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This story was written by Evan Thomas with reporting from Arian Campo-Flores, Pat Wingert, Daren Briscoe, Catharine Skipp, Lynn Waddell and Jinkeol Park (The Korea Daily) in Blacksburg; and Eve Conant, Holly Bailey and Mark Hosenball in Washington, D.C.
It takes a while to adjust to getting shot at, certainly if you are a 20-year-old sophomore biology major sitting in German class. At first, Derek O'Dell thought the slight young man dressed in dark clothes and holding a gun was playing some kind of bad joke. Then he saw the shell casings popping out of the pistol as the shooter opened fire. "I saw his eyes, too," O'Dell recalled to NEWSWEEK. "That's probably the scariest thing. There was nothing there, just emptiness almost. Like you can look in people's eyes and you can see life, their stories. But his--just emptiness."
Cho Seung-Hui had a life and a story, but he seemed determined not to share it with anyone, except in dark dreams and then in a final spasm of killing. At Virginia Tech, and possibly at home long before he went away to college, Cho lived in his own bleak little world. He rebuffed the efforts of teachers and roommates to reach out to him and scared away the rest. He imagined a supermodel girlfriend named Jelly, and as her fantasy lover called himself Spanky. Other times he called himself "Question Mark." He slept with his lights on and moaned in his sleep. And yet he was weirdly expressive, scrawling on the wall of his dorm room the yearning lyrics of a song called "Shine." ("Give me a word/Give me a sign/Show me where to look ... Tell me what will I find/Oh, heaven, let your light shine down.")
In between murdering two students a little after 7 a.m. and 30 more shortly after 9:30, Cho went to the post office to mail a package to NBC News in New York (delivered a day late because he had the wrong zip code). The package included a rancid manifesto in which Cho casts himself as a kind of avenging angel against the "Christian Criminals" who have raped and sodomized, humiliated and crucified him and others he describes as the "Weak and Defenseless." He seems to blame...