He was a chubby-cheeked campus creep who stalked at least three pretty co-eds – terrifying one enough that her parents called the cops on him – before he wound up unleashing Virginia Tech’s bloodbath.
“I stopped telling friends to come to my room, especially girls,” the shaken roommate of mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui, identified only as John, revealed in a chilling interview yesterday.
One night earlier this year, the twisted Cho “closed the door [of their room] and turned to me and said, ‘Hey, you want to know why I went up to that girl’s dorm room the other night?’ ” John said.
“He said he wanted to go up there and look her in the eye to see how cool she was . . . And when he looked in her eyes, he saw promiscuity.”
The roommate bared a long list of other bizarre warning signs that hinted at Cho’s troubled dark side before his rampage Monday at the Blacksburg, Va., campus. Cho killed 30 students and two teachers in the worst shooting massacre in U.S. history before turning the gun on himself.
His bizarre antics ranged from him making up an imaginary girlfriend – a supermodel he called “Jelly” – to his more disturbing, real-life encounters with the young women he apparently met online and then eventually confronted in person, only to have them recoil from him.
In the interview with CNN’s Gary Tuchman, John and another roommate, identified as Andy, talked about Cho, a 23-year-old English major from South Korea. They described how he barely talked, slept with the lights on and was constantly instant-messaging people, including one of his stalking victims.
John said the girl’s parents called cops after Cho found her at her dorm, introduced himself as “Question Mark” and began leaving messages on a dry-erase board outside her door.
“Question Mark” was the nickname other students on campus had given the increasingly isolated loner because he refused to put his name down on a roster for an English-literature class last semester – instead writing a question mark in its place.
“That really freaked the girl out,” John said.
The roomies said they thought Cho was just pathetic and more to be pitied when he lied about having a model girlfriend, who he said called him “Spanky.”
They thought he was more than a bit kooky when he played the love song “Shinedown,” by Collective Soul, over and over on his laptop.
But when he made crank calls to them, randomly snapped photos of women around campus, stalked their female friends and then threatened suicide when the cops were called, they said they knew he needed help. Andy said he told the police of Cho’s suicidal thoughts, “and they took him away to the counseling center for a night or two.”
Incredibly, some of the other male students who lived with Cho, John and Andy in the dorm suite didn’t even know his name.
By Monday morning, that had all changed.
Cho, a senior who immigrated to the United States with his family in 1992, had started the fateful day by killing a co-ed in another dorm, and then the male resident adviser who tried to rush to her aid.
He then returned to his own dorm suite, where he picked up the chains that he later used to bar doors at Norris Hall, an engineering building. It was there that he finished off his killing spree, killing 30 more and himself.
Cho left a puzzle behind in his dorm room – a suicide note that declared: “You caused me to do this.”
The chilling missive railed against “rich kids,” “deceitful charlatans” and “debauchery,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Another cop characterized the note as “anti-woman, anti-rich kid.”
Cho also left a clue on his body, as cops struggled to decipher the meaning of “Ismail Ax,” written in red ink on one of his arms.
Cho’s hateful, violent tendencies bubbled to the surface in numerous class assignments he turned in – to the point where concerned Virginia Tech professors referred him to counseling, teachers said yesterday.
One English professor was so freaked out by the shocking, murderous themes of Cho’s “plays” that she called the campus police – and anyone who’d listen – to report that he could be a homicidal maniac.
“They did nothing . . . It takes a lot to scare me. Nobody wanted to work with him,” said Lucinda Roy, who was the head of the English Department at the time.
Classmates and faculty said Cho stood out because he penned creepy prose and seemed desensitized to violence.
“We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did,” said Stephanie Derry, a senior English major who had a playwriting class with Cho.
“But when I got the call it was Cho who had some this, I started crying, bawling.”
Cho’s behavior could be traced back to high school, where classmate Jon Kennaugh remembered the future killer’s resentment over being an “outcast.”
Cho and Kennaugh both graduated from Westfield HS in Chantilly, Va., just outside Washington, in 2003.
Two of Cho’s victims – Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson – graduated from Westfield in 2006, but cops didn’t know if he targeted them.
“He [Cho] seemed sad, but I may have just thought that because people kind of made fun of him for being such an outcast . . . You know how immature high-schoolers can be,” said Kennaugh.
“He was always kind of weird and antisocial.”
Even up to the very end, Cho maintained an eerie calm.
Accounting major and dorm next-door neighbor Karan Grewal, 21, ran into Cho in the hallway and bathroom about two hours before the carnage. Cho didn’t drop any hints about the impending bloodshed.
“Nothing seemed out of the ordinary,” Grewal said. “That was kind of scary,” looking back.
The two-story townhouse in Centerville, Va., where Cho grew up and his parents still live was empty yesterday. His parents could not be reached for comment.
The heartbroken mom and dad, who own a dry-cleaning store, went into hiding as soon as they learned about their son’s shooting, according to Korean-language newspapers.
Additional reporting by Marianne Garvey in Centerville, Va., Jennifer Fermino, Dan Mangan and Daniel Friedman in New York and Post Wire Services