.
1. He was born autistic.
2. He received no treatment.
3. His family was poor.
4. His family was culturally separated.
5. He was a visible minority immigrant.
6. He was a bullied social outcast (a result of 1-5).
Note this passage in the first article:
“This type of mental illness that this poor man had was not something that was likely precipitated by teasing or bullying,” he said. More likely, he said, is that Cho had a biological psychiatric disorder that may have worsened in recent years because of the pressures of college life and his leaving the support of his family.
Randazzo said about the only difference between Cho and the killers studied is he hadn’t bragged about the assault in advance, though that may surface later, perhaps in blogs or chat rooms.
Even without knowing about the autism, the doctor had a strong suspicion there was a biological cause at the bottom of this. Indeed, autism even explains the “only difference,” the lack of bragging, as it would render Cho largely uncommunicative.
He was born with a biological/ psychological pathology which was made worse by his economic and social circumstances. This was a kid with untreated autism and a poor immigrant family, which made him a magnet for abuse. This happened in the only Western democracy with a flourishing gun culture.
Va. Tech shooter a ‘textbook killer’
By MATT APUZZO and SHARON COHEN, Associated Press Writers Thu Apr 19, 7:58 PM ET
BLACKSBURG, Va. - In high school, Cho Seung-Hui almost never opened his mouth. When he finally did, his classmates laughed, pointed at him and said: “Go back to China.”
As such details of the Virginia Tech shooter’s life come out, and experts pore over his sick and twisted writings and his videotaped rant, it is becoming increasingly clear that Cho was almost a textbook case of a school shooter: a painfully awkward, picked-on young man who lashed out with methodical fury at a world he believed was out to get him.
“In virtually every regard, Cho is prototypical of mass killers that I’ve studied in the past 25 years,” said Northeastern University criminal justice professor James Alan Fox, co-author of 16 books on crime. “That doesn’t mean, however, that one could have predicted his rampage.”
When criminologists and psychologists look at mass murders, Cho fits the themes they see repeatedly: a friendless figure, someone who has been bullied, someone who blames others and is bent on revenge, a careful planner, a male. And someone who sent up warning signs with his strange behavior long in advance.
Among other things, the 23-year-old South Korean immigrant was sent to a psychiatric hospital and pronounced an imminent danger to himself. He was accused of stalking two women and photographing female students in class with his cell phone. And his violence-filled writings were so disturbing he was removed from one class, and professors begged him to get counseling. He rarely looked anyone in the eye and did not even talk to his own roommates.
Cho, who killed 32 people and committed suicide at the Blacksburg campus Monday, cast himself in his video diatribe as a persecuted figure like Jesus Christ. Cho, who came to the U.S. at about age 8 in 1992 and whose parents worked at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington, also ranted against rich “brats” with Mercedes, gold necklaces, cognac and trust funds.
Classmates in Virginia, where Cho grew up, said he was teased and picked on, apparently because of shyness and his strange, mumbly way of speaking.
Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
“The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,’” Davids said.
Stephanie Roberts, 22, a classmate of Cho’s at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school. But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with him told her they recalled him getting bullied there.
“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”
Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, said she was sure Cho probably was picked on in middle school, but so was everyone else. And it didn’t seem as if English was the problem for him, she said. If he didn’t speak English well, there were several other Korean students he could have reached out to for friendship, but he didn’t.
In other developments Thursday:
- Gov. Timothy Kaine appointed an independent panel to look into the tragedy and how authorities handled it. The panel will be led by former Virginia State Police superintendent Gerald Massengill and will include former
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
- University officials said that all of Cho’s student victims would be awarded degrees posthumously, and officials are outlining a way to let students complete their courses, possibly by allowing their work to this point in the semester count as completed.
- With a backlash developing against the media, and some warning of copycat killers, the major TV networks cut back on showings of Cho’s video rant. “It has value as breaking news,” said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider, “but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam.”
A 2002 federal study on common characteristics of school shooters found that 71 percent of them “felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.”
The report said that “in some of these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to mount an attack at the school. In one case, most of the attacker’s schoolmates described the attacker as the kid everyone teased.”
Cho “would almost be a poster child for the pattern that we saw,” said Marisa Randazzo, the former chief research psychologist at the U.S.
Secret Service and co-author of the study, conducted jointly with the Education Department.
Among the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre were two other Westfield High graduates, Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated from the high school last year. But police said it is not clear whether Cho singled them out.
However, another expert who has worked with mentally disturbed young criminals suggested that Cho’s actions probably had genetic causes.
“This is very different” from someone who was bullied to the breaking point - Cho was clearly psychotic and delusional, said Dr. Louis Kraus, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center.
