Local Survives

Morgan Hill
– James and Vi Patrick spent Monday morning in agony, not
knowing if their son, David, was alive or dead.
Morgan Hill – James and Vi Patrick spent Monday morning in agony, not knowing if their son, David, was alive or dead.

As parents, they faced the unthinkable: a loose gunman on their son’s college campus, killing people at random. 

“It was total anxiety,” said James Patrick, a Morgan Hill resident who learned of the Virginia Tech shooting rampage Monday morning on a cable news channel. 

For roughly an hour, James Patrick called his son’s cell phone, failing to connect through overwhelmed circuits. 

Finally, about 10am west coast time, he connected with 18-year-old David, a freshman at the university. He graduated from Live Oak High School in 2006.

“He told me all hell’s broken loose,” James Patrick said. “There’d been a shooting, and he had been out on campus that morning.”

As news reports painted a more gruesome picture of the shooting rampage, the freshman worried about one of his friends who had not returned to the dorm. The next morning, he learned his friend Matthew LaPorte, a sophomore from Pennsylvania, had been shot and killed.

James said his son and a group of his friends are staying at a relative’s home in New Jersey until some of the shock wears off. 

Requests by South Valley Newspapers for an interview with David were declined. The father has even denied an interview request from CBS news to protect his son and help him overcome the trauma of losing his friend to Monday’s massacre.

Authorities at Virginia Tech have confirmed 33 people, including 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman, were shot and killed in what is the worst shooting rampage in U.S. history. The shootings occurred in two attacks on the Blacksburg, Va. campus. The first occurred about 7:15am when two people were shot to death in a campus dorm. About two-and-a-half hours later, 31 others were killed, including the gunman who police said shot himself, at a classroom building across campus.

James Patrick said he and his son are angry at the way campus police responded. After the first attack, he said, the campus should have been locked down. Additionally, administrators should have recognized “red flags” about the shooter’s mental state. The gunman, who committed suicide as police moved in, was a student at the university. For more than a year, campus authorities were aware of Cho’s troubled mental state.

“The president of the campus (Charles Steger) should resign,” James Patrick said. “We don’t understand why precautions weren’t taken after the first shooting. And the shooter had red flags going back to 1995.”

But law enforcement officials have defended their response, saying their reaction was based on information they had at the time. In addition, Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine appointed an independent panel to look into the tragedy and how authorities handled it. The panel will be led by former Virginia State Police superintendent Gerald Massengill and will include former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

Meanwhile, details of the Virginia Tech shooter’s life are emerging. As experts pore over his sick and twisted writings and his videotaped rant, it is becoming increasingly clear that Cho was almost a textbook case of a school shooter: a painfully awkward, picked-on young man who lashed out with methodical fury at a world he believed was out to get him.

“In virtually every regard, Cho is prototypical of mass killers that I’ve studied in the past 25 years,” said Northeastern University criminal justice professor James Alan Fox, co-author of 16 books on crime. “That doesn’t mean, however, that one could have predicted his rampage.”

Among other things, the 23-year-old South Korean immigrant was sent to a psychiatric hospital and pronounced an imminent danger to himself. He was accused of stalking two women and photographing female students in class with his cell phone. And his violence-filled writings were so disturbing he was removed from one class, and professors begged him to get counseling. He rarely looked anyone in the eye and did not even talk to his own roommates.

Cho, who killed 32 people and committed suicide at the Blacksburg campus Monday, cast himself in his video diatribe as a persecuted figure like Jesus Christ. Cho, who came to the U.S. at about age 8 in 1992 and whose parents worked at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington, also ranted against rich “brats” with Mercedes, gold necklaces, cognac and trust funds.

Classmates in Virginia, where Cho grew up, said he was teased and picked on, apparently because of shyness and his strange, mumbly way of speaking.

Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,”‘ Davids said.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, a classmate of Cho’s at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school. But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with him told her they recalled him getting bullied there.

“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”

Regan Wilder, 21, who attended Virginia Tech, high school and middle school with Cho, 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.

Gavilan College spokeswoman Jan Bernstein Chargin said the Gilroy community college, with satellite campuses in Morgan Hill and Hollister, would review its safety polices in light of the shooting.

“Needless to say, we’re shocked as much as anyone else about what happened Monday,” Bernstein Chargin said. “Many on campus have been discussing how to provide support for those who need it. I know our counselors have spoken to students who are upset by the tragedy. And, of course, people have had lots of questions about our own safety plans.”

Today, a committee of staff members, administrators, faculty and students will begin reviewing Gavilan’s emergency preparedness plan. Additionally, the campus is organizing a vigil for Monday so students can reflect on the tragedy.

Pat Harris, a spokeswoman for San Jose State University, said the school held an emergency drill Wednesday morning after gathering members of its building emergency team at an auditorium to discuss emergency procedures. Harris said the drill was not in response to the Virginia Tech tragedy, but was rather planned in advance to promote safety. She said the drill was conducted at a selected number of buildings and was not campus-wide.

San Jose State President Don Kassing, in a prepared statement to the campus community posted on the school’s Web site, said while the university can never fully prepare for such random acts of violence, administrators are “proactive” in researching and implementing ways to deal with any kind of emergency.

“Our hearts, thoughts and our prayers go out to the Virginia Tech community. We are one family in higher education … ” Kassing said, He assured students, teachers and family members that the school is ready to respond to any type of violence with well trained police officers and agreements for response with the San Joe Police Department and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. 

In other developments Thursday:

n University officials said that all of Cho’s student victims would be awarded degrees posthumously, and officials are outlining a way to let students complete their courses, possibly by allowing their work to this point in the semester count as completed.

n Private funeral ceremonies were held in Blacksburg for two international students killed in the massacre. Egyptian Waleed Mohammed Shaalan and Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, a civil engineering doctoral student from Indonesia, also will have funerals in their home countries.

n With a backlash developing against the media, and some warning of copycat killers, the major TV networks cut back on showings of Cho’s video rant. “It has value as breaking news,” said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider, “but then becomes practically pornographic as it is just repeated ad nauseam.”

A 2002 federal study on common characteristics of school shooters found that 71 percent of them “felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.”

The report said that “in some of these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to mount an attack at the school. In one case, most of the attacker’s schoolmates described the attacker as the kid everyone teased.”

Cho “would almost be a poster child for the pattern that we saw,” said Marisa Randazzo, the former chief research psychologist at the U.S. Secret Service and co-author of the study, conducted jointly with the Education Department.

Among the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre were two other Westfield High graduates, Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated from the high school last year. But police said it is not clear whether Cho singled them out.

Fox said there is typically a precipitating event that sets a gunman off. It is not yet known what that was in Cho’s case.

“It may not be huge” to normal people, but to Cho “it was the final straw that broke the camel’s back,” Fox said.

Tony Burchyns is a staff writer for South Valley Newspapers. Reach him at (408) 779-4106, ext. 201.

The Associated Press contributed to

this story.