Saugus native had reached out to troubled Cho

Saugus native Ross Alameddine knew the gunman who killed him at Virginia Tech, often sitting next to him last fall in an English class about the genre of horror, classmates said yesterday.

Justin Keyser said Alameddine, a 20-year-old sophomore, so dominated the class with his wise-cracking, sweet-natured personality that his classmates are mourning his death in part by remembering him for his attempts to reach out to their strange, solitary classmate, Seung-Hui Cho.

In an e-mail, another student in the class told Keyser she recalled Alameddine trying to engage Cho in friendly conversation. "She told me Ross would try and talk to him and he would be unresponsive," said Keyser, a 21-year-old senior from Virginia and like Cho an English major.

Keyser said his friend seemed concerned that news reports about Cho's violent writings would cast the English Department in a negative light and wanted to get the word out that classmates, especially Alameddine, tried to help him. The friend could not be reached for comment yesterday.

"She wanted people to know people were reaching out and being friendly," Keyser said.

There is no evidence that Cho, a 23-year-old senior, targeted Alameddine, who was gunned down as he sat in French class. But their shared class, first reported yesterday by The New York Times, is the first time that one of the 32 victims of Monday's massacre has been linked to the gunman.

A university spokesman yesterday declined to comment on the fact that Alameddine and Cho shared a class, saying that any possible ties between the killer and his victims remain under investigation.

Lauren Moscater, a 21-year-old senior also in the horror class, said Cho behaved strangely, writing his name down as "question mark" on the attendance sheet and refusing to introduce himself to other students when the professor asked everyone to say hello the first day.

Moscater said she sat in a different part of the classroom from Cho and cannot be sure that Alameddine spoke with him, though she said she would not be surprised.

"If he had an opinion, he would express it," she said of Alameddine. "He definitely is someone who stuck out in class . . . who went to college and got the most out of it."

Cho, on the other hand, sat near the back of the room wearing sunglasses and a hat, maintaining a stony silence, Moscater said in a telephone interview from her home in Long Island, N.Y.

Keyser said that Alameddine would often interrupt the horror films the class watched by making jokes. But he said the teacher didn't mind because everybody liked Alameddine, whom Keyser called "slightly nerdy and highly articulate."

"When I say nerdy I mean that in endearing terms," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Blacksburg, Va. "That was such a tight knit class -- I think a lot of it had to do with him being there. . . . He would talk to everybody."

He was also a movie geek who enjoyed bonding with classmates over the campy horror films they watched during the course.

"One of the first movies we watched was 'Friday the 13th,' the original," Keyser said. "We would talk about how the final scene in that is so great, and I knew from that we'd be friends."

Brent Stevens, who taught the class on horror, which featured films like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Patricia Cornwell's book on Jack the Ripper, said in a phone message that he was unaware of any relationship between Alameddine and Cho.

Another English professor of Alameddine's, Kelly Pender, raved about him yesterday.

"Ross was the kind of student who you needed to be in class because he made class work," she said. "The couple of times he wasn't there I walked in disappointed and a little distressed. He was the kind of student you depended on because he answered questions and knew what you were talking about. He was constantly smiling and would nod in agreement with what you said."

Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com