<p>There are killers who are mentally normal. If you ever go to Africa you should go to Sierra Leone, it is beautiful. Behind that beauty lies a civil war that ended 4 years ago. Many of the soldiers were children as young as 8 years old. Many of these kids did horrible things. These kids were perfectly fine.</p>
<p>Read up on the terms blood diamonds and conflict diamonds and you will get my drift.</p>
<p>One of our local boys resided in the dorm where the first shootings were. He told his mother that Cho apparently was looking for the girl he shot and that Ryan Clark (the RA) was trying to get other kids out of the dorm. Clark (hope I have name right) essentially put himself between shooter and where the other kids were exiting to try and keep Cho contained.</p>
<p>Another hero who didn’t hesitate to think of others before himself.</p>
<p>From an interview with Cho’s great maternal aunt </p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_headline=son-of-a-*****%26method=full%26objectid=18931479%26siteid=89520-name_page.html[/url]”>http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_headline=son-of-a-*****%26method=full%26objectid=18931479%26siteid=89520-name_page.html</a></p>
<p>Trying to remember where I saw the suspension info…</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.insideedition.com/ourstories/inside_stories/story.aspx?storyid=739[/url]”>http://www.insideedition.com/ourstories/inside_stories/story.aspx?storyid=739</a></p>
<p>btw…I do not believe this kid ‘chose’ to be silent. He had a severe speech and socialization issue–as well as other neurological deformities. He was merely a disabled kid struggling to participate in ‘mainstream’ public educaiton–when he should have been in special needs classrooms from the instance of his diagnosis. In my opinion.</p>
<p>Also, the diagnosis of autism and the subsequent mental illness should have been available for the public schools and the gun registration. Knock, knock.</p>
<p>Reading the statement made by the Cho family this evening made me weep.</p>
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<p>I agree. I feel terribly sad for the parents.</p>
<p>I remember, in the emotional time right after I first gave birth almost 21 years ago, seeing everything through a different lens of motherhood. I heard a news story about a cold-blooded killer on the radio shortly after my oldest was born and immediately, my first thought was, “How horrible his mother must feel.”</p>
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<p>The only stories I was able to find about a middle school suspension because of a hitlist were based on rumors circulated by fellow students, not official statements confirmed by school administrators. FERPA (Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act) protections continue to hold after a student’s death, so there appears to be no way a school official can authoritatively release such information to the public. </p>
<p>It sounds to me as though Cheers is jumping to conclusions here. The reliability of schoolyard rumors is rather dubious. He might well have missed a month of school because of temporary placement in a special needs program and students might have drawn their own conclusions about his absence. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it takes a lot to get suspended from school. School officials sometimes jump to conclusions rather quickly. A 15-year-old boy not only got suspended from school, he wound up spending 12 days in juvenile detention simply for making a phone call that happened to be timestamped (erroneously, due to a daylight-savings time glitch) adjacent to another phone call threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=4005564[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=4005564</a></p>
<p>And, in any event, I think many young teens act out during the turbulent middle school years and ultimately settle down to behave well after that. I assume he managed not to get into serious trouble in high school or rumors would be swirling about that too.</p>
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<p>Once again, it seems to me that cheers is jumping to conclusions about “overly ambitious parents.” It’s pretty clear they couldn’t afford private education, and likely were forced to accept whatever the public education system offered them. </p>
<p>The record of dedicated specialized education programs for students beyond preschool age is not promising. They are expensive and have a poor track record of producing well-adjusted students who can function in society.</p>
<p>I knew an autistic boy born around roughly the same time as Cho. He grew up in much more favorable circumstances (his father was a physician, who volunteered to be the physician member of the school district’s Committee on Special Education, hoping to establish a rapport with school officials that would give him leverage for negotiating for the best possible placement for his son; his grandfather was a professor of psychology.) The parents spared no expense, taking him to many specialists for evaluation and educational recommendations, including Yale’s autism clinic. The family lived in an affluent suburb with a generous school budget–and yet the alternatives offered were dismal. He wound up in a special-needs program with a small group of children with a hodge-podge of different diagnoses, including Downs’ syndrome, cerebral palsy with cognitive impairments, etc. None of the other children in the program were autistic and the teacher and aide had no particular training or experience working with autistic children. Despite his inability to speak, he was clearly a bright kid (good with puzzles, resourceful in getting loose, etc.) The family eventually gave up, uprooted, and moved away to Georgia, where there was a specialized facility that they hoped would serve their son better. The dad had to abandon a thriving private practice and start over. But he had an MD, a portable credential, and Atlanta was in a growth boom with plenty of demand for physicians. The boy was 8 at the time–I’ve often wondered what happened to him.</p>
<p>But the point is–this was a sophisticated and well-connected family, fluent in English and knowledgeable about how the special ed system worked, and they couldn’t get the local educational system to deliver an effective education for their autistic child. </p>
<p>What chance would poor immigrants with limited English skills and a tenuous visa status have?</p>
