Where's info on the "girlfriend"? Am I just being suspicious?

OK, we've been told Cho first shot his girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend) and her RA at West AJ at VT.

We're now hearing ALL about Cho and his life.

We're now hearing the names of the poor victims and details of their lives.

So...where's the girlfriend? Why are they not indicating who she is? I'm not trying to pry into her family's life because they have suffered immeasurably. That's not the point of this post. Maybe I've read one too many conspiracy threads and it's affecting my thought process - but with the incessant media coverage of this, I would think somewhere we'd know her name. Are they protecting her? It just doesn't make sense to me - we know the name of the brave young man who came to her help, but we don't know who she was. She was an innocent victim just like the 31 others - I wouldn't think that anyone would bear a grudge against her. I'm just a bit puzzled by this.

angle. From all accounts I've heard she might have been a girl in the wrong place or a stalking victim.

Perhaps he made one last attempt to connect with her and she spurned his interest...and that started the whole sad tragedy in motion.

which of course makes it gospel, she had spent the night with her boyfriend at another campus. She was just arriving home when, or about the time she was killed. It's possible he just walked by her and well, hell, speculation is pointless.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=19406792

plus info from London Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1667792.ece

No way in hell was she his girlfriend.

I think that he was stalking her.

The police were looking for her real boyfriend, who I believe lived off-campus and might not even been a VT student.

I'm guessing he was infatuated with her and made some delusional rantings about her that led law enforcement and reporters to believe that he actually dated her. It'll be especially tragically ironic for her if that's true. There are asswad newspaper headlines as we speak that are essentially blaming her for the incident. Here's a lovely one: The girl who led to massacre

Nice, huh? :puke:

It's despicable.

Poor girl is getting dragged through the mud after she was murder. She doesn't deserve that. I hope the truth comes out about this and is reported in the media.

NT

What a disgusting sensationalist headline. We hear this guy was a complete loner and somehow he has this incredibly outgoing girlfriend...Sure...Immediately upon hearing that he was a complete loner, it was obvious his only "girlfriend" problem, was never having one....and that he was stalking a bunch of girls...

Although the way the Chicago Tribune article about a Chinese person on a student visa was pretty stupid too.

alone, I doubt very much if he was outgoing enough to have a girlfriend. It's hard to say why he shot the young lady in question.

We should never learn her identity.
It's not her fault her boyfriend was batshit crazy.

an "imaginary" girlfriend, a supermodel. They thought the 1st female victim may have been a woman he was stalking.

ABC has an hour long segment on it and they just said that the police determined she was not his girlfriend.

They are still trying to find out why he killed her.

ABC also said that he was the one making the bomb threats. A bomb threat message was found with him or near him when they found him dead.

He had some strange marking on his arm, in red ink, that they are trying to determine what, if anything, it means.

He targeted engineering buildings in his shooting and his bomb threats, yet he was an English major.

I've only watched TV to a certain extent - I want to know, I want to honor the victims, but I can only take so much of the horror - thanks for the update.

Folks forget that the police are as hurt by this as they are, yet they have to keep going and investigating and protecting.

Give them time, this seems to be a loner who felt he was the victim of life's injustices, he resented the rich and other folks were to blame for all of his struggles.

Sometimes we have to realize that there are no true answers to why tragedies happen. They just do and we have to try to learn from them and grow beyond them.

:hug:

I do feel awful for the police and investigators and ER doctors and university heads. Something like this affects everyone involved, no matter to what extent.

I do hope we learn and grow from this - that way these 32 victims will not have died in vain. We should honor their memory in that way!

concept of "dying in vain" or not "dying in vain". Those who support this war want the soldier who have died to not to have died in vain. They say we have to support this war so our soldiers aren't foresaken. I don't get it.

It may seem callous, all those that died, it was there time. We have no control over the when or the how, we will all die.

I think it is more important that we remember that the victims didn't live their lives in vain, that our soldiers are serving and doing their jobs because that is what they have chosen to do. It isn't how we die, it is how we live that matters.

:shrug:

I don't know - maybe we don't agree on it, but I didn't mean "die in vain" in the traditional sense. I heard something once that I rarely mention on DU because of feared flames but it's appropriate here: while death is always inevitable eventually, some may actually die for a purpose. It's an odd way of looking at things and I'm not saying I fully agree with or understand it, but I guess that's what was in the back of my mind when I wrote that. I meant that perhaps something good will come of their deaths (greater attention to those obviously in need or the ability of more Americans to acknowledge that we have a problem here) and then it's not a complete and total loss. It's like Megan's Law coming out of the horrible rape and murder of Megan Kanka or the Amber Alert coming from Amber Hagerman's murder.

(as for the deaths of soldiers in Iraq...well, that is just useless and wasteful - IMO, the above "logic" doesn't apply to that)

this. May something good come out of this tragedy.

:hi:

He came here at a very difficult time, age-wise. Too old to easily reaclimate to a totally different culture, too young to have a strong sense of native identity. I wonder how his this background played out for him. I doubt there was a huge ex-pat Korean culture in Virginia and who really knows how well he was accepted by his peers in mid/high school? Was he shunned or made fun of? I throw this out because I have heard zilch about his personal history...and it may shed some understanding of the young man that he eventually became.

I am sure that they will dissect him and analyze him. So much is yet to be discovered.

btw...I love the Pulp Fiction-dancing smilie

thank you, I just adore the penguin avatar!

So there may be an abuse angle to it. It may account for some of the anger he expressed in his writing.

paper and Aussie TV station. Parents are hospitilized for shock, but Korean paper said attempted suicide.Sounds like the Koreans favor suicide for them. They seem to think this has brought shame on Korea. Poor people who immigrated for children's sake. They owned a dry cleaning store in Centreville, Va. Koreans seem to be obsessed with losing face. What would it be like to live Korean culture at home, and then go out the door to school and try to live American culture, plus parents pushing "You must succeed" at their kid. I think it would be very confusing to live in 2 worlds, especially if one perhaps had the potential for mental problems.? Not to excuse the shooter, but was thinking of this earlier.A very confusing life and not one for building self confidence.

that they don't understand your problems. They just want their kids to attend US colleges. Then you have the sister who graduated from Princeton, which suggests that sis adjusted and achieved. Given the culture that was even more pressure on younger brother.

I feel sorry for all the hundreds of dead and living victims of this tragedy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2059726,00.html

Dr Bill Knocke, head of the civil engineering faculty whose staff and students were among the dead, said he understood that Cho had gone on Monday morning to the dormitory of a female student, Emily Hilscher, 19, who was not his girlfriend but with whom he may have been infatuated. He confronted her and shot her. He also murdered her mentor and fellow student, Ryan Clark, 22, who tried to intervene.

Apparently 2.5 hrs.

Not looking to argue, but isn't that usually the 1st suspect in a homicide of this nature? Downstream on this thread there's a post that the boyfriend had guns and was doing target practice that weekend. Seems to me, he'd be the 1st person of interest. 2.5 hours doesn't seem like an exorbitant amount of time to spend trying to locate and question the boyfriend.

Because they ASSUMED that it was a "domestic problem." I don't really want to argue either. I'm just sick that they wasted 2 1/2 hours on a wild goose chase that they focused too much of their hopes on.

I'm also sure that colleges and universities around the country are drafting new procedures as a result of this tragedy. I wonder how anyone would have predicted this event, though. Columbine was 8 years earlier and I suspect that recent past shootings on campuses have tended to be limited to single victim incidences. I don't really know enough about the details of how the school reacted, maybe they should have shutdown the school until the perp was in custody. But we're talking about a school the size a medium size city here: 25000 students, maybe another 5000 employees, 2600 acres, and 100 buildings. Resource allocation rolls with highest probability of who the suspect is, I would think. Most of the security resources must have been looking for the boyfriend...they were obviously wrong in a big and horrible way this time.

and according to someone that was friends with her she hadn't a clue who he was. That was last night, there maybe be different or nee info thats come out today.

Emily Jane Hilscher


http://www.roanoke.com/vtvictimprofiles/

Emily Jane Hilscher is believed to have been the first person killed in the massacre.
She lived on the first floor of the coed Ambler Johnston dormitory and next door to
resident advisor Ryan Clark, who was also slain Monday.

Age: 19, Class: Freshman, Major: Animal and Poultry Sciences, Hometown: Woodville, Va.,
High School: Rappahanock County High School, Parents: Eric and Elizabeth Hilscher,
Blacksburg resdence: 4040 Ambler Johnston West.
Everybody here just loved her http://www.roanoke.com/vtvictims/wb/xp-113483

Sign the guestbook| Submit Photos| See Gallery

http://www.roanoke.com/vtvictimprofiles/

-------------------------------

Beautiful young woman.... this is so sad.

It is unreasonable to think we should know everything about everyone involved 24 hours or so after it all happened. There's a process involved in releasing names of victims. It differs depending on jurisdiction and local policy, but it's a process just the same.

A friend of mine suffered through his daughter's murder this past December. All the media knew for two days was that a body had been found. She was identified within hours. He had full control over when her name was released, and by the time it was -- this being the plan -- the full-blown, tell-all, dramatic story about her had been thrown to a back burner. Certainly a major story on it was done, but only after the family allowed it to be done.

The media are looking for stories, and they'll jump on and flesh out the story for the "brave guy" if that is the name they get first.

This just gets more awful and sadder with every new piece of info.

Thanks!

he even had a girlfriend.

Isn't it amazing how officials and reporters will take the word of someone like that? They will owe her family a sincere and unctious apology if it turns out she was never his girlfriend. And going on one or two dates with him doesn't count, either. If she never acknowledged a relationship, then she wasn't his girlfriend.

I find it outrageous that her name and face are being splashed across papers all over the world. :grr:

said she was the first person killed and she was not his girlfriend. The story indicated that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I think the police totally miscalled this from the beginning. They first labeled it a "domestic dispute" when it was really the beginning of a mass murder. They labeled her as the "girlfriend", involved in a private dispute, instead of a student murdered by a crazed gunman. This mis-labeling of the crime allowed them to minimize the danger to other students, and led them to skip lockdown procedures. We're not hearing much about her now because they don't want the media to see just how badly they mishandled this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18virginia.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

After two people, Emily Jane Hilscher, a freshman, and Ryan Clark, the resident adviser whose room was nearby in the dormitory, were shot dead, the campus police began searching for Karl D. Thornhill, who was described in Internet memorials as Ms. Hilscher’s boyfriend.

According to a search warrant filed by the police, Ms. Hilscher’s roommate had told the police that Mr. Thornhill, a student at nearby Radford University, had guns at his town house. The roommate told the police that she had recently been at a shooting range with Mr. Thornhill, the affidavit said, leading the police to believe he may have been the gunman.

But as they were questioning Mr. Thornhill, reports came in of widespread shooting at Norris Hall, making it clear that they had not contained the threat on campus. Mr. Thornhill was not arrested, although he continues to be an important witness in the case, the police said.

At the time of the dormitory shootings, Col. W. Steven Flaherty, the superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said, “There was certainly no evidence or no reason to think that there was anyone else at that particular point in time.”

According to former roommates.

to "get it."

sorry don't get it.

Apparently he told his roommates this.

The guy was nuts.

I should have know better.

When he even talked to his roommates about anything (which was rare), he talked about his "Jelly" girlfriend who was a supermodel. He was obviously completely off the rails and had been for some time.

I really hope this case brings out the necessity for comprehensive mental health assessment and treatment in our society. There appear to have been a lot of warning signs with this guy, and at least one of his professors had already alerted authorities about his problems. We need some way to catch and help dangerous people (not necessarily with medications) before atrocities like this can happen.

that's what I heard...only an imaginary one.

I'm still trying to comprehend the irony of how someone can be a "loner" and have a girlfriend. Having a girlfriend or even and ex means having a social circle. Which is not the conventional definition of a "loner".

they were making up "theories of the crime" right and left.

it was a murder-suicide for a while

then the girl's actual boyfriend was a "person of interest" - that is probably where the story came from - they were still questioning THAT guy when the second set of shootings started

now they are speculating the dorm was intended to be the site of the mass killings, but all the locked doors got in the way - so he went somewhere, thought it over, regrouped, maybe waited for classes to start, and picked another site. All while the first victim's boyfriend - "known to have access to guns" - was being questioned