The Cho Background Data

One of the major obstacles in trying to follow the VaTech story and maintain accurate reference materials for future discussion and analysis, is the continually changing articles posted by the mainstream media to their respective web sites. The news organizations edit, move, delete and cleanse the articles on a constant basis. Simply bookmarking an article's URL isn't sufficient. What is left for the researcher to do is archive the websites locally to a drive and constantly check the sites to see what has changed in the article text.

This leads to a nightmare process for fact checking and referencing sources. It also brings up the possibility that reported facts change or get lost in the dynamic flow of the story's evolution. To help piece together this story for the conspiracy theory researchers and enthusiasts, as well as for my own reference, I'm going to try to post the details that I believe we should keep in mind as we peel the onion. I'm going to provide a tag for this series of posts, which I will call "Cho Research", so that it will be easier to click a single link and see the collected posts in a chronological order. I'm going to place information into a descriptive order that matches the time lines and subject matter as closely as possible. For example, "The Cho Background Data", "The Cho Academic Data", etc...

I do not want to edit the posts after I have published them unless a link is dead or to add clarity when the validity of an item is in question. What I plan to do is leave the wording of the original post and simply add dated notations to any post in question within brackets. I hope to use these postings as a foundation to build upon when the more obscure aspects of the research process come into play, as you or I will be able to link to this information when citing references.

With this information in mind, here is a compiled and numbered overview of Cho's family background:


1) Cho’s maternal grandparents are reported to have been from a family of "well educated land owners" who fled from the north during the Korean conflict.

2) Little is known about his paternal grandparents, all that is known about Cho’s father’s family is that they were poor and from the south.

3) Cho’s father worked in the Saudi oilfields for 10 years (exact dates unknown)and wed Cho’s mother in an arranged marriage when he was 39 years of age and she was 29.

4) Cho’s extended family in Korea remember that as a boy he was quiet and they were worried that he may have had a “mental problem” as well as a report that he was diagnosed as being “clinically withdrawn” after the family’s move to America.

5) Cho’s older sister is remembered as being “super-intelligent” who graduated from Princeton in 2004 and has worked before as an intern at the State Department’s International Labor Office and at the US Embassy in Bangkok under Princeton’s International Internship Program. Her current position with the State Department as a contractor in the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office was, “set up by President George W Bush to coordinate the reconstruction program in Iraq and offers jobs to "highly skilled and motivated United States citizens" to work at the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, according to State Department documents."

6) There are also reports that Cho was diagnosed with autism by American Doctors.

7) The mother is widely reported to attend “Korean Church” (no denomination mentioned) and prayed for her son when he was a child. She is also reported to have asked Cho’s roommates at Virginia Tech to “help” her son.

8) The maternal grandparents are reportedly showing great hostility and anger at their grandson.