"It really was a very unremarkable sale," owner John Markell said. "He was about as clean-cut a kid as you'd ever want to see."
On campus, Cho had raised some alarms. His professor for a 2005 seminar, the renowned poet Nikki Giovanni, found his work disturbingly dark. "He was writing really creepy things," Giovanni said. Worse, Cho was intimidating the other students in the class by snapping pictures of them with his cellphone camera. Finally, Giovanni decided to ask Cho to complete the course work outside the seminar, in a one-on-one tutorial with the department head. "I couldn't allow him to destroy my class," she said.
At the end of the semester, Giovanni gave him an A -- not for talent or effort, but because she feared angering him.
"I think he liked the idea that he was a scary guy," Giovanni said.
In a more recent writing workshop, Cho maintained his intimidating presence. Though students were supposed to critique one another, student Stephanie Derry said she couldn't remember Cho ever saying a word.
"He would just sit and watch us," Derry said. "It was his lack of behavior that really set him apart."
His five roommates, too, found him hard to read. He worked out in the gym. He downloaded music. Other than that, they could identify few of his habits, except that he sometimes just sat in his room, staring vacantly ahead. His room was a blank: no posters, no photos -- nothing but a laptop and books.
Joseph Aust, a sophomore, shared a bedroom in the suite with Cho but didn't know his major. He couldn't even pronounce his roommate's name.
'Blood all over'
The shootings inside Norris Hall unfolded in fragments of sounds.
The clank of an empty ammunition clip falling to the floor. A scream. A siren. The scrape of a desk being pushed to barricade a classroom door.
And the shots, an unrelenting staccato. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
It started about 9:40 a.m., about 15 minutes after campus administrators sent a brief e-mail to all students and staff titled: "Shooting on campus." The e-mail made note of "a shooting incident" in the AJ dorm and urged everyone "to be cautious." But it raised no specific alarm.
The students in Herr Bishop's German class, in Room 207, didn't feel particularly concerned when a young man poked his head into their classroom. He took a look and left.
Moments later, he was back.
