2ndglance
疾恶如仇，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.
美国人将赵承熙也视为遇难者慰藉家人悲痛(图)
“你没能得到必要的帮助，知道这个事实的时候，感到非常悲哀。希望你家人能尽快得到安慰并恢复平静。上帝的恩宠……”（巴贝拉）“今后如果看到像你一样的孩子，我会对他伸出双手，给予他勇气和力量，把他的人生变得更好。”（大卫）
21日，颂扬遇难者的33个一半足球大小的花岗岩悼念碑按照椭圆形被安放在弗吉尼亚理工大学中央广场上。其中还包括凶手赵承熙的悼念碑。这是因为，他虽然犯下残忍的罪行，但学校和社会却没能对精神有问题的他提供适当的治疗和心理咨询，对此感到遗憾，同时也是为了安慰失去他的家人。
21日，在美国弗吉尼亚理工大学准备的临时追悼场上，吊客们举行遇难者悼念仪式。从最左边的星条旗开始向右数，第四个位置就是悼念赵承熙的位置。布莱克斯堡（弗吉尼亚州）=特派记者 崔宇皙摄影在赵承熙的悼念碑上，和其他悼念碑一样，在剪成“VT(弗吉尼亚理工大学的缩写)”模样的桔黄色彩纸上写着“2007年4月16日赵承熙”。旁边放着玫瑰、百合、康乃馨等鲜花和紫色蜡烛。在这些鲜花中放着一张便笺。上面写着：“希望你知道我并没有太生你的气，不憎恨你。你没有得到任何帮助和安慰，对此我感到非常心痛。所有的爱都包含在这里。劳拉。”
一直排到中央广场的吊客在各悼念碑前想着遇难者，不断擦拭着泪水。他们看到赵承熙悼念碑前放置的便笺后，不禁露出百感交集的表情。3年级学生雷切尔说：“他虽然很可恶，但他的家人真是可怜。”该校毕业生比尔-贝内特苦涩地说：“他也是一个人。”
弗大学生在前一天20日中午举行的遇难者悼念仪式上，敲响了33声丧钟，其中包括32名遇难者和凶手赵承熙。放飞到空中的气球也是33个。一直看到这些气球消失后，学生们互相抱在一起放声大哭。研究生克里斯-车巴克说：“他也是我们学校的学生，一共有33名学生死亡。我们应该公平地为所有人的死亡哀悼。”
学生们制作的网络报纸《planetblacksburg》(www.planetblacksburg.com)上也陆续登载了安慰赵承熙家人的文章。给赵承熙的姐姐赵善敬20日公布的道歉文留下的回帖中，一位名为凯西-克拉克的网民安慰说：“这不是你或你家人的错误。你也失去了你心爱的人。”
一位名为克里斯蒂娜的网民表示：“对为了遇难者家属而勇敢站出来的赵善敬表示感谢。赵某的家人也在我的祈祷名单中。”自称50多岁的克里斯蒂娜说：“我在赵善敬那个年龄，也就是20多岁的时候，曾因药物中毒而彷徨。我能充分理解你的家人必须经历的痛苦。”
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 （自闭症）。 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.