The Thirty-Third Victim: Representations of Seung Hui Cho in the Aftermath of the “Virginia Tech Massacre”

I was not there, on April 16, 2008, to participate in the memorial services that marked the first anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech. This is my university, but I was away for the year and was spared the impact of returning to the classroom immediately after the tragedy, the anxiety of coping with students who in losing friends and teachers also lost that sense of security and personal invulnerability that envelops the young. I was also not there on April 16, 2007, the day of the events that now “brand” Virginia Tech as much as its football team and funky Hokie Bird mascot. Like the rest of the nation I watched the story unfold on television and called friends and colleagues, anxious to know of their safety. It has been unsettling to be both intimately connected yet also removed from the “massacre,” the “tragedy at Virginia Tech.” I write this essay in an effort to come to terms personally with what happened at my school and as a historian who studies the lives of young people, their experiences, and the impact that youths have had in the past. I believe that how we have memorialized April 16 and how we constructed an identity for the youth who shot so many will shape the public consequences of that day and the history that is written about campus violence. Here, then, is a look at the thirty-third victim, at representations of Seung Hui Cho in the year after. I find Cho in the memorials to those who died on April 16 and also in media accounts that traced the story during its first year of life. News narratives, as Carolyn Kitch writes in her study of the media after the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, create a framework that allow journalists and audiences alike to “assign lasting meaning to the event.”The Cho of the memorials and the media went through many incarnations during the months from April 16, 2007 to April 16, 2008. There were false starts and identities that disappeared almost as quickly as they arose, until a consensus erased Cho and his suicide from the narrative and replaced him with mental illness and the problem of access to care.