It would have appeared on AFV except Cho didn't get hit in the nuts.
The package that arrived yesterday at NBC headquarters in New York was almost immediately flagged as suspicious, because it had been mailed from Blacksburg, Va., and bore the return name A. Ishmael. Labels: crime drama, epic, murder, school news, television
Last night, the anchor of “The NBC Nightly News,” Brian Williams, called the materials a “multimedia manifesto” and said they were mailed by Cho Seung-Hui, who has been identified as the killer of 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.
NBC executives had no explanation for why the network was singled out to receive the package, and nothing in the materials explained the action. Nothing on the envelope or in the package cited a specific individual at NBC.
The arrival in the mailroom set in motion intense decision making, much of it directed by Steve Capus, president of NBC News.
An NBC security officer, Brian Patton, opened the package, a large-size Express Mail envelope. The package had been intended to arrive in one day, but the address was wrong. Instead of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, it was “30 Rockefeller Ave.,” and the ZIP code was wrong.
Mr. Capus said Mr. Patton and everyone else at NBC who handled the original materials wore gloves. Mr. Capus did not see the contents until after copies had been made.
“I first learned of it just before noon,” he said.
He and others at NBC saw that the envelope had been mailed from a post office in Blacksburg at 9:01 a.m. on Monday, putting Mr. Cho’s visit to the post office within the two hours between the first two killings in a dormitory and the later mass attacks in a classroom building.
NBC quickly contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the state police in Virginia. Officials from the New York field office of the F.B.I. went to Rockefeller Center to pick up the originals.
Mr. Capus described the contents as one DVD disc and 23 pages of a preformatted document file with text and photographs interspersed. NBC showed many of the photos on its newscast. In the pictures, Mr. Cho poses with guns or other weapons like a knife and a hammer.
Mr. Capus said the written material was dominated by “threats and gibberish.”
“It was incredibly difficult to follow,” he added.
He said the on-camera statements were much the same. In one section, Mr. Cho referred to the gunmen in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Nowhere did Mr. Cho refer to specific people or specific acts, Mr. Capus said. The student did not admit the killings in the dormitory and did not say he was about to go on a shooting rampage.
The details of dealing with law enforcement and trying to decide what could be used on television accounted for NBC’s not covering the story until Mr. Williams’s newscast, Mr. Capus said.
In an interview last night on MSNBC, Mr. Williams said NBC had been concerned about the sensitivities of broadcasting as much of the material as it did.
“This was a sick business tonight, going on the air with this,” he said.
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