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Disturbed childhood turned him into a mass murderer?

Jonathan Watts and Conor Clarke

Shocked neighbours in assailant's hometown try to make sense of the violence

Seoul/Centreville: Name: Cho Seung-hui. Leaving date: 19 August 1992. Reason for departure: Relocation overseas.

The elementary school record in Seoul was penned neatly in red ink, stamped with three official seals and filed away in a cabinet of records that might never have been reopened were it not for the massacre on the other side of the world.

But it marks one of the key turning points in the life of the South Korean schoolboy who grew up to become America's most notorious campus killer.

Cho was eight years old at the time. He had completed just one year and one semester at the Shinchang primary school in the suburbs of Seoul when his family decided to make a fresh start on the other side of the Pacific. Why they moved is unclear. But at least part of the motive was economic.

South Korea was growing fast in 1992. It was one of Asia's tiger economies. But Cho's family were getting left behind. A year earlier they had moved out of their first-floor home to a gloomy basement flat a few hundred metres away.

Their landlady at the time, Im Pong-ae, told local reporters the family had money problems. She said the father, Cho Sung-tae, was never at home, the mother, Hyang Ai, was working as a cleaner in the houses of wealthier neighbours, and the children wore old, unfashionable clothes. ``Before our contract was up they announced they were moving to the U.S. They told me that they found it difficult to live in Korea so they want to make a new beginning,'' Ms Im said.

Uncomfortable question

For the young boy who made the move, that fresh start was to have a murderous ending 15 years later that his former neighbourhood is struggling to comprehend.

``I remember the little boy being a very quiet kid. It is shocking that he did such a thing,'' Ms Im said. How that child turned into a killer is an uncomfortable question for many Koreans, particularly those who live so close to his first home.

In the taxi to this northern suburb of Seoul, the radio buzzed with a talkshow in which callers complained angrily that the world media was describing Cho as Korean. ``He left here when he was still a small child. It is America that has formed his character so they shouldn't associate him with our country,'' was a typical comment.

The relocation to America cannot have been easy. There were 47 students in Cho's class when he left Shinchang. They studied from Monday to Saturday but not one of the 25 hours in the weekly curriculum was devoted to English.

Those who have been through a similar experience say adjusting to another culture can be traumatic. Many young Koreans belong to the so-called 1.5 generation, which means they were children when their parents moved overseas.

``It can be tough. There are language problems, name-calling and you suddenly find yourself in a minority,'' said Thomas Nam, who also moved from Korea to the U.S. An inferiority complex would not be unnatural in such circumstances, particularly when, as in Cho's case, you had already come from a community where you were poorer than most of your neighbours.

The success of his sister in graduating from Princeton may have made matters worse because, according to the traditional Confucian beliefs of many Korean families, sons are supposed to do better than daughters.

Quiet suburb

More than 11,000 km from Seoul, and 320 km north-east of the site of the carnage, lies the town of Centreville, Virginia, where Cho's family settled in a modest two-storey terrace house and his father opened a dry-cleaning business. Cho attended the local high school, Westfield High, where two of his victims were also pupils.

Centreville, a quiet suburb half an hour's drive from Washington, D.C., is unsuited to media frenzy. But 24 hours after the shootings, dozens of reporters and TV news crews gathered on the corner near Cho's home, the private road blocked by a long row of police motorcycles. Neighbours quietly took photographs and tried to make sense of the violence. Jesus Falcon, who recently moved to Centreville, was disturbed that the perpetrator of the mass shootings had lived a few hundred metres away.

``It's shock, like immediate shock,'' he said. ``It's now a fact to me that this can happen anywhere. It's chilling and scary.''

Others saw a potential cause for Cho's disturbed mind in Westfield High School. ``He might have got picked on,'' said Kevin Altomare, a second-year student who identified ``really snobby'' pupils as a source of isolation for some. Drew Helton, a first-year student at the school, said he had heard racist talk. ``There's a bad word that people call Asians — `chink'. You hear that one a lot.''

This is not the first time tragedy has come to Centreville. Last May, Michael Kennedy, a Centreville teenager and Westfield High School student, shot and killed two county police officers. ``It just seems like this type of thing always happens,'' said Kevin Altomare.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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