At Va. Tech, Near Silence For a Student's Anguished Cry

"I know one thing," William Kim tells me as we sit in the tiny back office at the convenience store he owns in the District's Palisades neighborhood. "I never had a chance to save my son. If the school isn't going to do anything, at least let me try. If they had just called me, everybody would drop everything, close the store and go down there, 150 miles an hour. When you talk to your friends like this, this is a cry: 'Help me.' Any psychologist knows that. Danny waited five weeks after the e-mail. That's what's killing me. Nobody gave me the chance."

Dean Brown says that among the many recommendations that have come out of last spring's tragedy, several would lower the barriers to contacting parents when a student appears to be in trouble. But those ideas remain just proposals, he said.

"We really need to have written protocols as a foundation to stand on because you can get into all kinds of legal and privacy issues," says Brown. If the police check "had indicated any cause for concern, we would have contacted the family."

Some schools aren't waiting for legal clearance. At Cornell University, the number of suicides has dropped considerably in the six years since administrators reinterpreted privacy laws and started notifying parents about their children's troubles even without students' permission. Cornell also asks professors to report students who don't attend class regularly or seem troubled.

There is a steady stream of customers at the Kims' Mac Market -- Daniel's parents are there from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week -- but there are also now many hours when they are alone with their memories and questions. What should the university have done? What could they have done?

As William sits in his office combing through Daniel's IM chats, his wife, Elizabeth, can be seen and heard on the video screen that hangs over Kim's desk. She cries out, "Oh, Daniel, Daniel," as her sobs echo over the speaker that monitors transactions at the front counter.

After Seung Hui Cho -- another Korean American student from Northern Virginia -- killed 32 people and himself, Danny's parents asked their son to come home. During the visit, Daniel seemed frightened but otherwise himself. But one day, he came home from getting a haircut and told his father, "I look just like him, the shooter."

"Oh, no, Dan, you don't look like him at all," his father replied.

"And he said, 'Yes, when they see me, they'll see him. In their eyes, I look like him.' "

When Daniel returned to school, he secluded himself for two weeks -- in the same dorm in which Cho killed his first two victims. When he did venture out to take a final exam, he put on sunglasses and a hat.

On a rare trip outside his dorm, according to his friends, Daniel was surprised in an elevator by a student who pelted him with punches and anti-Korean slurs.

The Kims knew none of this until after Daniel died. Only as William has mined his son's electronic records has he found chats in which his son told a friend that "I have depression or whatever." And this: "I'm half-black, half-Asian." And this: "I'm thinking about changing my name to Lainhart" because "Kim is just like hi guys I'm a gook."