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BLACKSBURG, Va. (Sun Media) — It was so easy for a madman to buy a gun.
So he armed himself with two.
As American as Apple Pie is how one leftist Italian newspaper has described the final result of that deal.
The man who sold Cho Seung-Hui one of those weapons, which the young student would use to execute 32 students and staff here on Monday, yesterday recalled the $571 sale of a Glock handgun as rather “unremarkable.”
A nice, clean college kid, is how Roanoke Firearms owner John Markell recalled Cho, who came in 37 days ago to make his buy. But the destruction and the pain Cho, a 23-year-old student, caused here at Virginia Tech — the death tally includes the murder of a Canadian educator — has become anything but typical. And, as is usually the case in these sad dramas, it’s opened up the debate about gun control in a country that will never come to an agreement on such a thing.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine reacted harshly last night to gun lobbyists who have suggested if the students were all armed they may have had a fighting chance. He said at a time when bodies are still being identified, no one should be making the killings their own political “hobby horse.”
But it’s still the cowardice and troubled past of the killer that dominates conversations here, rather than the weapons he used to deliver his wrath. Considered a troubled loner and sullen spectre on this campus, a disturbing flesh and bones profile of Cho has begun to take shape.
He once referred to himself as “anonymous.” Now his world — every detail and scrap of paper collected in his dorm by police yesterday— are the focus of the most intense mass shooting investigation in American history.
And while he may have set a new benchmark in gun violence here, his motive, it seems from mounting evidence, was as old as any book — the mix of madness and desire.
Just as his character flaws were being coloured in yesterday, so too were stories that he may have succeeded in his rampage, but still failed to break the composure and spirit of many of his victims.
Liviu Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer, apparently barricaded the doorway to his Virginia Tech classroom to give students the chance to escape.
He died, but many of his students lived.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Librescu’s son Joe said yesterday from his home outside Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
Another hero may have been popular student, Ryan “Stack” Clark. On this campus, he was seen as a leader and someone who made a difference in university life. He apparently did the same in death.
The story circulating among his peers is that Stack died while shielding a female student.
They died together.
Soon after the killings, even as the campus was on lock-down, students and his family began to communicate using popular Internet social networking sites. On Facebook.com, Stack had at around 1,000 names under his “friends” list yesterday. The sites became town squares, to talk about his valour.
“Everyone knew Stack,” said 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Christine Eickhoff.
“He was everyone’s friend.”
Against these unarmed heroes, there stood Cho — walking and firing.
It’s now believed Cho began his violent last day by shooting his former girlfriend in a jealous rage early Monday morning. Less than three hours later, dozens more dead would fall to his anger, and another 28 were sent to hospital, having survived gunshot wounds and hard escapes from second and third floor windows.
It’s suspected Cho first killed 18-year-old Emily Jane Hilscher in West Ambler Johnston Hall.
Students here say he was obsessed, and hurt at some perceived slight by her..
“They had a big quarrel and he shot her ... then the RA (resident assistant Clark, 22) came, and he shot the RA,” student Chen Chia-hao told Taiwanese television.
Cho just continued from there. Working without words and with sickening precision, he used the 9-mm Glock and a .22-calibre handgun to kill anyone he could find. He then turned the gun on himself, just as police were making their way up the stairs. There is a suggestion he was simply running low on ammo.
His erratic behaviour didn’t suddenly appear in a vacuum. He and his alarming ways were known to school officials here.
One source said he started a fire in his dorm some time ago and a roommate told the press he was difficult to get along with. And his often violent writings became red flags, and caused school officials to try to steer him toward therapy.
He is described in stories as a “Korean student,” but, in fact, he had been in the U.S. with his family since he was a little boy.
His world and words infused self-written plays, included weapons beyond guns — a favourite was chain saw attacks. English teaching staff here say his writings were increasingly troubling.
While Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said last night no suicide note had been found, there are reports his essays included rants, such as “You caused me to do this,” and tirades against wealthy kids.
But, in the absence of official word from investigators here, it is often difficult to measure what is fact and what is fantasy about the killer.
Police last night stepped forward to say there was no truth to the report that Cho’s parents had committed suicide after finding out his hand ended 33 lives, including his own.
The victims include former Nova Scotia resident Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a foreign language professor originally from the Montreal area who taught at Virginia Tech with her husband, a horticulture professor.
Cho himself died in a classroom, among a group of innocent young men and women he had just executed.
Most victims were found on the second floor of Norris Hall, in what investigators describe as a “frightening and incomprehensible scene.” They died in four classrooms and in a stairwell.
What police found when they finally were able to break through the chains which Cho had used to fortress the exits was so chaotic that forensic experts are still piecing it together this morning.
As well as not so simply tending to the mortal remains of a black day.
“The process will take place over time,” explained the state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Marcella Fierro — a short, motherly figure in a white lab coat and gentle tone.
“(Each) family can be assured we have taken care of their child.”
There is no such thing as haste in her work, she continued.
A day before, it was far different.
Things were fast. And fury and a cowardly madman walked quickly from class to class, firing at frightened people and even doors barricaded by students.
“I heard the shots,” said teacher Scott Hendricks, who was in Norris Hall when Cho began his grisly tour.
“I didn’t hear the screaming.”
But he could see students, many who had jumped from windows, crippled and crawling across the lawn to get clear of the building. He hunkered down in his office, hearing the shots and waiting.
Finally, police broke in and pulled him out.
Bodies and personal belongings were strewn throughout the crime scene, making identification, and even following the path Cho took, difficult.
But the harsh sketch beginning to take shape is in that inside that large stone building on Monday, in ways which will never be fully known, students and staff reached out to one another.
Just as a troubled young madman — and unremarkable customer at a local gun shop — became forever reviled for his wrath.