University ‘warned about gunman’

A PROFESSOR who taught a student whose gun rampage at Virginia Tech left 32 people dead says she warned university officials about his behaviour.

Lucinda Roy said she became concerned after Cho Seung-hui wrote disturbing pieces for a creative writing class. The 23-year-old South Korean has been described as a loner and an introvert.Virginia’s governor has vowed to review authorities’ handling of the shootings amid claims that the US university did not do enough to protect students.Police said Cho killed 30 people before committing suicide.He is also believed to have killed two students earlier in the day.Roy, a former chairwoman of Virginia Tech’s English Department, said that concerns arose about Cho’s writings in late 2005.Roy said that she was so disturbed by what she found that she decided to take him out of the classroom for one-to-one tutoring.She also spoke to university authorities “repeatedly” about the student.His writing “seemed very angry”, she said.But the threats seemed to be under the surface and were not explicit, which was the reason why the authorities could not act, she said.One of the reasons people were so concerned about Cho was because he barely spoke.”He was quite a gifted student in some ways, but he seemed to be very lonely and depressed,” she said.The university has not responded to her comments.A former classmate of Cho’s, Ian MacFarlane, has also posted on the AOL news website two plays he says that Cho wrote.In an internet blog, he described Cho’s work as “like something out of a nightmare”, with “really twisted, macabre violence”.The plays purporting to be by Cho are strewn with obscenities and one concludes with a man killing his 13-year-old stepson.BBCThe 23-year-old South Korean has been described as a loner and an introvert.Virginia’s governor has vowed to review authorities’ handling of the shootings amid claims that the US university did not do enough to protect students.Police said Cho killed 30 people before committing suicide.He is also believed to have killed two students earlier in the day.Roy, a former chairwoman of Virginia Tech’s English Department, said that concerns arose about Cho’s writings in late 2005.Roy said that she was so disturbed by what she found that she decided to take him out of the classroom for one-to-one tutoring.She also spoke to university authorities “repeatedly” about the student.His writing “seemed very angry”, she said.But the threats seemed to be under the surface and were not explicit, which was the reason why the authorities could not act, she said.One of the reasons people were so concerned about Cho was because he barely spoke.”He was quite a gifted student in some ways, but he seemed to be very lonely and depressed,” she said.The university has not responded to her comments.A former classmate of Cho’s, Ian MacFarlane, has also posted on the AOL news website two plays he says that Cho wrote.In an internet blog, he described Cho’s work as “like something out of a nightmare”, with “really twisted, macabre violence”.The plays purporting to be by Cho are strewn with obscenities and one concludes with a man killing his 13-year-old stepson.BBC