2ndglance
疾惡如仇，柔情似水。重情感，意境，和哲理
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 13 minutes ago
Long before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say.
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.
Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.
"As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.
Cho shot 32 people to death and committed suicide Monday in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. The high school classmates' accounts add to the psychological portrait that is beginning to take shape, and could shed light on the video rant Cho mailed to NBC in the middle of his rampage at Virginia Tech.
In the often-incoherent video, the 23-year-old Cho portrays himself as persecuted and rants about rich kids.
"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, who came to the U.S. in 1992 and whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."
Among the victims of the massacre were two other Westfield High graduates: Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated from the high school last year. Police said it is not clear whether Cho singled them out.
Stephanie Roberts, 22, a fellow member of Cho's graduating class at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school.
"I just remember he was a shy kid who didn't really want to talk to anybody," she said. "I guess a lot of people felt like maybe there was a language barrier."
But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told her they recalled him getting picked on there.
"There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him," Roberts said Wednesday. "He didn't speak English really well and they would really make fun of him."
Virginia Tech student Alison Heck said a suitemate of hers on campus — Christina Lilick — found a mysterious question mark scrawled on the dry erase board on her door. Lilick went to the same high school as Cho, according to Lilick's Facebook page. Cho once scrawled a question mark on the sign-in sheet on the first day of a literature class, and other students came to know him as "the question mark kid."
"I don't know if she knew that it was him for sure," Heck said. "I do remember that that fall that she was being stalked and she had mentioned the question mark. And there was a question mark on her door."
Heck added: "She just let us know about it just in case there was a strange person walking around our suite."
Lilick could not immediately be located for comment, via e-mail or telephone.
Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, said she was in several classes with Cho in high school, including advanced-placement calculus and Spanish. She said he walked around with his head down, and almost never spoke. And when he did, it was "a real low mutter, like a whisper."
As part of an exam in Spanish class, students had to answer questions in Spanish on tape, and other students were so curious to know what Cho sounded like that they waited eagerly for the teacher to play his recording, she said. She said that on the tape, he did not speak confidently but did seem to know Spanish.
Wilder recalled high school teachers trying to get him to participate, but "he would only shrug his shoulders or he'd give like two-word responses, and I think it just got to the point where teachers just gave up because they realized he wasn't going to come out of the shell he was in, so they just kind of passed him over for the most part as time went on."
She 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, she said.
Wilder said Cho wasn't any friendlier in college, where "he always had that same damn blank stare, like glare, on his face. And I'd always try to make eye contact with him because I recognized the kid because I'd seen him for six years, but he'd always just look right past you like you weren't there."
In other developments, Gov. Timothy Kaine is appointing a five- to seven-member panel to investigate the shootings, the governor's office said Thursday. The panel will review Cho's mental health history and how police responded to the tragedy. The panel will submit a report in two to three months.
University officials also announced that all of Cho's student victims would be awarded degrees posthumously, and that other students terrorized by the shootings might be allowed to end the semester immediately without consequences.
On Wednesday, NBC received a package containing a rambling and often incoherent 23-page written statement from Cho, 28 video clips and 43 photos — many of them showing Cho, in a military-style vest and backward baseball cap, brandishing handguns. A Postal Service time stamp reads 9:01 a.m. — between the two attacks on campus.
The package helped explain one mystery: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second attack, at a classroom building.
"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," a snarling Cho says on video. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said Thursday that the material contained little they did not already know. Flaherty said he was disappointed that NBC decided to broadcast parts of it.
"I just hate that a lot of people not used to seeing that type of image had to see it," he said.
On NBC's "Today" show Thursday, host Meredith Vieira said the decision to air the information "was not taken lightly." Some victims' relatives canceled their plans to speak with NBC because they were upset over the airing of the images, she said.
"I saw his picture on TV, and when I did I just got chills," said Kristy Venning, a junior from Franklin County, Va. "There's really no words. It shows he put so much thought into this and I think it's sick."
There has been some speculation, especially among online forums, that Cho may have been inspired by the South Korean movie "Oldboy." One of the killer's mailed photos shows him brandishing a hammer — the signature weapon of the protagonist — and in a pose similar to one from the film.
The film won the Grand Prix prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. It is about a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. After escaping, he goes on a rampage against his captor.
