More Information on VT

[shipperx]

More info on the shooter 

Also,  a blog entry by fellow student  in addition to articles: 

"There were also reports that Cho, a senior majoring in English from Centreville, Va., had been taking medication for depression, and had also recently set fire to a dorm room and stalked women.

Identification was delayed nearly 24 hours after the end of the rampage because Cho was carrying no ID, had no police record and had severely damaged his own face when he killed himself.

A positive match was finally made with fingerprints on immigration records.

"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said Tuesday morning.

Cho was born in South Korea on Jan. 18, 1984 and entered the United States in 1992 as a child of 8. He was a permanent resident alien, a "green card" holder entitled to most of the legal rights held by U.S. citizens.

Cho's last hours apparently began with the killings of freshman veterinary student Emily Hilscher, 19, and senior Ryan "Stack" Clark, a resident advisor, at about 7:15 a.m. in the West Ambler Johnson residence hall.

Hilscher's connection to Cho is not clear. [...] "As far as we can tell, wrong place, wrong time," said John W. McCarthy, an administrator for rural Rappahannock County, Va., where Hilscher's family lives, to the Washington Post. "She was a beautiful, smart, great kid."

What seems clear is that Clark, as the most immediate authority, tried to intervene and was killed for his trouble.[...]

Neighbor Abdul Shash said the gunman played basketball and wouldn't respond if someone greeted him.

He was "very quiet, always by himself," said Shash.

Those tendencies carried on into college, where Cho apparently made it through nearly four years without making many friends.

Classmates said that on the first day of an introduction to British literature class last year, the 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves.

When it was Cho's turn, he didn't speak.

The professor looked at the sign-in sheet and, where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark.

"Is your name, 'Question mark?'" classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking.

The young man offered little response.

Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous.

"He didn't reach out to anyone. He never talked," Poole said. "We just really knew him as the 'question mark kid.'"

A Virginia Tech professor said Cho's work in creative-writing class was so disturbing that he had been referred to the school's counseling service.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman.

But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be."

[...]  

The Web site The Smoking Gun on Tuesday posted a play Cho allegedly wrote last year. Entitled "Richard McBeef," the violent, possibly darkly comic one-act play concerns an argument between the title character and his 13-year-old stepson, who accuses him of murdering his father and of pedophilia.

The play seems sympathetic to the stepfather, who tries to defend himself in vain against his wife and stepson's accusations. It ends on an ambiguous note, with the stepfather swinging a "deadly blow" at the boy.  link

[...]
according to ABC and the Chicago Tribune.

Sources also told the Tribune about the strange inscription on one of Cho's arms — the words "ISMAIL AX" in red ink.

The reference may be to the Biblical sacrifice of Abraham, in which God commands the patriarch to sacrifice his own son. Abraham begins to comply, but God intervenes at the last moment to save the boy.

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the son is Isaac, father of the Jewish people; in Islam, it is his older half-brother, Ismail, or Ishmael in Hebrew.

Abraham uses a knife in most versions of the story, but some accounts have him wielding an ax.

A more obscure reference may be to a passage in the Koran referring to Abraham's destruction of pagan idols; in some accounts, he uses an ax to do so.