Vt Tech Shooter Info

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Link - Gunman in massacre contacted NBC News - Massacre at Virginia Tech - MSNBC.com

MSNBC

Sometime after he killed two people in a Virginia university dormitory but before he slaughtered 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui mailed NBC News a large package, including photographs and videos, lamenting that “I didn’t have to do this,” the network said Wednesday.
Cho, 23, a senior English major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people in two attacks before taking his own life.
NBC News President Steve Capus said the network received the package in Wednesday morning’s mail delivery and immediately turned the materials over to FBI agents in New York.
The package included an 1,800-word manifesto-like statement diatribe in which he expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even.
The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” Capus said in an interview late Wednesday afternoon.
The material does not include any images of the shootings Monday, but it does contain “vague references,” including “things like ‘this didn’t have to happen,’ ” Capus said.
“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says on one of the videos. “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.”
Capus said gloved NBC security personnel handled the package very carefully as soon as it arrived. The network immediately called the FBI and turned it over.
The package bore a U.S. Postal Service stamp recording that it had been received at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. ET Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho shot two people in the West Ambler Johnston residence hall on the Virginia Tech campus and shortly before Cho entered Norris Hall, where he killed 30 more people.
“We probably would have received the mail earlier had it not been that he had the wrong address and ZIP code,” Capus said.
[B]Shooter speaks on camera
[/B]Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera, Capus said. He does not name anyone specifically, but he mentions “sin” and “spilling” his blood and talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy.
The production of the videos is uneven, with Cho’s voice so soft that at times it is hard to understand him. But they indicate 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, Capus said.
The package also includes 29 photographs. He looks like a normal, smiling college student in only the first two. In the rest, he presents a stern face; in 11, he aims handguns at the camera that are “consistent with what we’ve heard about the guns in this incident,” Capus said.
Other photographs show Cho holding a knife, and some show hollow-point bullets lined up on a table.
“This may be a very new, critical component of this investigation,” said Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police, the lead agency investigating the shootings. “We’re in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth.”
[B]Detention order issued[/B]
As early as 2005, police and school administrators were wrestling with what to do with Cho, who was accused of stalking two female students and was sent to a mental health facility after police obtained a temporary detention order.
The two women complained to campus police that Cho was contacting them with “annoying” telephone calls and e-mail messages in November and December 2005, campus Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.
Cho was referred to the university’s disciplinary system, but Flinchum said the woman declined to press charges, and the case apparently never reached a hearing.
However, after the second incident, the department received a call from an acquaintance of Cho’s, who was concerned that he might be suicidal, Flinchum said. Police obtained a temporary detention order from a local magistrate, and in December of that year, Cho was voluntarily but briefly admitted to Carilion St. Albans Behavioral Health Center in Radford, NBC News’ Jim Popkin reported.
To issue a detention order under Virginia law, a magistrate must find both that the subject is “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment” and that the subject is “an imminent danger to himself or others, or is so seriously mentally ill as to be substantially unable to care for himself.”
According to a doctor’s report accompanying the order, which was obtained by NBC News, Cho was “depressed,” but “his insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor, a clinical psychologist, noted that Cho “denies suicidal ideations.”
Cho was released, said Dr. Harvey Barker, director of the health center.
“If a person is able, at that moment, to ah persuade a psychiatrist [and] the hospital treating team that they are OK to be released — I imagine sometimes that does happen,” Barker told NBC News.
Under the law, the magistrate could have issued a stronger detention order mandating inpatient treatment, but there was no indication Wednesday that such an order was ever entered. A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans told NBC News that he could not discuss Cho’s case because of patient confidentiality and privacy laws, but he said the hospital was cooperating with the investigation.
Otherwise, Flinchum said, there were no further police incidents involving Cho until the deadly shootings Monday, first in a young woman’s dormitory room and then at a classroom building across campus. Neither of the alleged stalking victims was among the victims Monday.

In addition to the 33 people confirmed dead, including the gunman, nine people remained in hospitals in stable condition, hospital authorities said.