Shortly before Seung-hui Cho gunned down 30 people in Norris Hall, the Virginia Tech senior apparently mailed a large package to NBC News containing rambling messages about his anger at the wealthy and alluding to the slaughter that was about to take place.
"You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option," Cho said in one of the QuickTime videos included in the package, in which he compared himself to Jesus and the two shooters at Columbine High School.
NBC received the package today and broadcast excerpts of the videos this evening on "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams."
The package also contained more than two dozen photos of the Cho, including 11 of him aggressively thrusting pistols at the camera. Cho, 23, did not explain his exact motives for the killings, but expressed rage and resentment in an 1,800-word, profanity-laced diatribe that Williams described as a "multimedia manifesto."
"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," the student said on one of the videos, several of which looked like they were recorded inside a car. "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."
Cho had begun working on the materials at least six days before the massacre, NBC reported. Some of the messages appeared to have been taped after the first shootings at a campus residence hall on Monday.
The package was addressed simply to "NBC" and mailed to the network's Rockefeller Center headquarters in Manhattan. It postmarked in at 9:01 a.m. EDT Monday, less than two hours after Cho shot two people in a dorm. It was sent through overnight mail, but because it had the wrong Zip Code, the package did not arrive until this morning.
Williams said that an alert New York postal employee noticed the return address from Blacksburg, Va., and notified security officials at NBC, who donned gloves to open the package.
Network security officials opened the package. They made copies of the letter and videos for the news division and turned the materials over to the FBI agents in New York.
Throughout the afternoon, NBC hyped the existence of package extensively on its cable channel, MSNBC, as well as MSNBC.com, noting that the network's 6:30 p.m. newscast would report on the materials Cho mailed.
At the same time, some questioned whether the network should air the material. "Is this ethical?" asked Tucker Carlson on MSNBC shortly before the broadcast.
Analyst Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI profiler, is providing his expertise to NBC's coverage of the shooting's aftermath. Nonetheless, he said he disagreed with the network's decision to broadcast Cho's words.
"This is what this guy wants," Van Zandt said. "He wants to be able to reach his hand out of the grave and grab us by the throat and make us listen to him one more time.
"I'm going to be part of it, but there's part of me that still doesn't like it that we're going to live this guy's fantasy out for him, even though he's been dead for two days."
On "NBC Nightly News," Williams said that "we know we are, in effect, airing the words of a murderer here tonight."
"We're working with law enforcement on some this because we don't want to create any more heroes and or martyrs from this," the anchor said later, adding that more of the materials from Cho's package would air Thursday morning on NBC's "Today."