Seung Cho and warning signs

I try not to comment about stuff like the Virginia Tech shootings if all I can think of to say is how horrified I am, which other people can say better than me. But some of the coverage struck me today:

“We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did,” classmate Stephanie Derry said. “But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”

Lucinda Roy, the English department co-chairwoman who tutored Cho one-on-one after another professor had difficulties with him, even had a code word with an assistant to call police if she ever felt threatened by Cho.

Roy told the Times offered to go with Mr. Cho to counseling, just to talk. “But he wouldn’t say yes, and unfortunately I couldn’t force him to do it,” she said.

She told CNN she was so disturbed by his writing that she went to the police and university administrators for help.

“The threats seemed to be underneath the surface,” she said. “They were not explicit and that was the difficulty the police had.”

And then there’s this former classmate writing on AOL:

When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments. …

While I “knew” Cho, I always wished there was something I could do for him, but I couldn’t think of anything. As far as notifying authorities, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any system set up that lets people say “Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this guy!” If there were, I definitely would have tried to get the kid some help. I think that could have had a good chance of averting yesterday’s tragedy more than anything.

But actually I guess there is some sort of system to do that: ABC News reports that in 2005:

University officials said the school had obtained a “temporary detention order” from a local magistrate that allowed them to refer Cho to an off-campus medical facility. According to Virginia law, “A magistrate has the authority to issue a detention order upon a finding that a person is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment.

“The magistrate also must find that the persin is an imminent danger to himself or others,” says the guideline from Virginia’s state court system.

“We normally go through access” — appealing to the state’s legal system for help — “because they have the power to commit people if they need to be committed,” said Wendell Flinchum, chief of the Virginia Tech police department.

Flinchum said they believe Cho was taken to Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford, Va., a private facility which can take 162 inpatients.

It’s not clear what happened there.

Sigh … I wish I had all the answers.

UPDATE:

ABC had this fascinating interview with forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner, who has examined many notorious mass shooters and says Cho was shows signs of being schizophrenic:

How he related to his roommate was just too bizarre to be depression. The bizarre content of his plays — mashing a half-eaten “banana bar” in someone’s mouth, the hypersexual, nihilistic (death obsessed) obsessions in the absence of depressive guilt or tearfulness are another clue. The progressive decline of a period of years. ….. In a similar vein, Mr. Cho’s stilted communication in his homicide note (deceitful charlatans — not the language of a 23-year-old college kid) is also the manner of a schizophrenic’s communications, as is his pronounced delay in responding to questions.

Welner attaches significance about this supposed romantic rejection … one wonders if it was by Emily Hilscher, one of the two first victims, although that remains unconfirmed:

In my professional experience, rejection from a romantic target is a very common and underestimated homicidal trigger for young men, be it mass shooting, killing of friends or even intrafamilial shooting. The assailants are reluctant to speak of the emotionally loaded issue after the fact — particularly because they may have had an intense reaction to a rather unimpressive emotional connection.

And that is precisely the point. Alienated, paranoid individuals have great difficulty connecting with others because of their social awkwardness, rage and negativism, and because of the depression that many who later go on rampages also have in addition. Reminders of their failure to connect with others are very painful to them. Richard Baumhammer — who targeted minorities in a shooting spree that left five people dead in April 2000 was so starved for relationships with women, for example, that he would pay girls from escort services to simply come to his home and sit with him.

Wilner says paranoid individuals need to be engaged, rather than isolated.