“This type of mental illness that this poor man had was not something that was likely precipitated by teasing or bullying,” he said. More likely, he said, is that Cho had a biological psychiatric disorder that may have worsened in recent years because of the pressures of college life and his leaving the support of his family.
Randazzo said about the only difference between Cho and the killers studied is he hadn’t bragged about the assault in advance, though that may surface later, perhaps in blogs or chat rooms.
Fox, the criminologist, said Cho probably made the decision to go on a killing spree months ago based on his weapon purchase. That would explain why witnesses described him as remarkably calm when he did the shooting.
“There’s a lot of scripting that’s going on in their heads, a lot of planning. Once they’ve decided it, there’s a certain degree of comfort and satisfaction that they’ll be the last to laugh,” Fox said.
Fox said there is typically a precipitating event that sets a gunman off. It is not yet known what that was in Cho’s case.
“It may not be huge” to normal people, but to Cho “it was the final straw that broke the camel’s back,” Fox said.
SON OF A BITCH
EXCLUSIVE: Grandad’s anger at uni murderer
Graham Brough In South Korea 20/04/2007
THE grandfather of Cho Seung-Hui said yesterday: “Son of a bitch. It serves him right he died with his victims.”
Kim Hyang-Sik, 82, said he had a doom-laden dream of Cho’s parents the night of his murderous rampage - and woke to hear the news of the massacre and his grandson’s death.
He watched Cho’s sick video of himself holding a gun to his head.
His sister Kim Yang-Sun, 85, who also saw it, told the Mirror that afterwards her brother was so distraught he had “gone away for a few days to calm himself down and avoid more questions”.
She too repeatedly referred to the killer as “son of a bitch” or “a***hole” and said his mother Kim Hyang-Yim had problems with him from infancy.
Yang-Sun revealed the eight-year-old was diagnosed as autistic soon after his family emigrated to the US.
She said: “He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around and when others called his name he just answered yes or no but never showed any feelings or motions.
“We started to worry that he was autistic - that was the big concern of his mother. He was even a loner as a child.
“Soon after they got to America his mother was so worried about his inability to talk she took him to hospital and he was diagnosed as autistic.”
Yang-Sun spoke at her tiny one roomed shack inside a vinyl farm shelter in the Gohyang area of South Korea’s capital Seoul.
The family had stayed there the night before they emigrated in 1992. Yang-Sun said Cho’s mother had been reluctant to marry her older husband.
She said: “She had five brothers and sisters and she was the second eldest child. She took care of them after she graduated from high school, which meant a lot of self-sacrifice.
“Hyang-Yim was a full-time house person on one of her parents’ small farms outside Seoul. She stayed at home like that for years and was still single at home when she was 29.
“We became worried that she was spending too much time at home with her brothers and sisters and family and getting to old for a husband.
“So the family decided to force her into a blind date to find a husband. She met Cho Sung-Tae on that date. He was 10 years older at 39 and still single too. They decided to get married soon after that.
“She didn’t want to but her family insisted because we thought she was getting past the right age and it would be good for her.
“Her husband was very serious and quiet and careful with money. He was not very sociable and not very friendly to his mother-in-law and father-in-law.
“After they were married he went away twice to Saudi Arabia in the 80s to try to make some money in the construction boom. He came back with about 2,000 [pounds sterling], which was enough to buy a small house in Seoul. He also ran a second-hand bookstore. His mother was living in the States on a long term visit to stay with his sister. She asked him to bring his family to live there.
“His sold the house to pay for the emigration costs and rented instead but there were lots of delays and eventually the whole process to get the permissions and organise things took eight years.
“By that time the money from the house was nearly gone. They were barely making ends meet so they had nothing to lose and had this idea of the American dream where there was a lot of money to be made.”
She went on: “The reaction of my brother was that Seung-Hui was a troublemaker and it served him right that he died because he caused his mother a lot of problems. He was more worried about his daughter.
“He spoke to a few reporters to express sympathy to victims’ families on behalf of our family but now he has gone away. He is 82 and lives quietly on a small farm and all this is too much for him.”
Other relatives admitted Cho’s parents had always been aware of his problems but had neither the time nor money for specialist help.
His uncle Chan Kim, 56, said: “He wasn’t like a normal kid. We were worried about him not talking.
“Both his parents knew he had mental problems but they were poor and they couldn’t send him to a special hospital in the United States.
“His mother and sister were asking his friends to help instead.
“His parents worked and did not have time to look after his condition and didn’t give him special treatment.
“They had no time or money to look after his special problem even though they knew he was autistic.”
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