Cho’s Family Knew Something Was Wrong With Virginia Tech Killer

There was clearly something wrong with Cho Seung-Hui and his family knew it.

But even they were unable to help the boy who would grow up to become the worst mass school killer in North American history.

Relatives in South Korea now say Cho was withdrawn even as a child, and the problem was so bad, they believed he might be autistic.

Autism is a syndrome that causes people to become uncommunicative and unable to properly relate to the rest of the world. But it rarely leads to violence.

But despite taking him to doctors, it appears nothing was ever really done to address his underlying problems.

“From the beginning, he wouldn’t answer me,” his great aunt Kim Yang-soon reveals. “(He) didn’t talk. Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them.”
 
The family came to the U.S. when Cho was just eight, hoping for a better life. But it quickly became clear the youngster didn’t find one.

“When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism,” Kim adds, stating that the family never stopped worrying about the boy’s odd behaviour.

His unnamed uncle back in his native Korea also noted the child’s strange affect. “[He] didn’t talk much when he was young,” he remembers. “We were concerned about him being too quiet and encouraged him to talk more.”
 
But he specifically notes there was nothing that indicated what was to come.

Whatever was wrong with the child, it was to become a lifelong pattern. Acquaintances from high school recalled a boy who tried never to open his mouth.

When he was forced by teachers to read something in class, other kids would laugh at his voice which sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” remembers fellow student Chris Davids.

That same trait was noted by his roommates at Virginia Tech University, where Cho took 33 lives, including his own, on Monday. He had no known friends on campus.

Cho’s mother would frequently call her brother long distance around the Christmas holiday, to update the folks back home on the family’s progress. But nothing was ever mentioned about anything being wrong.

“She said the children were studying well,” the uncle remembers . “She didn’t seem worried about her children at all. She just talked about how hard she had to work to make a living, to support the children.”

Cho’s parents, who had been working at a Washington, D.C. dry cleaners, haven’t been seen since the shootings. It’s now been revealed they’re in hiding under the protection of U.S. authorities, fearful of a possible backlash against them.

But it may be Cho’s aunt who best sums up the boy she knew growing up in South Korea.

“He was very cold,” she observes.

Whatever happened to that lonely, silent child, one thing seems certain – when Cho finally found his voice, it was a scream that came filled with a lifetime of rage at the end of two very powerful guns.