Authorities on Thursday disclosed that more than a year before the massacre, Cho had been accused of sending unwanted messages to two women and was taken to a psychiatric hospital on a magistrate's orders and was pronounced a danger to himself. But he was released with orders to undergo outpatient treatment.
Also, Cho's twisted, violence-filled writings and menacing, uncommunicative demeanor had disturbed professors and students so much that he was removed from one English class and was repeatedly urged to get counseling.
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Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed, Vicki Smith, Sue Lindsey and Justin Pope in Blacksburg, Va.; Matt Barakat in Richmond, Va.; Colleen Long, Tom Hays and Jake Coyle in New York; and Lara Jakes Jordan, Sarah Karush and Sharon Theimer in Washington contributed to this report.
美國人將趙承熙也視為遇難者慰藉家人悲痛(圖)
“你沒能得到必要的幫助，知道這個事實的時候，感到非常悲哀。希望你家人能盡快得到安慰並恢複平靜。上帝的恩寵……”（巴貝拉）“今後如果看到像你一樣的孩子，我會對他伸出雙手，給予他勇氣和力量，把他的人生變得更好。”（大衛）
21日，頌揚遇難者的33個一半足球大小的花崗岩悼念碑按照橢圓形被安放在弗吉尼亞理工大學中央廣場上。其中還包括凶手趙承熙的悼念碑。這是因為，他雖然犯下殘忍的罪行，但學校和社會卻沒能對精神有問題的他提供適當的治療和心理谘詢，對此感到遺憾，同時也是為了安慰失去他的家人。
21日，在美國弗吉尼亞理工大學準備的臨時追悼場上，吊客們舉行遇難者悼念儀式。從最左邊的星條旗開始向右數，第四個位置就是悼念趙承熙的位置。布萊克斯堡（弗吉尼亞州）=特派記者 崔宇皙攝影在趙承熙的悼念碑上，和其他悼念碑一樣，在剪成“VT(弗吉尼亞理工大學的縮寫)”模樣的桔黃色彩紙上寫著“2007年4月16日趙承熙”。旁邊放著玫瑰、百合、康乃馨等鮮花和紫色蠟燭。在這些鮮花中放著一張便箋。上麵寫著：“希望你知道我並沒有太生你的氣，不憎恨你。你沒有得到任何幫助和安慰，對此我感到非常心痛。所有的愛都包含在這裏。勞拉。”
一直排到中央廣場的吊客在各悼念碑前想著遇難者，不斷擦拭著淚水。他們看到趙承熙悼念碑前放置的便箋後，不禁露出百感交集的表情。3年級學生雷切爾說：“他雖然很可惡，但他的家人真是可憐。”該校畢業生比爾-貝內特苦澀地說：“他也是一個人。”
弗大學生在前一天20日中午舉行的遇難者悼念儀式上，敲響了33聲喪鍾，其中包括32名遇難者和凶手趙承熙。放飛到空中的氣球也是33個。一直看到這些氣球消失後，學生們互相抱在一起放聲大哭。研究生克裏斯-車巴克說：“他也是我們學校的學生，一共有33名學生死亡。我們應該公平地為所有人的死亡哀悼。”
學生們製作的網絡報紙《planetblacksburg》(www.planetblacksburg.com)上也陸續登載了安慰趙承熙家人的文章。給趙承熙的姐姐趙善敬20日公布的道歉文留下的回帖中，一位名為凱西-克拉克的網民安慰說：“這不是你或你家人的錯誤。你也失去了你心愛的人。”
一位名為克裏斯蒂娜的網民表示：“對為了遇難者家屬而勇敢站出來的趙善敬表示感謝。趙某的家人也在我的祈禱名單中。”自稱50多歲的克裏斯蒂娜說：“我在趙善敬那個年齡，也就是20多歲的時候，曾因藥物中毒而彷徨。我能充分理解你的家人必須經曆的痛苦。”
http://news.wenxuecity.com/messages/200704/news-gb2312-394107.html
I have recently read about the background information about him from his childhood, his teenageryears to his college life. It sounds to me that he might really have a mild mental disorder called autism （自閉症）。 His family and the school authorities really did not try to help him in this regard. Instead, he was laughed at and isolated in schools. He was a loner in this world. What a tragic life! He did not know how to interact with ppl and did not reach out to learn. When he grew older, he had the physical need to interact with ppl. But he interacted with ppl in a wrong way (stalking). His life was doomed to be a failure even if he had not committed such a heinous crime.