(Continued...) It was on the fourth floor of West AJ, the world would soon learn, where the horror began.

Not in a room, but in a common area . A place where anyone could see the horror unfold. It happened just after 7 a.m., while most students remained snuggled in bed.

Pop.

Pop.

In an instant, bullets struck down Emily Hilscher, before she could meet up with her roommate for their walk to class. Before her planned afternoon horseback ride.

Also hit was Ryan “Stack” Clark, a resident adviser known for his academics and fun-loving nature.

Just as quickly, the shooting ended.

Or paused, as the world also would learn.

The shootings were the climax of a grueling few years for Cho.

Fifteen years ago , his mother and father had brought him and his older sister to America from South Korea.

His father had said he wanted to go to a place where no one knew their name.

After bouncing around, they landed in the affluent Northern Virginia suburb of Centreville.

As his parents toiled at a dry-cleaning business, money surrounded them. The teenager began using the Westernized version of his name, Seung-Hui Cho.

His sister had gone to the equally affluent world of Princeton , and later got a job with the U.S. government.

Throughout school, Cho also had performed well.

Straight A’s in math, but less success at friendship. No one at Westfield High School — which had a student body of some 3,000 — was close to him when he graduated in 2003.

He applied and was accepted to Virginia Tech, an in-state school four hours from his family. He would major in English, despite his proficiency with numbers.

Cho’s final two years in Blacksburg had been particularly intense.

In 2005, during renowned poet Nikki Giovanni’s poetry class his junior year, students had protested his presence.

In that class, he regularly wore sunglasses and a hat that Giovanni repeatedly made him remove. He’d snap pictures of female classmates from under his desk with his cellphone. His writings disturbed her.

“It was the meanness that bothered me. It was a really mean streak,” Giovanni said.

If he wasn’t removed, Giovanni told department head Lucinda Roy, she’d leave the university.

Although Cho insisted his writing was just satire, Giovanni’s threat forced him into individual tutoring with Roy until the end of the fall semester that year.

Roy tried to counsel him. He confessed to her how lonely he was.

Outside of the class that semester, the troubles continued. He began following female students on campus, showing up at their doors and phoning incessantly. In November 2005, one of the women complained to campus police, but Cho avoided criminal repercussions because she filed no charges.

Instead, police warned him and sent a referral to the university’s discipline department.

A second complaint of harassment came the following month. That same day, his roommates told police he was suicidal.

Cho was compelled to see a professional counselor. When he did, a Montgomery County judge signed off on a temporary detention order that landed Cho in a behavioral facility outside Radford.

In mid-December he spent one night at the center, where doctors determined that the college student was an imminent danger to himself or others.

But a psychologist decided that, although Cho was “flat” and his mood depressed, he had normal judgment.

Cho returned to Tech.

In August 2006, Cho moved into Harper, a suite-style dorm where he had five roommates. He didn’t get to know them and ate meals alone.

The fall semester passed. The holiday break. January.

On Feb. 9, 2007, he visited JND Pawnbrokers, about a 15-minute walk from campus in downtown Blacksburg, and picked up a .22-caliber Walther P22 pistol he had bought online — a gun that typically costs about $300 and can fire 10 bullets before being reloaded.

On March 12, he bought another gun at Roanoke Firearms on Cove Road. Cho presented his blue and white Virginia driver’s license, checkbook, green card and a credit card. The transaction was for $571 and was captured on the store’s video surveillance camera.

He left with a box of 50 cartridges and a 9 mm Glock 19 — a gun that holds 15 rounds and one in the chamber.

Privately, he spent time in the following month making videos and video photos of himself with the guns.

The images showed off his new buzz haircut and some other weapons, including a knife and hammer.

He began compiling a scrapbook of sorts, with printed photos from the videos. Eleven images in all.

In some of the portraits, he pointed the guns and weapons at his head. In others, he aimed at the camera.

He lined up boxes of hollow-point ammunition purchased from Wal-Mart and Dick’s Sporting Goods in nearby Christiansburg and attempted artistic close-ups.

“Don’t you just wish you finished me off when you had the chance? Don’t you just wish you killed me?” he wrote below the picture.

On the videos, he read from an 1,800-word rant against “hedonistic brats” and “sadistic snobs.”

“I didn’t have to do it. I could have left. I could have fled,” he said into the camera. “But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them.”

He refers to “martyrs like Eric and Dylan” — a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers.

He saved it all to his computer.

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

And a final written message on one of the 11 printed photos: “Let the revolution begin.”

Professor Liviu Librescu was always smiling, always pleasant, always in a hurry.

For a 76-year-old aeronautics engineer, he seemed to be flying high.

His students loved and respected the Romanian-born Holocaust survivor, a man who had been imprisoned in a labor camp and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a ghetto in Focsani, Romania, during World War II. After immigrating to Israel, he left for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year and then permanent residence.

On Monday morning, Librescu greeted his students in 204 Norris Hall. Then he started his class.

Solid mechanics. The theory of elasticity — a branch of physics that governs the response of solid material to applied stress.

Fascinating stuff for budding engineers. (Continued...)

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