It's clear why profilers compared him to the students who shot their classmates at Columbine High School — it's the same kind of "me against the world" attitude.
Just minutes after firing two fatal shots at the Virginia Tech dormitory on Monday, Cho Seung-Hui returned to his own dorm room and made the final preparations to mail what appears to be a video confession.
"When the time came, I did it," Cho says in the video. "I had to."
In a separate written document, he includes 29 photos he apparently took of himself. He looks like a normal, smiling college student in only the first two. In the rest he presents the stern face and strikes the pose that was very likely what his victims saw later on Monday.
In 11 of the pictures, he aims handguns at the camera, likely the ones he bought in the past two months. In his 1,800-word diatribe, he expresses rage, resentment, and a desire to get even — with exactly whom, he never says.
"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," he says. "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."
Much of it is incoherent, laced with profanity. He rails against hedonism and Christianity.
"You just love to crucify me," he says. "You loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and raping my soul all this time."
Though he tried to cover his tracks by filing down the serial number on his guns, he obviously wanted the world to know who was responsible for the worst mass shooting in America. He began working on these materials at least six days beforehand.
"I didn't have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It's not for me, for my children, for my brothers and sisters that you f**k. I did it for them," he says.
The package containing Cho's recordings and written material was postmarked at 9:01 Monday morning, after the shooting at the dorm and just minutes before he began firing in the classroom building.
The package, addressed to NBC, arrived in the regular mail system late yesterday. It was routinely handled, not addressed to any specific person, and was opened today. NBC News immediately contacted the FBI and Virginia State Police, and agreed to hold off on reporting its contents while investigators pursued potential leads.