Va. Tech Shooter a 'Textbook Killer'

Blacksburg, Va., customers watch the NBC Nightly News as they dine in a local restaurant on Wednesday, April 18, 2007. Between his first and second bursts of gunfire, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui mailed a package to NBC that containing photos of him brandishing guns and video of him delivering an angry, profanity laced tirade. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta) (Amy Sancetta - AP)

"Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold," Kim Yang-soon said in an interview with AP Television News. "When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism."

Neither school officials, who have his educational records, nor police who have his medical records, have mentioned such a diagnosis this week. Autistic individuals often have difficulty communicating, but such a diagnosis would not necessarily explain his violence.

Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, said she was sure Cho probably was picked on in middle school, but so was everyone else. And it didn't seem as if English was the problem for him, she said. If he didn't speak English well, there were several other Korean students he could have reached out to for friendship, but he didn't.

In other developments Thursday:

_ Gov. Timothy Kaine appointed an independent panel to look into the tragedy and how authorities handled it. The panel will be led by former Virginia State Police superintendent Gerald Massengill and will include former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

_ University officials said that all of Cho's student victims would be awarded degrees posthumously, and officials are outlining a way to let students complete their courses, possibly by allowing their work to this point in the semester count as completed.

_ Private funeral ceremonies were held in Blacksburg for two international students killed in the massacre. Egyptian Waleed Mohammed Shaalan and Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, a civil engineering doctoral student from Indonesia, also will have funerals in their home countries.

_ With a backlash developing against the media, and some warning of copycat killers, the major TV networks cut back on showings of Cho's video rant. "It has value as breaking news," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider, "but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam."

A 2002 federal study on common characteristics of school shooters found that 71 percent of them "felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack."

The report said that "in some of these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to mount an attack at the school. In one case, most of the attacker's schoolmates described the attacker as the kid everyone teased."

Cho "would almost be a poster child for the pattern that we saw," said Marisa Randazzo, the former chief research psychologist at the U.S. Secret Service and co-author of the study, conducted jointly with the Education Department.

Among the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre were two other Westfield High graduates, Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated from the high school last year. But police said it is not clear whether Cho singled them out.