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Gunman Sent Video During Lull In Slaughter
Anti-violence activist Dentis Shaw of Charlotte with students. In a video, gunman Cho Seung Hui said, "You forced me into a corner."
(By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)
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Both pieces of news came as the school was still trying to regain its balance after the calamity.
But seeing Cho in his burst of anger on television brought many back to the horrors of Monday.
"It was very scary because it's the closest we're ever going to get to seeing what [the people at Norris Hall] saw," said Kristin Fleming-Dahl, a 19-year-old sophomore. "For some of them, that were their last moments. Seeing the pictures made it more real. It was like a slap in the face."
Fleming-Dahl said NBC was too quick to release the pictures. "It probably would have been better to wait," she said.
Michael A. Mason, who heads the FBI's criminal investigations division, said Cho's mailing "feeds into exactly what he wanted to accomplish by this heinous act."
The package includes one nightmarish photograph of a menacing, black-gloved Cho posing in a black baseball cap holding two black pistols at arm's length. He is wearing a black T-shirt and what appears to be a tan safari vest, resembling an apparition out of a violent video game.
In the excerpted pictures and video, Cho has a military-style haircut. Parts of the video seem to have been shot inside a car. Some look as though they might have been shot in a dorm room with white-painted cinderblock walls.
NBC said the package apparently was delayed by the flawed Zip code. It was noticed by a postal worker in New York who spotted the Blacksburg return address and what Cho wrote as his name in the sender's box: "A Ishmael," similar to the well-publicized "Ismael Ax." NBC News President Steve Capus said the network re ceived the package in Tuesday's mail delivery. It was not opened until yesterday and did not include any images of the massacre, Capus said in a written statement.
Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking to the camera, Capus said.
The production of the videos indicated that Cho had worked on the package for some time, because he not only "took the time to record the videos, but he also broke them down into snippets" that were embedded paragraph by paragraph into the main document on a CD-ROM, Capus said.
Before the video was released, officials in Blacksburg spoke of their previous encounter with Cho. In December 2005, he was declared mentally ill and was temporarily but involuntarily sent to a Christiansburg mental-health center, according court records.
The night at the mental-health facility came a few weeks after police had been contacted by a female student upset over e-mails Cho had sent her, said Flinchum, the Tech police chief.
