Diatribune

As a child the Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui could not speak, and this was a concern to his parents, his grandparents, and his uncle.  It wasn’t that he couldn’t speak a second language, English, that he would have had to learn when his parents emigrated to the US when the child was 9 years old, it was that he didn’t speak at all.  His disability was pronounced at an early age, impacted negatively on his socialization skills, and learning a second language would have been that much more difficult.

Gunman troubled parents because he did not speak as a child

In high school he was bullied and teased, not because of his race, but because he could not and did not speak.  By the time he got to college he was seriously troubled, and his speech impairment, with his shyness, his isolation was so extreme that he became severely anti-social and mentally ill.

A Strange Mumbly Way of Speaking

Va. Tech shooter was picked on in school
Yahoo News
April 19, 2007

Long before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy in suburban Washington because of his shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked, 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.

Shy Campus Killer Bullied at School

The only professor that was able to make contact with him in college was Professor Roy who taught him one to one when his anti-social behavior had become so extreme and threatening in one of his Creative Writing courses that attendance went from 70 down to 7.  Professor Roy asked him at one time, "Are you lonely?  Do you have any friends?"  Cho answered that he was lonely and had no friends.  Professor Roy said that Cho was the loneliest person she had ever met in her life.

The loneliest person I have ever met in my life – Prof. Lucinda Roy

In college he did not speak.  If he answered at all, it was in a monosyllabic whisper.  Of all the people who have been interviewed... his roommates, his classmates, his professors, and his relations there is not one who has mentioned any one time ever when the Virginia Tech killer spoke.

His inability to speak was so extreme that when on the first day of one of his classes students had to identify themselves, Cho could not say his name out loud and signed himself in with a question mark.  After that he became "Question Mark Guy."  He even called himself that.

The Question Mark Guy

He rarely made eye contact.  He kept his hat down so low over his face, wore sunglasses in class, and pulled his jacket up so high that his writing professor Nikki Giovanni insisted that he show his face.  "You can’t make me," said Cho.  Just those four words on record, until the video package he sent to NBC, just 2 hours after the first shooting.

In that video the Virginia Tech killer speaks, in volumes.  Only then, with a marked speech impairment that is muffled, garbled, and mumbling while telling of persecution, threatening violence, identifying with the Columbine killers, the mentally ill and suicidal killer speaks.

"You caused me to do this," says Cho Seung-Hui in the video he sent to NBC.  Who is he addressing?  I think his vendetta was against every person and every face he had ever known from the time he was a young child who could not speak.    

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