[Dion]

The signs were there but nobody followed up on them or took them seriously. Maybe if they did this senseless massacre could have been avoided.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl.../International

Some students who shared writing classes with Mr. Cho last year say the student had appeared troubled long before the campus massacre, evidenced by the horrific themes that anchored the one-act scripts he submitted for peer-review in a playwriting class.

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," Ian MacFarlane, a former classmate of Mr. Cho and a current employee of America Online, wrote in a blog on AOL yesterday and posted two scripts he said Mr. Cho wrote. "The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of.

"When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap."

The plays have a dark tone students said was typical of Mr. Cho's writing. In one, a high-school student describes his desire to kill his teacher. "I wanna watch him bleed like the way he made us kids bleed," a character says.

More than one professor in the school's English department harboured the same fear.