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Anorak News | Cho Seung-Hui And His Victims

Cho Seung-Hui And His Victims

by | 18th, April 2007

cho190.jpgGUNMAN Cho Seung-Hui stares out from the Mail’s front page. To his left is one of his first two victims, 18-year-old student Emily Hilscher.

Under the headline “THE DEADLY INFATUATION” readers learn that detectives “believe” Cho was obsessed with Hilscher.

The 23-year-old South Korean, dressed like a “boy scout”, killed Hilscher. He then killed Ryan Clark, a student who had “rushed to help her”.

Cho began his rampage. He killed 30 more. And this, as the Mail notes, “makes him the most deadly murderer in American history”.

Only, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even make Cho the deadliest killer in a school in American history. The most prolific killer of them all is Andrew Kehoe who murdered 45 people in the Bath School disaster, the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927.

Kehoe left a note on which he wrote: “CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.”

Cho also left a note. The Mirror takes a look at it and conjures the front-page headline: “YOU MADE ME DO THIS.”

As is the way with mass killings, the paper adds mug shots of the victims to its front page. They surround a larger image of Cho’s head.

But only 22 of the killed are shown. Where are the rest? If the Mirror is to make us remember and pay some kind of cod tribute to the dead surely each of the victims should be listed.

But the Mirror’s places impact over dignity. “Virginia killer rants at ‘rich kid’ fellow students in suicide note,” comes the teaser.

Often when the nutcase has finished killing he kills himself and leaves us guessing as to why he did it. But Cho left a message.

In his missive he wrote of “debauchery” and “charlatans”. He wrote “Ismail Ax” on the inside of an arm. The papers spend no time analysing this. The Sun says it’s “believed to be a religious reference”.

There is an anecdote about how when asked to write his name and introduce himself to the class, Cho put down a question mark. “Is you name ‘Question mark?’” asked the professor. Cho did not reply.

He’s a “warped weirdo” says the Sun. His is the “FACE OF HATE”.

There is a page dedicated to Hilscher. The Sun has trawled the web to find news of how the teenager was well liked and wanted to be a vet.

“SLAUGHTER BY WEIRDO,” says the Sun sensitively. Cho had produced “disturbing images” in his creative writing class. He was taking “high doses of anti-depressants”. He’d been accused of stalking women and setting fire to his dorm.

Every move he made is now suggestive of the brewing horror, a timeline of events and non-events leading to the madness.

But little is really known. Much less understood…



Posted: 18th, April 2007 | In: Tabloids Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink