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Memorial Stones Stand Honoring Virginia Tech Victims

Posted April. 14, 2008 06:11,   

한국어

▽ “They continue to live in darkness”

A resident said, “After the massacre, Cho’s parents came back quietly but they rarely show up during the day.”

The gunman’s family has been declining interviews with the Korean Consulate, let alone with the media.

“They continue to live in darkness,” said Wade Smith, a lawyer who has been assisting Cho Seung-hui’s family, in an interview with the Washington Post. “I think there will come a time when they are able to speak, (but) for now, they have made it clear to me they just want to be quiet and not say anything."

The U.S. newspaper reported that Cho’s sister, 27, works for the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. After graduating from Princeton University, she worked for an outsourcing company of the State Department at the time of the accident.

Even a year later, many questions surrounding the shooting rampage remain unresolved. Immediately after the incident, some Koreans attributed the case to social and structural problems such as failure to adapt after immigration, but the investigation found that it was due to Cho’s mental illness.

As a child, Cho had symptoms of isolation serious enough to be considered as mental illness. His parents attempted to treat his illness medically and religiously, to no avail. He was even ordered by the court to have psychiatric treatment after police caught him for stalking female students after he got into college.

However, it still remains unresolved why he went to the dormitory early in the morning to kill a female student and then went to Norris Hall, the engineering building at Virginia Tech, to kill 30 people indiscriminately. The police failed to find any relation between the gunman and the first victim.

▽ Virginia Tech prepares for memorial service

Norris Hall reopened last September but the classrooms where the shooting happened remain closed. The doors penetrated by bullets were replaced with new ones, but they have no knobs. Other floors of the building are being used as the mechanical engineering offices for the faculty and graduate students.

Virginia Tech conceived a plan to use the place as the center for peace studies and violence prevention to learn lessons from the shootings.

In front of the administration building, 32 memorial stones were recently placed. The university plans to declare April 16 the Day of Mourning, canceling classes for the day and holding various memorial events.

“It’s calm in school,” said Yu Hyeon-seung, 30, a graduate student majoring in industrial engineering who represents the Korean Student Association, said on Saturday. “We discussed ways to participate in the events as a group of Korean students, but we thought that doing something as a group was inappropriate.”

Yu said, “As far as I know, few people on campus think that the shooting was conducted by a Korean. Instead, the incident highlighted the gun control problems in America.”

Civic group members calling for addressing problems related to the victims and controlling guns plan to hold a ‘lie-in’ demonstration in front of the Supreme Court and the Capitol Hill in Washington on April 16.

However, no significant progress has been made in gun control. Only small changes have been made to enforce stricter rules to control gun purchases by the mentally ill and to reinforce the crisis management system and the management of mentally ill students at schools.



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