The families of those murdered by Cho Seung-Hui are in the process of burying the dead. Professor Liviu Librescu was buried earlier today in his adopted homeland of Israel. He gave his life to give his students extra time to escape a classroom in Norris Hall through the windows.
Engineering Professor Liviu Librescu's body was wrapped in a prayer shawl according to Jewish tradition, and his two sons intoned the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.My earlier comments on Professor Librescu are here.
A representative of the Romanian government posthumously awarded the Romanian-born Librescu the country's highest medal for his scientific accomplishments and heroism. Romanian officials laid a wreath at the grave.
"I walked through the streets today with my head held high because I have such a father," his elder son, Joe, said.
Librescu, a 76-year-old aeronautics engineer and lecturer at the school for 20 years, died trying to barricade the door of his Virginia Tech classroom to keep the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, away from his students.
"It's so painful for me to think of your last moments, in which you suffered. I'll never know what went through your mind, but I hope very much that wherever you are, you will watch over your family," Librescu's weeping wife, Marlena, said.
Librescu's family said his last moments were recounted in numerous e-mails from students after the attack.
"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Joe Librescu told The Associated Press after the massacre. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."
As the students jumped, Librescu was shot dead, one of the 32 victims in the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.
A child in Nazi-allied Romania during World War II, Librescu was deported along with his family to a labor camp in Transnistria and then to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. According to a report compiled by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were killed by the Romanian regime during the war.
Virginia's Governor has called for a moment of silence to honor and memorialize the dead.
I've seen several reports today claiming that Cho suffered from autism, but his problems appeared to go much deeper than that.
VIRGINIA Tech gunman Cho Seung-hui was diagnosed with autism after the family emigrated to the United States, a relative in South Korea said.
"From the beginning, he wouldn't answer me," Kim Yang-soon, Cho's great aunt, said in an interview yesterday with Associated Press Television News. He "didn't talk. Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold."
"When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism," said Kim, 85, adding that the family had constant worries about Cho.
The uncle gave a similar account, but said there were no early indications that the South Korean student who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University in the US had serious problems. The uncle asked to be identified only by his last name, Kim.
Cho "didn't talk much when he was young. He was very quiet, but he didn't display any peculiarities to suggest he may have problems," Kim said by telephone.
Autism support groups are speaking out over the possibility that Cho suffered from autism. Even more bizarre is the reaction from some of Cho's relatives.
This was a deeply disturbed guy and his mental illness didn't make things any easier - especially as far as treatment was concerned. Yet, he was sufficiently capable of being admitted to a prestigeous university like Virginia Tech. If he was indeed autistic, it could have been a mild form such as Aspergers. Without having access to the medical records of those who treated him, it's impossible to say what was going on. Consider the symptoms of Aspergers:
- Narrow interests or preoccupation with a subject to the exclusion of other activities
- Repetitive behaviors or rituals
- Peculiarities in speech and language
- Extensive logical/technical patterns of thought
- Socially and emotionally inappropriate behavior and interpersonal interaction
- Problems with nonverbal communication
- Clumsy and uncoordinated motor movements
Does this mean that autism or Aspergers played a role? That's for the clinicians and forensic pathologists and forensic psychologists to figure out. I doubt we'll ever know precisely what was going on in Cho's head before he went on his rampage.
The Washington Post attempts to clarify the timeline of events.
Virginia Tech classes are set to resume Monday. It will be a good long time before people on the campus are able to get back to something approaching normalcy.
WDBJ7 has profiles of all the victims.
Meanwhile, did Cho actually use high capacity clips? Confederate Yankee has been sparring with ABC News over that point, and while some news reports claim that Cho only used the standard magazines available to the two handguns, one report claims that a high capacity magazine was also recovered. ABC News went with the notion that high capacity clips were involved even before the dust had settled and before evidence was even gathered from the crime scene. Now, we have conflicting reports on the matter. It remains to be seen whether the high capacity clips were involved. Either way this resolves, the reporting of this aspect has been quite poor.
Meanwhile, the NRA is attempting to get out in front of this issue by calling for stricter restrictions on the sale of firearms to those with mental disorders. It also appears that the state of Virginia may have been lax in providing mental health information to the database relied upon by firearms sellers to approve the sales. Newsweek claims that Cho should have failed the background check as a result.
UPDATE:
Howard Kurtz notes the following about the blowback against the media by the public:
In all the years I've been chronicling the media, I have rarely seen the tidal wave of resentment that has washed over television organizations that showed the now-infamous Cho video. In the minds of many Americans, this was a horribly offensive act, and no amount of explanation about the obligations of journalism is going to change that view.There's a lot of reason that the public has had enough with the media's mendacity and claims of journalistic integrity that ring hollow with every new scandal that shows that the emperor has no clothes.
It turns out that the package sent to NBC news added little to law enforcement's understanding of Cho's intentions and that all it did was increase the likelyhood of copycats. Indeed, there was a spate of copycat threats called in all across the country. Schools in several parts of the country closed today as a result of the threats, which happen to coincide with the anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
NBC News, which fired Imus for saying reprehensible statements on air, made the decision to release and highly publicize inflammatory and reprehensible imagery created by Cho in the leadup to his going on a rampage on the Virginia Tech campus. Is NBC News going to hold itself accountable for the emotional damage done to the families of those who lost loved ones? If Imus was forced out of his well paying job, why not those who decided to make the Cho multimedia package available and the highest profile items on the NBC websites and broadcasts?
Is this not a double standard? All claims to newsworthiness aside, the emotional harm done to the victims is just as real. Where are the apologies? Where are the mea culpas from NBC News?
UPDATE:
Here's another report from the graveside of Professor Librescu that is especially poignant:
He was honored not only by Israel and the U.S., but his native land as well. At the funeral, a representative of Romanian President Traian Basescu presented his family with the Order of the Star of Romania both for his bravery and his contributions to science.
Over the course of the week, Librescu’s son Joe spoke of the two homes he loved in Israel and in Virginia. “He saw himself as something of an ambassador for Israel in a place where there were very few Israelis, and in his field of study.”
Librescu loved his university, his research and his students, and his father’s decision to give his life to protect his students, “he behaved exactly as I would expect him to,” Joe said, and was proud that, as far as he knew, none of the students in his father’s class were killed.
His son Joe said that remarkably, though he hadn’t seen his father in six months, or spoken to his father for several weeks before the tragedy, he had been able to reach him just a day before his father had been looking forward to a family reunion planned in Romania in June. Sadly, that reunion turned out to be in Israel, around Librescu’s grave, surrounded by the international press.
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