Report weaves dark tale of gunman's past

WASHINGTON — Seung-hui Cho drifted in silence through four years of high school and his first year in college, all but lost in the throng.

But as a sophomore, he discovered his place in life: He would be a writer.

During the summer break, he had spent hours writing manuscripts. He changed his major to English. And he submitted a book proposal to a New York publisher, "sort of like Tom Sawyer except that it's really silly and pathetic," he explained in an e-mail to one professor.

Rather than provide a path out of his troubled world, though, his writing ambition brought disappointment, followed by a downward spiral of bizarre behavior. It culminated in a bloody massacre on the Virginia Tech campus in which Cho killed 32 students and teachers before turning the gun on himself.

The shootings April 16 prompted universities across the country to tighten their security alert systems.

In the most comprehensive report to date of the shootings, a panel appointed by Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine faulted the decision by authorities not to issue a campuswide notification after the first two students were killed in a dorm, two hours before the deadly rampage in the classrooms of Norris Hall.

The report also faulted the Virginia Tech Police Department for prematurely concluding that the initial shooting was an incident of domestic violence, spending hours tracking and interviewing "a person of interest" who was not involved, while Cho regrouped and reloaded for the later, deadlier assault.

"The failure to give notice in a prompt fashion was a clear error," Kaine said in a news conference discussing the results of the four-month study. "That could have made a difference in this particularly tragedy, but it probably wouldn't have averted the tragedy."

Kaine said that what really might have made the difference was "connecting some of the mental health dots." The report noted that school officials and others did not share information on Cho's behavior because they believed federal privacy laws banned any disclosure of a student's mental health records. Kaine said that may have been too strict an interpretation of the law.

Tracy Littlejohn, a Virginia Tech graduate from Simi Valley whose cousin Erin Peterson was killed by Cho, said Thursday that she wished more could have been done to alert students after the first shooting. "I cannot say that Erin would not have died that day, but she would have at least had the information about her safety." Littlejohn said. "She was sitting in French class. She had no idea."