Police swarm Virginia Tech building

Virginia Tech students still on edge after the deadliest shooting in US history got another scare this morning as police in commando gear with weapons drawn swarmed the building which houses the president’s office.

The threat of suspicious activity turned out to be unfounded, said Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said, and the building was reopened.

But students were rattled, with the shock of the mass shooting of 32 students and faculty on Monday still sinking in.

“They were just screaming, ’Get off the sidewalks,”’ said Terryn Wingler-Petty, a third year student from Wisconsin.

“They seemed very confused about what was going on. They were just trying to get people organised.”

One officer was seen escorting a crying young woman out, telling her, “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

Roommates and professors began opening up today about the gunman who carried out the massacre in two university buildings before shooting himself on Monday.

Roommates said Cho Seung-Hui rarely spoke or made eye contact with them and that his bizarre behaviour became even less predictable in recent weeks.

Cho started waking up as early as 5.30am instead of his usual 7am, his roommate, Joseph Aust, told ABC’s Good Morning America.

“I tried to make conversation with him earlier in the year when he moved in,” Aust said.

“He would just give one-word answers and stay quiet. He pretty much never looked me in the eye.”

Aust was among many students and professors who described the killer in the worst shooting massacre in modern US history as a sullen loner, and authorities said he left a rambling note raging against women and rich kids.

News reports said that Cho, a 23-year-old English major in his fourth-year of college, may have been taking medication for depression and that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic.

Professors and classmates were alarmed by his class writings – pages filled with twisted, violence-drenched writing.

“It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating,” poet Nikki Giovanni, one of his professors, told CNN today.

“At first I thought, OK, he’s trying to see what the parameters are. Kids curse and talk about a lot of different things. He stayed in that spot. I said, ’You can’t do that.’ He said, ’Yes, I can.’ I said, ’No, not in my class.”’

Giovanni said her students were so unnerved by Cho’s behaviour that she had security check on her room and eventually had him taken out of her class.

Some students had stopped coming to class, saying Cho was taking photos of them with his mobile phone, she said.

In screenplays Cho wrote for a class last autumn, characters throw hammers and attack with chainsaws, said a student who attended Virginia Tech.

In another, Cho concocted a tale of students who fantasise about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.

“When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare,” former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site.

“The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of.”

He said he and other students “were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university’s English department, said Cho’s writing was so disturbing that he had been referred to the university’s counselling service.

Despite the many warning signs that came to light in the bloody aftermath, police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set Cho off.

“He was a loner, and we’re having difficulty finding information about him,” school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

“We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did,” said another classmate, Stephanie Derry.

“But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling.”

With classes cancelled for the rest of the week, many students left town, lugging pillows, sleeping bags and backpacks down the pavements.

Last night, thousands of Virginia Tech students, faculty and area residents poured into the centre of campus to grieve together.

Volunteers passed out thousands of candles in paper cups, donated from around the country.

Then, as the flames flickered, speakers urged them to find solace in one another.

As silence spread across the grassy bowl of the drill field, a pair of trumpets began to play taps. A few in the crowd began to sing Amazing Grace.

Afterward, students, some weeping, others holding each other for support, gathered around makeshift memorials, filling banners and plywood boards with messages belying their pain.

“I think this is something that will take a while. It still hasn’t hit a lot of people yet,” said Amber McGee, a freshman from Wytheville, Virginia.

Cho – who arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, DC, where his parents worked at a dry cleaners - left a note that was found after the bloodbath.

A law enforcement official who read Cho’s note described it yesterday as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion.

“You caused me to do this,” the official quoted the note as saying.

Cho indicated in his letter that the end was near and that there was a deed to be done, the official said. He also expressed disappointment in his own religion, and made several references to Christianity, the official said.

The official said the letter was either found in Cho’s dorm room or in his backpack. The backpack was found in the hallway of the classroom building where the shootings happened, and contained several rounds of ammunition, the official said.

Monday’s rampage consisted of two attacks, more than two hours apart – first at a dormitory, where two people were killed, then inside a classroom building, where 31 people, including Cho, died.

Two handguns – a 9 mm and a .22-calibre – were found in the classroom building.

According to court papers, police found a “bomb threat” note – directed at engineering school buildings – near the victims in the classroom building.

In the past three weeks, Virginia Tech was hit with two other bomb threats. Investigators have not connected those earlier threats to Cho.

Cho graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, in 2003. His family lived in an off-white, two-story townhouse in Centreville, Virginia.

At least one of those killed in the rampage, Reema Samaha, graduated from Westfield High in 2006. But there was no immediate word from authorities on whether Cho knew the young woman and singled her out.

“He was very quiet, always by himself,” neighbour Abdul Shash said. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him.

Some classmates said that on the first day of a British literature class last year, the 30 or so students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak.

On the sign-in sheet where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. “Is your name, ’Question mark?”’ classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.

Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous. “He didn’t reach out to anyone. He never talked,” Poole said.

“We just really knew him as the question mark kid,” Poole said.

Investigators stopped short of saying Cho carried out both attacks. But State Police ballistics tests showed one gun was used in both.