'You forced me into a corner,' campus killer said

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- After he killed his first two victims and before he massacred 30 more, the Virginia Tech gunman responsible for the worst shooting spree in US history mailed menacing photos and disturbing video footage of himself -- accompanied by an angry diatribe about his grievances -- to NBC News in New York, the network and law enforcement authorities disclosed yesterday. NBC broadcast some of the material last night.

"This didn't have to happen," Seung-Hui Cho mutters darkly into the camera, reading from what authorities said was a dense 1,800-word me-against-the-world manifesto that railed against his fellow students, Christianity, and hedonism. "You forced me into a corner and gave me no option," he said.

It appeared Cho compiled the material well before Monday's events. At times he is difficult to understand, and many of his statements make little sense.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," Cho says at one point. "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."

Police and NBC News said the multi media package was postmarked 9:01 a.m. Monday morning at the Blackburg post office, an hour and forty-five minutes after Cho killed two students in a dormitory and a half-hour before he gunned down 30 others in classrooms and in the stairwell of an academic building across campus. The network, which received the overnight express package Tuesday and opened it yesterday at NBC's headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, copied the material, then handed it over to the FBI, a spokesman said.

W. Steven Flaherty, Virginia State Police superintendent, said the stunning development was "a very new, critical component of this investigation."

"We're in the process right now of attempting to analyze and evaluate its worth," he told reporters yesterday.

Flaherty gave no further details and said federal authorities were reviewing the package, which could provide insight into Cho's motivations.

Steve Capus, NBC News president, said the compact disc contained in the materials included a "rambling manifesto-like statement embedded with a series of photographs," The material is "hard to follow . . . disturbing, very disturbing, very angry, profanity-laced," he said.

The development appeared to shed light on where Cho went and what he did for the two hours between the slayings of two students inside a campus dormitory and the massacre inside Norris Hall, an academic building on the other side of the sprawling campus.

On the Blacksburg campus, news of the package and NBC's decision to broadcast the video spread quickly. Students, already shocked by the events on Monday, were reeling from the images of Cho dressed in the vest witnesses said bulged with extra ammunition.

"It kind of made me sick, seeing him the way those kids in Norris Hall would have seen him as they were bleeding to death," said Dana Peters, who is studying for her master's degree in education. "It really hurt my heart."

Journalism specialists said NBC News acted responsibly in airing its exclusive report last night of Cho ranting in a video confession and posing in photographs with guns and knives.

Before the existence of Cho's manifesto became known, investigators had been sifting through his computer files and other personal effects. They had also been scrambling to determine his whereabouts between the first and second sets of shootings, a two-hour gap that could be explained in part by his trip to the post office.

"Retracing his steps prior to the shooting at Norris Hall is so crucial," said Corrine Geller , public information officer for the Virginia State Police. "That will aid in determining if there is a link between the Norris Hall shooting and the residence hall. And knowing where he was is paramount . . . in finding a motive."

Earlier in the day, investigators reported that in November and December 2005, more than a year before Monday's massacre, Cho was accused of harassing two female students with repeated phone calls, notes, and computer messages, but the complaints were dropped when the alleged victims declined to press charges, authorities said yesterday.

Virginia Tech's police chief, Wendell Flinchum, said police referred Cho to the university's disciplinary system after the first harassment complaint, but Cho was not expelled. Ed Spencer, assistant vice president of student affairs, would not comment on any action taken against Cho, citing protection of students' medical privacy even after death.

After the second complaint, Flinchum said, Cho was taken to a mental health facility not connected to the university because an acquaintance reported that he might be suicidal, Flinchum said. The acquaintance was not identified.

Those disclosures added to a rapidly growing list of warning signs that appeared well before the 23-year-old student went on his deadly rampage . Among other things, Cho's twisted, violence-filled writings and sullen, vacant-eyed demeanor had disturbed professors and students so much that he was removed from one English class and was repeatedly urged to get counseling.

The day of the shootings, Cho was last seen by one of his roommates, Karan Grewal , who had stayed up all night to complete an assignment, before dawn on the morning of the shooting s . But where Cho went afterward, up until he took his own life in Norris Hall, had been the subject of much speculation yesterday.

The package to NBC included at least 43 photographs. Cho is smiling and appears to be a normal college student in two of them; in the rest he is stern-faced. In many of them he is wielding his guns; in one he held a gun up to his head. In others he holds up a knife. A photograph shows hollow-point bullets on a table.

In his report last night, NBC News anchor Brian Williams said the network was very aware it was airing "the words of a murderer . . . We tried to edit carefully. Some of it was so profane."

In one of the videotaped segments, Cho angrily alludes to slights he has suffered, declaring that "you loved inducing cancer in my head and terror in my heart, ripping my soul all this time" and vowing that he is prepared to die "like Jesus Christ." But he never mentions who has wronged him or why, and he seems to make several oblique references to the horror he was about to unleash.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul, and torched my conscience," he said. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

The manifesto also mentions "martyrs like Eric and Dylan," in what appears to be a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, responsible for the deadly shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.

Appearing later with MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Williams said he and others at NBC recognized that watching Cho's screeds "was a sick business" but "felt compelled as journalists" to air them.

Bob Zelnick, a former ABC News correspondent and professor of journalism at Boston University, said NBC's decision was appropriate given the worldwide attention to the shootings.

Zelnick said his only fear was that the publicity could inspire copycats.

"We don't want to do anything that could be interpreted as a reward for some other insane person."