We know that the side effects of many psychiatric drugs include obsessive thoughts involving suicide, death, and killing others. Yet often there is some actual thing that triggers the actual event. In this case, a columnist for the New York post may have stumbled on the answer
The following are facts. Make of them what you choose.It looks like Cho Seung-Hui had been meticulously planning his crime for months, but had not yet done anything. The TV story led him to a paranoid fantasy that the show was covertly exposing his plans, and that they were talking about him. Instead of surrendering his weapons, he surrendered to the voices in his head. The voices that were there thanks to the side effects of the drugs he had been on.
On Sunday night, April 15th, 12 hours before Cho Seung-Hui began his killing spree on the Virginia Tech campus, "Dateline NBC" devoted its entire show to telling the story of psychotic murderer Robert Hyde.
Hyde was a bright young man from Albuquerque who began to suffer a steady mental deterioration until, one day, in 2005, at different locations, he shot and killed five people.
Beyond the murders, the NBC show stressed that Hyde was a time bomb who was released from police custody and hospital care despite frightening episodes and warnings from many, including his family, that eventually there would be hell to pay, that eventually he would kill.
Hyde's story, it turned out, was roughly the same as Cho's life story, except for the killing part. Cho hadn't killed anyone, not yet.
The morning after NBC's show aired, Cho, described by schoolmates as an all-night TV watcher, shot and killed two people.
He then returned to his dormitory to mail a parcel to NBC. It included a note from Cho that began, "You forced me into a corner."
Then he traveled to a different section of the Virginia Tech campus, where he shot and murdered 30 more people.
Surely, Cho's diseased mind was prepped and primed to commit mass murder, at some point. But did NBC's show, the night before, serve as his prompt? In his afflicted state, did that "Dateline" installment push him over the edge? It's unlikely that we'll ever know.
Yet, the numerous similarities between the Hyde and Cho stories are inescapable. So is the timing. Cho's rampage began fewer than 12 hours after NBC's episode about Hyde ended. And Cho interrupted his rampage only to send NBC a you-pushed-me-to-do-this missive.
But even if it's all just a matter of bizarre, chilling coincidences, those coincidences seem too great to ignore or dismiss. They're worthy of your attention.
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