Darkness Falls

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Cho's teachers, meanwhile, had been trying to take on his suspected mental disorder on their own. Poetry teacher Nikki Giovanni confronted the student she called "a bully." "There was something mean about this boy," she said of the young man who was in her class two years ago. "Troubled kids get drunk and jump off buildings. It was the meanness that bothered me."

Every day, from very early in the semester, she would ask him to remove his sunglasses and hat. "We would have this sort of ritual," she said. "He was very intimidating to my other students." There was trouble when he was caught using his cell phone to take pictures of female classmates under the desks. Eventually some stopped coming to class.

Universities are hierarchical places, tolerant of eccentricity, protective of privacy but alert to risk. Giovanni wrote a letter to department head Roy, in part because she wanted to create a record that could lead to removing Cho from her class. Giovanni said she was prepared to quit over the issue. Roy, for her part, saw the anger as well. "He seemed so sad inside," she said, and she shared her concerns with campus police and counselors. They told her that unless the threats were explicit, there was little they could do. So Roy took him on as a private student, just to keep him away from others. When he was referred to counseling, she offered to walk him there.

So did some classmates in his playwriting class. They had grown alarmed at what they heard when it was his turn to present his plays for peer review. The works were violent, obsessive and often focused on sexual abuse. One especially profane play titled Mr. Brownstone told of a student being repeatedly sodomized by a teacher. Another was about a 13-year-old who accuses his stepfather of abusing him. The protagonist's mother at one point brandishes a chainsaw. The play ends with the stepfather crushing the boy to death.

Classmate Stephanie Derry told the campus paper Collegiate Times, "We had to laugh because it couldn't ever be real or truthful. I mean, who throws chainsaws around? But we always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did." When she learned the identity of the shooter on Tuesday, she burst into tears. "I kept having to tell myself there is no way we could have known this was coming."

The classrooms were open Monday morning at 7, including the three that had been closed off on Friday after university officials received the second bomb threat in as many weeks. They had offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who knew anything and were supposed to meet that morning to discuss security measures. It would be too late before anyone came across a posting on a school online forum, which police now believe was left by Cho: "I'm going to kill people at Vtech today."

Freshman Michael Cunningham lives in Room 4052 of West Ambler Johnston, an immense dorm with nearly 900 students. He heard what he thought might be three doors slamming. "It was so windy on Monday, and many students leave their windows open at night," he said. "So we assumed that it was doors being shut by a wind gust." He went back to sleep.

Detectives and military people have a saying about their line of work: "Assumption is the mother of all f___ ups." When the 911 call came in at 7:15, campus police headed to West AJ, where they found a freshman, Emily Hilscher ("Pixie" on her MySpace page), and her next-door neighbor, residential adviser Ryan Clark, shot to death. Students told police a gunman had been going from room to room, looking for his girlfriend. Assuming they were dealing with a lovers' quarrel, police secured the murder scene and began gathering evidence. The crime was over, the investigation begun, or so they thought.

By 8:25 a.m. top university officials, including the president, the executive vice president and provost, were meeting to discuss what had happened and figure out how to proceed. An hour later, a campuswide e-mail went out telling of a shooting, urging caution and requesting that students contact the campus police "if you observe anything suspicious."

But no one was observing Cho at that point. He appears to have gone back to his room in Harper Hall, a smaller dorm just across from West AJ, reloaded his weapon and tucked two knives into his backpack. He had clearly been preparing his NBC exhibit for days, with its 27 QuickTime videos, self-portraits of Cho as normal kid, Cho as jihadi."I didn't have to do this," he said into the camera. "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," Cho says on one of the videos. "You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option ... Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off." He sent the package express mail to NBC in New York City; if he hadn't had the address wrong, it might have gotten there sooner. Then he headed back out the door and across the campus to Norris Hall, home of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics. And suddenly this was not over.

Introductory German was meeting in Room 207, a couple dozen students in their first class of the day, when Cho peered in, as though he was looking for someone. One student thought he looked like a Boy Scout. He was wearing the school color--a maroon cap--and a vest with pockets for his ammunition. When he went back into the classroom, he was quiet and purposeful. First he shot instructor Jamie Bishop, 35, in the head. Then he went methodically around the room. Derek O'Dell was hit in the arm; when Cho finally left for the next room, O'Dell and two other students moved to block the classroom door in case he returned--which he did, firing into the door several times before moving on.

Elsewhere students mistook the sounds for construction work going on nearby. Liviu Librescu, 77, the Holocaust survivor, was teaching solid mechanics on the same hall when the class heard the shots. He braced his body in front of the door, yelling to his students to head for the window. They pushed out the screens, jumped or dropped into bushes below to escape. "I must've been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last," said Alec Calhoun, who landed in a bush and ran. The two students behind him were shot, he said, and as he climbed out the window, he turned and looked at his teacher, who had stayed behind. Librescu was shot to death through the door.