BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) - The student slouched into his chair, his face wrapped in sunglasses, the brim of his baseball cap pulled down so low his eyes were almost lost. The Virginia Tech professor who took a seat across from him did so because there didn't really seem to be any other option.
Andy Koch, suitemate of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho , is seen at his apartment in Blacksburg, Va. Friday April 20, 2007. Many days, Andy Koch would return to his dorm to find suitemate Seung-Hui Cho standing in the hall, staring out a window that offered a sweeping view of neighboring West Ambler Johnston Hall. Investigators are still trying to determine how and why Cho picked his victims. (Photo: AP / Charles Dharapak)
But in three, hour-long talks that began that October day, Lucinda Roy tentatively edged away from the lesson plan for her class of one, moving beyond poetry and drawing the darkly troubled student, Seung-Hui Cho, into a tortured and all-too-brief conversation about the human need for friendship and the pain of being trapped inside oneself.
Looking back, it may have been the closest anyone ever came to reaching the brooding loner before he metamorphosed into the gunman responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
But soon after their meetings in 2005, Roy — who alerted university officials with her fears about the student and tried to get him into counseling — lost touch with Cho. The semester ended. She went on leave. They exchanged e-mails once or twice. Then nothing.
It is only now that she asks herself: What if ...?
Roy has wrestled with that question endlessly in the past few days. And it is a variation of the one that now haunts this quarrystone campus and mountain town, an aching doubt that grows with each new revelation of missed signals and miscalculations, twists of fate and legal loopholes, and what appear increasingly like a series of lost opportunities to avert tragedy.
"That's a question I'll probably be asking myself the rest of my life," Roy says. "What else could I have done? Could I have done more? I think probably all of us could have done more."
In fact, it is not at all certain what might have stopped Cho from carrying out the rampage that left 32 people dead before he killed himself.
What has become clear is that at numerous points over the past year and a half, critical incidents took place that at least gave people around Cho — as well as administrators, police and mental health providers — the briefest windows into his state of mind, and perhaps chances to alter his path to destruction.
We wouldn't be human if we didn't second-guess ourselves. And there's probably no time when that is more true than after a tragedy unleashed by a fellow human being.
"I don't think at the time you could have said he's definitely going to shoot someone. But we had talked about he was likely to do that if there was someone that was going to do it," says Andy Koch a junior from Richmond, Va., who was Cho's suitemate last year.
"The first thing I thought of Monday was Seung ... and if that's the first thing you think about, there were definitely some things that we should have done," he says. But "I don't know what we could have done."
Many Virginia Tech students say that they do not want to second-guess, that they are content that university officials and those who came in contact with Cho did the best they could to prevent the tragedy.
But the story of the Virginia Tech massacre is a labyrinth of what-ifs. Many of them come with explanations any reasonable person would understand. There's just one problem with such explanations: They do nothing to explain the horror of the most unspeakable acts.
