Dramatic video sheds light oncampusshooter’s motive

US TELEVISION station NBC has flighted a dramatic, at times incoherent video account from Virginia Tech student Cho Seung Hui, who massacred 32 people at the campus on Monday in the worst mass shooting in US history.

In the rambling video clips, the shooter is shown brandishing handguns. Cho also sent the TV station a 23-page written statement and 43 photos.

In the video footage Cho portrays himself as persecuted and rants about rich kids.

“Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats,” says Cho, who came to the US in 1992.

“Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds weren’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfil your hedonistic needs. You had everything,” he says.

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” a snarling Cho says, “but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

Cho was apparently bullied by fellow students at high school.

They mocked his shyness and the strange way he talked, classmates said.

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech student who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant rarely opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.

Once, in English class, the teacher asked the students to read aloud and, when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled.

After the teacher threatened that he would fail his grade as far as participation was concerned, 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’.”

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

Stephanie Roberts, 22, a fellow member of Cho’s graduating class at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone in that school picking on Cho.

“I just remember he was a shy kid who didn’t really want to talk to anybody,” she said.

“I guess a lot of people felt like maybe there was a language barrier.”

But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told her they recalled him getting picked on there.

“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” said Roberts.

“He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”

Virginia Tech student Alison Heck said one of her housemates on campus – Christina Lilick, who apparently also went to the same high school as Cho – found a mysterious question mark scrawled on the dry erase board on her door.

Cho once scrawled a question mark on the sign-in sheet on the first day of a literature class, and other students came to know him as “the question mark kid”. — Sapa-AP