Even to his roommates, assailant was scarcely known

BLACKSBURG, Va. — He revealed little of his troubled mind in conversation. His roommates said he often just stared into space.

Seung-Hui Cho saved his brutal thoughts for his writing.

Cho, 23, identified by Virginia Tech officials yesterday as the person who killed 32 people in the worst mass shooting in modern American history before turning the gun on himself, was little known to most of his fellow students, even to his roommates.

But an English professor and his fellow students in an English class say he wrote at least two dark, violent plays that were so disturbing that the professor recommended that he receive counseling.

Cho, who was born in South Korea and moved to the United States at the age of 8, was a senior majoring in English at the school.

The Chicago Tribune reported that he left a long and ‘‘disturbing’’ note in his Virginia Tech dorm room that veered from present to past tense and explained his actions, saying at one point, ‘‘You caused me to do this,’’ according to ABC News, quoting unnamed law enforcement officials. It was not clear who he meant.

One former student, Ian McFarlane, who said he had a class with Cho, wrote in a blog that two of Cho’s plays were ‘‘something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of.’’

One play, titled ‘‘Richard McBeef,’’ describes a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather, Dick, of pedophilia and wants to kill him.

‘‘I hate him,’’ the boy says in the play. ‘‘Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die.’’ The boy tries to suffocate his stepfather with a banana cereal bar, but, in the end, the stepfather kills the boy.

‘‘We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did,’’ said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. ‘‘But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.’’

Lucinda Roy, who taught Cho in a poetry workshop in the fall of 2005, told The New York Times that in October of that year he submitted a piece of writing that was so disturbing that she contacted the campus police, counseling services, student affairs, and officials in her department. She described the writing as a ‘‘veiled threat rather than something explicit.’’

University officials said he could be excused from the class unless she wanted to tutor him individually, which she agreed to do three times from October to December 2005. During those sessions, she said in an interview with the Times, he always wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low.

‘‘He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,’’ she told the Times.

Roy said she had been so nervous about taking him on as an individual student that she worked out a code with her assistant: If she mentioned the name of a dead professor, her assistant would know it was time to call security.

It was unclear yesterday if Cho had ever received treatment or counseling.

Cho apparently kept such a low profile on campus and interacted so little with fellow students — his suitemates said they did not know him well — that university officials could not say much about him, either.

‘‘He was a loner, and we’re having difficulty finding information about him,’’ said Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations.

Cho automatically qualified for legal status in the United States when he arrived in Detroit with his parents, who entered the country legally from South Korea in 1992. Roughly a decade later, he fulfilled the requirement to renew his green card. Authorities took fingerprints and ran criminal checks. In October 2003, his green card was renewed; criminal checks found nothing amiss in his record, according to US immigration officials.

His parents, who also have a daughter, a graduate of Princeton, run a dry-cleaning business in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., officials said.

In the mid-1990s, they purchased a three-bedroom, off-white town house in Centreville, a fairly affluent suburb about 25 miles west of Washington. About five or six police cars, most of them unmarked, arrived at their home Monday evening, neighbors said.

The parents were in seclusion yesterday. For many hours, South Korean embassy officials were unable to locate them to offer assistance.

Dozens of reporters converged on the neighborhood, a side street in the Sully Station II development.

Marshall Main, a retired stockbroker who lives across the street from the Cho family, said Cho’s parents were polite and kept to themselves.

He said he only saw their son occasionally over the years, walking the short distance from the town house to his car, and didn’t even know his name. Doris Main, Marshall’s wife and a retired teacher, said when Cho’s name was announced as the shooter in the Virginia Tech killings, she didn’t know he was their neighbor until reporters started showing up.

At Virginia Tech, Cho lived in Harper Hall, a quiet, Gothic stone dormitory populated mostly by upperclassmen. Dorm residents spend most of their time sequestered in their suites rather than in common areas, so it is not unusual for neighbors to be strangers. But even those in Cho’s own suite knew little about him.

Karan Grewal, who lived in the same suite as Cho, said he had initially believed that Cho was a foreign exchange student who spoke little English. Cho, he said, was so resolutely silent that only seeing him write in English on his computer tipped him off that his suitemate was fluent.

‘‘When I said ‘hi’ to him he didn’t act disgusted or angry or anything. He just had no expression,’’ Grewal said.

Grewal said he never saw Cho with another person, not in the suite, not in the dining hall — where he spotted Cho only occasionally — nor in the gym. ‘‘I never even saw him on the cellphone,’’ Grewal said.

And yet Grewal did not describe anything ominous about Cho’s behavior. He said he noticed only one recent change — Cho started going to the gym in February.

Grewal last saw his suitemate at 5 a.m. Monday, roughly two hours before the shootings of a woman and a resident adviser in the West Ambler Johnston dorm.

More than two hours later, authorities said, the gunman killed 30 people in Norris Hall before turning the gun on himself. Authorities said that between the shootings Cho had apparently returned to his dorm room.

The Chicago Tribune, citing unidentified sources, reported on its website that Cho had recently shown troubling signs, including setting a fire in a dorm room and stalking women. Police also believe Cho at some point had been taking medication for depression, the Tribune reported.

Classmates said that on the first day of an Introduction to British Literature class last year, the 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak.

The professor looked at the sign-in sheet and, where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. ‘‘Is your name ‘Question mark?’ ’’ classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.

In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous.

‘‘He didn’t reach out to anyone. He never talked,’’ Poole said. ‘‘We just really knew him as the question-mark kid.’’

In Centreville, just a mile from his childhood home, friends and family members of the Samaha family gathered to mourn the death of Reema Samaha, a freshman who was killed in the Norris Hall slaughter. Samaha’s friends said they had no information that would have linked Cho and Samaha, who both graduated from Westfield High School, along with a second victim, Erin Peterson.

Authorities did not know if Cho knew the two young women and targeted them.

On this day, they weren’t thinking about that anyway. ‘‘She’s an extremely sweet, caring person,’’ said Danielle Ragole, speaking of Samaha in the present tense before catching herself. ‘‘There was a presence about her that nobody is going to forget.’’

Added another family friend, Meredith Sanders, ‘‘She didn’t deserve this. None of them did.’’

Wire reports were used in this story. Globe staff reporter Yvonne Abraham and staff researcher Jeremiah L. Manion also contributed to this story. Bombardieri reported from Blacksburg, Va., Donnelly reported from Centreville, Va. Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com