Va. Tech Anguishes Over Missed Signals

Mourners visit the makeshift memorial in front of Burruss Hall on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Saturday, April 21, 2007. The memorial has grown daily since a gunman killed 32 students and faculty in a rampage last Monday. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) (Robert F. Bukaty - AP)

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- The student slouched into his chair, his face wrapped in sunglasses, the brim of his baseball cap pulled down so low his eyes were almost lost. The Virginia Tech professor who took a seat across from him did so because there didn't really seem to be any other option.

But in three, hour-long talks that began that October day, Lucinda Roy tentatively edged away from the lesson plan for her class of one, moving beyond poetry and drawing the darkly troubled student, Seung-Hui Cho, into a tortured and all-too-brief conversation about the human need for friendship and the pain of being trapped inside oneself.

Looking back, it may have been the closest anyone ever came to reaching the brooding loner before he metamorphosed into the gunman responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

But soon after their meetings in 2005, Roy _ who alerted university officials with her fears about the student and tried to get him into counseling _ lost touch with Cho. The semester ended. She went on leave. They exchanged e-mails once or twice. Then nothing.

It is only now that she asks herself: What if ...?

Roy has wrestled with that question endlessly in the past few days. And it is a variation of the one that now haunts this quarrystone campus and mountain town, an aching doubt that grows with each new revelation of missed signals and miscalculations, twists of fate and legal loopholes, and what appear increasingly like a series of lost opportunities to avert tragedy.

"That's a question I'll probably be asking myself the rest of my life," Roy says. "What else could I have done? Could I have done more? I think probably all of us could have done more."

In fact, it is not at all certain what might have stopped Cho from carrying out the rampage that left 32 people dead before he killed himself.

What has become clear is that at numerous points over the past year and a half, critical incidents took place that at least gave people around Cho _ as well as administrators, police and mental health providers _ the briefest windows into his state of mind, and perhaps chances to alter his path to destruction.

We wouldn't be human if we didn't second-guess ourselves. And there's probably no time when that is more true than after a tragedy unleashed by a fellow human being.

"I don't think at the time you could have said he's definitely going to shoot someone. But we had talked about he was likely to do that if there was someone that was going to do it," says Andy Koch a junior from Richmond, Va., who was Cho's suitemate last year.

"The first thing I thought of Monday was Seung ... and if that's the first thing you think about, there were definitely some things that we should have done," he says. But "I don't know what we could have done."