Like everyone else, I’m fascinated with the details dripping in about VT shooter Cho Seung-Hui - especially the current news regarding a package her sent to NBC News. The interviews with his former roomates, the tales from his professors and classmates and everything else point to a troubled young man whose mind had drifted a bit off the path. It’s as if everyone expected this but no one saw it coming, least of all his family. The short comments made by his parents indicate that they never in a million years saw this coming, nor did they know Cho to be the odd loner everyone is making him out to be
The whole incident reminds of Stuart Tay, another young asian who, rather than being a shooter, was the victim of a rather grisley murder, the result of an apparent burglary plan gone bad. You can read all the details in Time Magazine. Apparently, the 2003 movie Better Luck Tomorrow, which I have not yet seen, is based on this incident as well.
The articles all talked about how Stuart was an honor roll student from a wealthy family who seemed to have a great future ahead of him. His parents believed him to be a sweet, innocent kid who would never, ever get into the kind of trouble he was now being accused of. He had a beautiful cheerleader girlfriend, was polite to his family and even kept his teddy bear “Ben” in its own bed next to his own. He was running his own business building computers (in fact, the plan he was killed over involved burglarizing the home of this parts supplier) and looked like he may be going to Princeton once he graduated from Foothill High School in Tustin - the cross-town rival to my own Alma Mater, Tustin High.
I didn’t know that Stuart. We were never friends, but he kept popping up in parts of my life. When my mother knocked on my bedroom door on New Year’s Day to ask if I knew Stuart Tay, who had been reported as missing that morning, I already sensed there was trouble. From what I had keard about him, he was already on a dangerous path. From what his parents and friends told local news agencies, however, it sounded like he’d kept that part of his life well hidden.
I first heard of him when two of my closest friends, both former boy scouts, talked about this amazingly annoying and geeky member in their troop. They described his as arrogant and needling to the point of obnoxious. He, in fact, became such a target of their scorn that they frequently brought him up in conversation to both laugh at and comiserate about him. I founf their taled humorous, though mean spirited. When I told them their derision was unnecessary, I was assured that were I to know the guy, I’d be saying the same things.
A year or so later I was heavily involved in the burgeoining Orange County BBS scene. Before the internet went public, some folks - myself included - attached modems to phone lines and ran servers off of them. A client could dial in with their modem and read and leave notes on message boards as well as share files. Often, members of these boards would set up real life meetings.
On one such board, I had struck up what I considered to be a minor friendship with someone going by the name “DepecheMode” or just “DM”. He seemed rather knowledgeable about the same sorts of things I was interested in and we exchanged much information. A high school friend of mine who also frequented the board - for sake of anonymity I’m calling him ‘S’ - told me that he knew DM and frequently hung out with him. It turned out DM was the same Stuart I had heard so many stories about. S had said that Stuart had bragged to some degree about his exploits as a hacker. S sort of looked up to Stuart in a weird way, like he was some kind of criminal anti-hero. The stories I heard all sounded too exaggerated to be true. One day, S ran up to me as we were walking between classes to ask my advice on something.
“Stuart offered to pay me $500 if I went to UPS to pick up a package for him. Do you think I should do it?”
I laughed a little at him. “$500? What’s in the package?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. But, man, $500!”
“Why doesn’t he pick it up himself?”
“He said he’s too busy.”
I didn’t really believe that Stuart would actually pay S $500 to pick up a package, but I still gave him serious advice. “Think about it this way - what could be in that package that is so important to Stuart that he’d be willing to pay you so much just to pick it up but not so important that he’d be willing to do it himself? Do you think there may be something illegal in this package?”
S thought this over. “Probably, knowing the kind of stuff Stuart’s into.”
“Is getting $500 worth the possibility of you being thrown into jail for signing a package containing illegal stuff?”
“No, not really.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
I never followed up with S about the package, but the stories about Stuart continued.
One evening, the BBS we were members of had an in-person get together at a pizza place. S couldn’t make it, but I was interested enough in meeting some of the folks there that I went alone. While there, a youn asian man wearing all black came in and sat at our table. I introduced myself and he quietly shook my hand. I asked what his screenname was and he told me to guess. It didn’t take long - our conversation sort of gave away the fact that this was DM, the infamous Stuart sitting in front of me.
He denied it. “I’m not DM.”
“Well, who are you then?”
“Guess.”
More talk and I was completely positive this guy was DM, but despite our convivial online chat, he wished to pretend he’d never heard of me and refused to confirm himself. He was weird and more than a little confounding. After he left, one of the other members told me that I was right, that was DM and not to be too bothered by it. He had a reputation for being weird.
I stopped chatting with DM not too longer after that, then soon quit the BBS all together. Several months later I was hanging out at S’s house with a group of friends when another mutual friend - I’m calling him ‘J’ - called to say that he and Stuart were coming over. I groaned and told my story about meeting DM to S, who reassured me that Stuart was totally cool.
J came through the door about 20 minutes later with DM/Stuart in tow. I was right - they were one in the same. Stuart had a stun gun with him whose batteries were running low, but still had the power to deliver a nasty shock. As J talked to S, Stuart kept zapping J in the leg and laughing while J twitched. Someone said he shouldn’t be doing that and Stuart laughed it off, shocking J again. Both J and S seemed entranced by this guy - the rest of us thought he was a dick - and defended his actions (though J looked like he was starting to get irritated with the shocks). Not long after they arrived, they declared that they had things to do and left.
That was the last time I met Stuart. That happened not long before his body was found in a shallow grave in a Buena Park backyard. I was shocked by the death only because it was someone I knew, which hit rather close to home. But, given the stories I had heard - bragging about high-level computer hacking, being a member of the Chinese mafia, paying people huge sums of money to pick up mysterious packages - it didn’t surprise me that he was the victim. I still believe a lot of the bragging was rubbish, part of some bizarre megalomaniacal criminal fantasy, but if you want it hard enough, you can sometimes turn your fantasies into reality. He wanted to be a criminal mastermind and his ambition manifested and got him killed.
His family, school teachers and others may have seen some signs of oddness in him, but they claimed to never suspect him to be involved in something like that. Whether they were truly clueless or whether they chose to put on blinder, I’m not sure. After the tragedy at VT this week, lots of people are re-examining Cho-Seung Hui and his behavior, tryingt o find patterns. His family is shocked and saddened and many of the people who knew him thought of him as a quiet loner. Though some apparently talked about his potential as a school shooter, one wonders whether their talk was serious. When NBC reveals the full details of the information they have received, I wonder how much more we’ll see about the dark passages in Hui’s mind. Like Hui, Stuart did not keep his dark thoughts so hidden - they, in fact, engendered some kind of affection from some of his friends.
I’m not suggesting here that such dark thoughts will always lead to violence. There’s an entire community of weird young people known as “Goths” who revel in the darker side of life and death who also on average happen to be some of the most intelligent and peaceful people you’ll ever meet. What I am suggesting is that you can’t always trust your perceptions. Just as there were two Stuarts, there appears to have also been two Cho’s - one the brooding but painfully shy young man who kept to himself, the other apparently a passionately angry and violent young man who chose the worst possible path to demonstrate what was going on inside.
