And then boom. Look what happened.

Coincidence or conspiracy... needs to be questioned further, IMO.

A Virginia Tech professor said Cho's work in creative-writing class was so disturbing that he had been referred to the school's counseling service.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman.

But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

Professor Roy told the New York Times she tutored Cho individually in the fall of 2005 after his writings and behavior had intimidated his classmates.

During the sessions, she said, he wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead.

"He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses," Roy told the newspaper.

She also said she had been so worried about tutoring Cho that she developed a plan with her assistant ? if she mentioned the name of a dead professor, the assistant would know to call campus security.

The Web site The Smoking Gun on Tuesday posted a play Cho allegedly wrote last year. Entitled "Richard McBeef," the violent, possibly darkly comic one-act play concerns an argument between the title character and his 13-year-old stepson, who accuses him of murdering his father and of pedophilia.

The play seems sympathetic to the stepfather, who tries to defend himself in vain against his wife and stepson's accusations. It ends on an ambiguous note, with the stepfather swinging a "deadly blow" at the boy.

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site.

"The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of."

He said he and other students "were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter."

Poet Nikki Giovanni, one of his professors, told a cable news channel Wednesday that her students were so unnerved by Cho's behavior that she had security check on her room and eventually had him taken out of her class.

Some students had stopped coming to class, saying Cho was taking photos of them with his cell phone, she said.

Giovanni told the Washington Post that after one instance when Cho recited his poetry in class, seven out of 70 students showed up for the next meeting.

She asked about the absences, and was told the other students were afraid of Cho.

"It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating," Giovanni said of his writing. "At first I thought, OK, he's trying to see what the parameters are. Kids curse and talk about a lot of different things. He stayed in that spot. I said, 'You can't do that.' He said, 'Yes, I can.' I said, 'No, not in my class.'"

"We always joked we were just waiting for him to do something, waiting to hear about something he did," said another classmate, Stephanie Derry. "But when I got the call it was Cho who had done this, I started crying, bawling."

A Virginia Tech police spokesman said Tuesday Cho had been issued a speeding ticket on April 7 for driving at 44 mph in a 25-mph zone on campus. His court date was set for May 23.

Cho has not been tied to two campus bomb threats in the past three weeks, but a note detailing a third bomb threat was found near the bodies in Norris Hall.

On Wednesday morning, yet another bomb threat had campus police evacuate Burrus Hall, another school building.