Cho’s words, actions fit school shooting pattern

Bill Dedman Investigative reporter • Profile • E-mail

BLACKSBURG, Va. - By his words and actions, Seung-Hui Cho is a familiar character to researchers who have studied the previous shootings in the nation's schools.

Based on emerging accounts of his behavior before his deadly attack at Virginia Tech, Cho exhibited three characteristics that the experts say are common among school shooters:

He didn’t “just snap” but instead acquired the weapons weeks earlier.

He was considered a threat by others, even though he didn’t make any explicit threats.

Fellow students and teachers raised concerns about his behavior.

Cho caused a great deal of concern on the Virginia Tech campus before Monday's mass shooting, even being committed to a mental health facility for a day or two in 2005 after he made a second unwanted contact with female students, campus officials said Wednesday. His writings and behavior in class alarmed other students and teachers. His roommates heard him talk of suicide.

But because he didn’t threaten to harm anyone, university officials said, there was little more they could do.

Behavior matches pattern
That's been the pattern in most previous school attacks in the U.S., according to a landmark study in 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service. Researchers looked at 37 school shootings and interviewed 10 of the shooters themselves.

In more than 3 out of 4 school shootings, the attacker had made no threat against the schoolteachers or students. But most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. The attackers posed a threat even though they hadn't made a threat.

Schools can do a lot more to deal with such concerns, said one of the authors of the study.

"The notion that a concerned teacher who tries to get someone to counseling and that there are no other options if the student refuses to go — that seems much too limited," one of the report’s co-authors, psychologist Robert A. Fein, told MSNBC.com on Wednesday. He has consulted with federal agencies on targeted violence, including terrorism, school shootings and workplace violence.

"I understand that students in college are not high school kids," Fein said, "but schools should be able to do better than that. This is not to cast blame on anyone. There's no cookie-cutter solution, and there probably are lots of 'right ways,' but the notion of having a team that can gather and examine information and determine 'we may have a problem here' and then work to figure out what to do, or ask others, or keep working on it, still makes sense to me."

Virginia Tech officials described a long chain of events preceding Monday's shooting and expressed frustration that their systems weren't set up to deal with a student like Cho, who had not made a threat or committed a crime. Since his erratic behavior did not cross those thresholds, they said they could do nothing more than recommend he receive counseling.

Cho came to authorities' attention
The officials said that Cho had come to their attention several times before Monday’s shooting:

• On Nov. 27, 2005, a female student told campus police that she had received unwanted phone calls and visits from Cho, campus police said. She declined to press charges and told police that Cho was "annoying" rather than threatening. Police referred Cho to the campus disciplinary system; the university won't say what happened next, citing privacy laws. Even Cho's parents, they said, could not be told the results.
• In December 2005, a second female student told campus police that she received unwanted instant messages from Cho. She said no explicit threat was made, but she asked police to tell him to have no further contact with him. (Neither of these female students was among this week's victims, campus officials said.)
• On the same day as the second complaint, a person told campus police that they were concerned that Cho might be suicidal. Police did not identify the person, but two of Cho's roommates have said they communicated this concern to the resident advisers in the dorm and to campus police. Campus police spoke with Cho, and asked him to speak with a counselor. He was sent to New River Community Services, a counseling center off campus, and then was detained at St. Alban's, a mental health center near Radford, Va. Police said they don't know details of his treatment at New River, and on Wednesday they applied for a search warrant for his medical records. The officials didn't say how long he was treated there, but his roommates have said in interviews that he was gone for one to two nights. If his detention was involuntary, it should have shown up on background checks when he bought two guns in the 10 weeks before the shooting, officials said.
• Cho's writings also caused concerns. Teacher and poet Nikki Giovanni said other students were afraid to come to class with him, because of his sullen demeanor, and because he was taking photos of other students in class. She tried to talk with Cho, and sought help from her department chair, who tried to talk Cho into going to counseling.

Those behaviors fit the "profile" of a school shooting. That's not a profile of a certain type of student — school shooters have been of many ethnicities, family backgrounds and academic standing. But experts say there is a pattern of actions that typically precede an attack.

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