Long before deadly attacks, gunman had been an enigma

School officials said Cho had posted a deadly warning on a school online forum.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- It was 5:30 Monday morning and Karan Grewal was finishing a break after a long night of cramming for his classes at Virginia Tech. As he left the bathroom at Harper Hall, his dormitory mate, Cho Seung-Hui, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, entered for his morning ritual of applying lotion, inserting his contact lenses and taking his medication.
"He was, like, normal," Grewal, a 21-year-old accounting major, said Tuesday, describing the ordinary start to what turned out to be an extraordinary day.
Grewal said he went back to sleep but, according to authorities, Cho stayed awake. In fewer than five hours, Cho was dead, having killed himself after shooting 32 others to death at two locations on the Blue Ridge Mountain campus.
"He did not seem like a guy that's capable of anything like this," Grewal said.
A day after the deadliest gun massacre in modern U.S. history, students, friends and officials were trying to understand how Cho, a 23-year-old senior who was majoring in English, came to kill. It was a hazy picture of a man whose last note was a rant against rich kids and debauchery, but who also appeared organized enough to secure weapons and stage his rampage.
According to school officials, Cho even had time to post a deadly warning on a school online forum.
"im going to kill people at vtech today," they said he wrote.
Loner from South Korea
Cho, who has been described as a loner, emigrated from South Korea to the United States in 1992 with his family.
He spoke little in class, submitted disturbing writing assignments to professors and reportedly died with the phrase "Ismail Ax" inked in red on his arm.
Cho Seung-Hui, a senior at Virginia Tech, was identified Tuesday morning as the sole shooter in the campus slayings. Wielding two handguns, Cho killed 32 students and faculty members and injured nearly two dozen others.
The rampage ended when Cho shot himself fatally in the head with a wound so violent that investigators had trouble identifying him.
Law enforcement officials worked Tuesday to understand Cho's motives and paint a clearer picture of the young English major.
He was so isolated that few in the close-knit Korean community on campus knew him. Law enforcement agents were having difficulties learning about him, and English teachers and fellow students were troubled by some of his writings in classes.
"There was some concern about him," said Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university English department.
She said the department's chairwoman of creative writing, Lucinda Roy, had Cho in a class and described him as "troubled." He was referred to campus counseling on the basis of some of his writings, she said.
"Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be," Rude said. "But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."
Strange writings
A fellow student, Stephanie Derry, told the campus newspaper that Cho's writings in a spring creative writing workshop included macabre slayings that featured bizarre weaponry.
"His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque," Derry said.
"We made jokes around the class about his work, because it was just so fictional, so surreal, we just had to laugh," Derry said. "We had to laugh because it couldn't ever be real or truthful. I mean, who throws hammers or chain saws around?"
When students questioned Cho, he just shrugged, Derry told the Collegiate Times.
"Cho was really, really quiet," Derry said. "I can't even remember one word he said the entire semester."
"We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did," Derry said. "But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling."
On campus, Cho appeared to keep to himself.
"No one knew him," said Young-Hwan Kim, president of the evangelical Korean Campus Crusade for Christ organization.
A search warrant affidavit filed in Montgomery County, Va., circuit court said police found a "bomb threat note ... directed at engineering school department buildings" near the bodies of Cho and some of his victims.
The Chicago Tribune reported that Cho left a "disturbing" note in his dorm room.
In the note, Cho railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charms," the Tribune reported.
Cho was a legal resident alien, a status that allowed him to legally buy handguns.
Cho, like many of his victims, came to Virginia Tech from Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.
What's likely
Investigators stopped short of saying Cho carried out both attacks. But state police ballistics tests showed one gun was used in both.
"It's certainly reasonable for us to assume that Cho was the shooter in both places," Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell R. Flinchum said Tuesday morning. But he said police had not entirely ruled out the possibility that two people were involved.
The person of interest was identified as Karl David Thornhill of Blacksburg. According to federal affidavits released Tuesday, Thornhill was said to be a friend of Emily Hilscher, the woman killed in the first shooting. Police wanted to talk to him because the woman's roommate, Heather Haugh, told them Thornhill and Hilscher fired guns at a shooting range as recently as two weeks ago.