Killer Profile

...a sullen loner, and authorities said he left a rambling note raging against women and rich kids.

It's fascinating for me that this killer (worst in US history) was:

- Korean
- majoring in English
- had a bone to pick with women
- had a bone to pick with 'rich kids'

It's interesting because I've spoken to Koreans who have returned from time abroad and, particularly in the case of Asian men, they usually have pretty nasty experiences. One reason is the foreign women, who they are no doubt attracted to, are not, in most cases, attracted to them.

It is also very difficult to adapt, as a foreigner to a foreign country, and even more so (even worse so) if you can't maintain a conversation.

Korea though has, as far as I'm concerned, a schizophrenic approach to reality. They are a polite, decent and wonderful people, yet can be (exceptionally I admit) rude, emotionally irate and irrational. The sheer number of massage parlours and love hotels that exist side by side apartment buildings with families ostensibly inhabited by 'decent' Koreans is bizarre.
Just the North-South Korea schizm is evidence enough of a people and a country who are not fully integrated with reality (or how to deal directly with it).

Their obsession with plastic surgery, and appearances (cutting the face to look less eastern, aborting female children) makes their confucian moral codes somehow irrelevant.

The above are stereotypes, but the point remains that the world's worst shooting spree was perpetrated by a Korean policeman as an emotional response to an argument with a girlfriend.

I've seen people tearing each other's clothing off on a few occasions in the streets of Korea, been vehemently scolded on buses and trains for how I was sitting (or speaking), and watched a shoe store owner hurling shoes at the door after a client returned them. And so on.

It's a society where boys and young men are treated like princes, and women are expected to serve and adore. Naturally, in the wider world, this isn't always the case. Which our young killer no doubt discovered, to his chagrin, and now, ours.

My question is: was this kid playing computer games all the time? My guess is yes. Was it Counterstrike?

from msnbc.com:

Roommates said Cho Seung-Hui rarely spoke or made eye contact with them and that his bizarre behavior became even less predictable in recent weeks.
Cho started waking up as early as 5:30 a.m. instead of his usual 7 a.m., his roommate, Joseph Aust, told ABC's "Good Morning America."



"I tried to make conversation with him earlier in the year when he moved in," Aust said. "He would just give one-word answers and stay quiet. He pretty much never looked me in the eye."





News reports said that Cho, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English, may have been taking medication for depression and that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic.
Writings for his English degree were reportedly dominated by disillusioned, violent characters.
“I felt he was a very lonely, isolated kind of person the whole time,” Lucinda Roy, an English professor who taught Cho, told CNN on Tuesday. “He would always wear sunglasses even inside, and a cap.”



Cho, who immigrated to the United States 15 years ago and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., was found with the words “Ismael Ax” written in red ink on one of his arms, the Post reported law enforcement sources as saying. It was unclear what the words meant.
Cho used two handguns, which police confirmed he had purchased legally, and stopped only to reload. Police have stopped short of saying he was responsible for the shooting deaths of two other people two hours earlier at a dormitory but said tests showed the same gun was used in both incidents.