<p>If Cho was autistic, his academic track record suggests he must have been quite high-functioning. Many such do somehow manage to muddle through and make a reasonably independent life for themselves. Indeed, if he’d majored in something like computer science, he might have more easily flown under the radar screen, since computer programming assignments don’t give the same scope for expressing a troubled inner life as creative writing classes.</p>
<p>We live in a society where nobody at all is allowed to carry a 4 ounce tube of toothpaste onto a plane. The burden of proof to be allowed to carry more than 3 ounces of a liquid or gel onto a plane is very high, and we spend huge amounts of time and money screening people and luggage before we allow people to carry their toothpaste onto planes.</p>
<p>But we spend very little money ensuring that people who acquire guns are mentally stable, and there is no burden of proof to establish that one is mentally stable enough to purchase a gun. The burden of proof is on law enforcement agencies to establish that one is not stable enough to purchase a gun. The default assumption, in the absence of affirmative information to the contrary, is that a person is entitled to purchase a gun.</p>
<p>New story in NYT:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20cnd-guns.html?hp[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20cnd-guns.html?hp</a></p>
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<p>I am well aware of this. You cannot possibly be suggesting it is a comparable situation. </p>
<p>However, all the same, I would not classify being so terrorized, disturbed, and brainwashed as a child that you are forced to override your emotional instincts as “mentally normal.” It is obviously far from their fault and I wish it were not so, but I do believe that these children have been disturbed significantly. I would not suspect that they disagree, former child soldiers have come to DC and the picture I get is not that they feel they were acting normally or naturally in any way.</p>
<p>By the way, the neighbors I ran into earlier today whose son is a Sr at VT said that the shooter lived in an honors dorm!!!</p>
<p>No matter what anyone thinks these parents should have or could have done with their child, it doesn’t diminish the utter pain and grief, feelings of shame and so forth to be the parents of a child who killed all these innocent people and in a very public way. I feel sorry for them. We don’t know what resources or help they had and they surely never could have predicted this severity of how his problems would play out. He functioned enough to go to college and so forth. I don’t know if his schools failed him. But as parents, I have to think they wanted help and what was best for their child who was so afflicted. At this point, however, the pain of what their son has done must be so unbearable for them and who can they turn to and can they show their faces, etc. ? It is like guilt by association. No matter what they did or didn’t do for their son, they surely don’t deserve this. Same with Cho’s sister. Their lives are wrecked, just as is the case for parents/family of the innocently murdered victims. I do NOT feel sorry for Cho himself. But I do for his parents. Even before Cho carried out this massacre, it must have been very difficult to deal with having a son like this. A parent’s job is hard enough. It sounds like parenting him was a huge challenge and I don’t know what help they received or sought. </p>
<p>He should not have been able to obtain those guns legally, or that amount of ammunition. Further, I wish there were metal detectors at school building entrances. I mean there are to get on a plane. Why shouldn’t schools be as safe as planes? Like someone said, you can’t take toothpaste on plane, so how come a gun can get into a school building? Hopefully some things can change. We can’t keep these things from happening but a mixture of various steps can make it harder to carry these things out. </p>
<p>I don’t know what sorts of evaluations his public schools made over the years if this student was exhibiting certain behaviors. Usually kids like this come to the attention of staff and there are referrals and plans and services put in place. Apparently he had a diagnosis and people have reported other odd behaviors. I wonder what interventions or plans were in place at his schools up through 12th grade. I wonder what, if anything, special ed folks at his high school recommended the parents do about him once he was in college in terms of any monitoring of his illness. Lots of unanswered stuff here. Too hard to say without knowing what interventions were taken at school while he was growing up. I would think with a diagnosis, he would have come under special services. Even so, those with kids who require special services, it sure helps to have parents who advocate and seek resources and services. His parents may not have been equipped to do that as immigrants, hard to say.</p>
<p>Wonderful post, Soozie.</p>
<p>Correction to my post #876. The family is NOT in protective custody. Sorry for the error.</p>
<p>Also, I think it is a long and distant stretch from saying that Cho could have, should have, or might have benefited from intervention at various points along the way to saying that the parents could have ever envisioned it would come to THIS, or that people should be making those kind of accusations against them. Nobody here knows whether Cho suffered some kind of psychotic break, let alone the parents or sister, who were no longer living with him on a daily basis. The guy did make it through four years of college - who knows whether or not his family monitored him more actively at various times. The blame game is not one I’d choose to play here.</p>
<p>Cross posted with you soozie. As usual, you say it best.</p>
<p>I’m especially struck by his sister’s words:</p>
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<p>It truly sounds to me as though nobody expected this. Most high functioning autistic children do not grow up into erratically violent adults. (They may well have social and emotional difficulties, but certainly I don’t think there’s anything in the literature on autistic-spectrum disorders that would have led the family to imagine such an outcome to be possible. For all his troubled history, there was absolutely no indication he had ever been physically aggressive in any way.)</p>
