High school classmates say gunman was bullied

Nation’s sympathy envelops college town
Most attention returned to Blacksburg, where authorities reported Thursday afternoon that eight people remained in the hospital. None of the patients was critically wounded, but doctors said some could face extensive rehabilitation.

They also said their hospitals were being overrun with flowers — so many that they asked sympathetic well-wishers to stop sending them. Flower shops around Blacksburg said they were overwhelmed with orders.

Virginia Tech officials, meanwhile, said the students who were killed Monday would be awarded posthumous degrees at commencement ceremonies May 11. Other students who may have been traumatized by the shootings could be allowed to end the semester without consequences, they said.

Exhausted university officials said they were determined to move forward to get Virginia Tech “back up on its feet and running again,” in the words of Larry Hincker, the school’s chief spokesman, who has become a familiar face to Americans riveted to television coverage of the shootings.

“We have got to move forward,” Hincker said Thursday afternoon. “We cannot let this horror define Virginia Tech.”

Many question NBC’s handling of package
Elsewhere, journalists, law enforcement officials and ordinary Americans debated NBC’s decision to broadcast Cho’s hate-filled material and to publish more of it on MSNBC.com.

Flaherty said he appreciated NBC’s cooperation with investigators, but he said he was “rather disappointed in the editorial decision to broadcast these disturbing images.”

NBC News President Steve Capus said Thursday on NBC’s TODAY program that he understood that many people would disagree with his decision. But “ever since we heard the first reports about what happened on that campus, we all wanted to know — and I’m not sure we’ll ever fully understand — why this happened, but I do think this is as close as we’ll come to having a glimpse inside the mind of a killer,” he said.

The network said in a statement that it would limit its use of the video “across NBC News, including MSNBC, to no more than 10 percent of our airtime.”

Gunman’s message hits campus
In the 1,800-word manifesto-like statement, Cho expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even — with whom, he does not say. It mentions “martyrs like Eric and Dylan” — apparently a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers who killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., eight years ago this Friday.

Virginia Tech students and their families reacted with disgust and disbelief, as well as with anger at NBC.

“I have some friends that survived in classrooms next door,” Susan Ivins, a Virginia Tech student, told NBC News. “And just knowing that they could have seen this man holding a gun to their face like that, it just breaks my heart.”

A killer speaks The extensive material sent to NBC News this week by Seung-Hui Cho includes an angry diatribe against the rich and numerous unspecified enemies. Among the statements: • You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people. • Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can? • You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything. Source: NBC News

Gabrielle Minnich, a Virginia Tech graduate who has worked at the school since 1990, said she tried to avoid seeing the video release from Cho.“I’ve seen little clips, and I’ve turned away, because I don’t think we need to focus on that,” Minnich told MSNBC.com. “I’m sorry it happened, because it’s just prolonging the whole process we have to go through.”

Behind an impromptu memorial to Cho’s 32 victims on the campus drill field, a 2- by 2-foot orange cardboard sign was affixed to a wall in front of Burruss Hall overnight reading, “VT stay strong, Media Stay Away.”

Michael and Peggy Herbstritt, the parents of Jeremy Herbstritt, who died in Monday’s shootings, were scheduled to be interviewed Thursday morning on TODAY, but they canceled their appearance after the material was aired.

An   MSNBC.com message board was inundated with thousands of posts. Some of the responses praised the network for bringing Cho’s mental illness graphically to light, but most castigated NBC for seeming to give Cho the attention he wanted.

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