<p>And yet, it seems that many psychiatric disorders show up in young adulthood, often in young adults with absolutely no history of mental disorders in childhood. I have been struck by the story of a good friend whose older sister had been the pride and joy of the family throughout her childhood and teenage years. My friend greatly admired her sister, looked up to her, was in awe of her—and, tragically, after several highly successful years of college, schizophrenia struck from out of the blue and completely unravelled her promising young life. That was 30 years ago. She never did finish college, was in and out of hospitals, eventually came back to live with her parents, and now, thanks to modern drugs, manages to live a tenuous and precarious existence. Fortunately, her father was a physician, her mother was a nurse, and they did their best to help her salvage as much as possible of her life, but she still struggles.</p>
<p>If schizophrenia can strike someone with no prior history as a bolt out of the blue (mathematician John Nash is another example), it certainly could also strike someone with a history of different problems.</p>
<p>There is just so much we don’t know. I truly don’t know what I would have done if faced with trying to raise a child facing the difficulties he faced, even under the best of circumstances. When he was born, autism was considered a hopeless diagnosis. Many treatments have raised false hopes, only to have them dashed again. By the time he got to this country at age 8, there was a growing body of evidence supporting the use of applied behavior analysis (ABA) starting very young (ideally before age 2), but even then, school districts were reluctant to pay for it–and he was well past the ideal age when it is most effective.</p>
<p>If I lived in a country where I didn’t speak the language well or understand the resources available, I can’t begin to imagine how I would have been able to deal with such a child. </p>
<p>I understand his mom prayed a lot and hoped for the best. I truly don’t know what his parents could have done to prevent a tragedy like this one. Even if they’d taken him out of school, they couldn’t lock him away from society.</p>
<p>It seems to me that society failed here, not the parents.</p>
<p>There is a federal law that says that guns should be locked away from people like this. The law was not enforced.</p>
<p>His parents are victims too. They have also lost their only son to a monster. Even more so they must feel responsible for all the others too. My heart goes out to them, and yes we lost my D’s friend in the killing. </p>
<p>A child that is not fitting in, that struggles with hidden (or not so) disabilities is a constant struggle. Advice is varied and inconsistent. "experts? aren’t. Every glimmer of improvement is hope and hard to tell permanent from temporary. Outward signs can be confusing. If you have never struggled with this with a child you cannot know or second guess what those parents did. It is not like there is a cookbook that gives a recipe for success. One so different from the sibling is baffling to everyone. It is easy to sit here now and say what should have been seen. But the experts don’t agree and in contemporaneous evaluations, each expert gives a different answer, if you know to ask for experts and can afford to have them. The school system does not provide them unless they are failing or you have enough influence to make them. When they go to college you have no more say. The colleges tell you nothing. </p>
<p>But most who struggle do not go out and kill everyone - and yet it seems no one knows how to tell the difference ahead of time. Only in 20/20 hind sight. A tragedy.</p>
<p>Would we expect the family, no offense, to say, yeah, we knew he was different and had issues?</p>
<p>her answer was very gracious, but as a family, wouldn’t we all say that?</p>
<p>But it does indeed seem quite plausible that the family might not have imagined he could be capable of such violence.</p>
<p>After all, the students who went to school with him told stories of eccentric and disturbing behavior but none ever said he acted out in any physically violent manner.</p>
<p>wisteria, I agree…people can notice his anti social behavior and other oddities but not expect him to be violent if he hadn’t exhibited any violence before.</p>
<p>There are many many kids who have issues, and I see them everyday in the school district of our well-heeled town. Parents are constantly pushing to have their kids mainstreamed and fit into society. Shrill and strident moms have their low-functioning kids disrupting normal classromms, because they can bully the schools into it. </p>
<p>In more rural areas, where the level of worldliness is much lower, and life is simpler, I can well imagine folk carrying on with their silent burden. Not knowing better. Or not being able to afford the professional help that it takes. Or not wanting to stick out in the community.</p>
<p>Besides, there is no evidence at all of Cho hurting anyone. He was seen as reserved, weird, introverted, maybe sullen at worst.</p>
<p>I can only imagining the Cho family wringing their hands in grief and despair. Hiding in their shame and guilt. Wondering what they did wrong. Blaming themselves for not being omniscient.</p>
<p>When I first came to this country, I was struck by how “callous” people seemed to be. Someone loses their child in a hit-and-run, and there they are, being interviewed on T.V., speaking calmly of what an amazing gymnast he was, etc. In many countries families grieve behind their doors, wail in their bedrooms, and do not speak of their pain.</p>
<p>I soon realized that these were cultural differences. Not emotional ones.</p>
<p>Similarly, there was much criticism hurled at the Chos; why haven’t they spoken yet, 2 days have passed; they must not care; they need to apologize to everyone etc. But these people, humans also, have been devastated, in a horrible way, almost worse, as they will forever carry the pain and guilt of their child’s actions.</p>
<p>And now that we have a statement from them, a very moving one IMO, let’s have some compassion and not critique it.</p>
<p>What is going through my mind now is the teacher or gc who wrote the recommendations for this kid upon entering college. I think of what my d. had to go through and if this kid was like this his whole academic life then who the heck wrote those recs.</p>
<p>janesmom, as has been noted on this thread a couple of times, there are no recs required to be admitted to Virginia Tech.</p>