Brian Williams‘ intro on NBC Nightly News:
“Good evening. We now know what the Virginia Tech gunman was doing during that two-hour period between shootings on campus. He was compiling before going to the post office and mailing via overnight mail what can only be described as a multimedia manifesto, containing video, still pictures and a lengthy document to NBC headquarters here in New York. The envelope was sent from Blacksburg, Virginia on Monday morning.”
Then Williams showed a color copy of the USPS envelope…
you can see the hand writing of the clerk checking it in at 9:01 a.m. but because the gunman had the wrong zip code, and there are three different scratched out attempts, the zip code had to be corrected and didn’t arrive here until today. an alert new york city postal service employee spotted the return address and he spotted the return address name ishmail and brought it to our attention by hand. when the package arrived on the desk of our news division president today we called federal authorities. tonight they have the original envelope. this one is a color copy. we have been poring over a copy of the contents we made and we are still going through it. we are sensitive to how this will be seen by those affected and we know we are in effect airing the words of a murderer here tonight. we asked our correspondent pete williams to be with us tonight. >> after seeing this material, it’s clear why the profilers have compared cho seung-hui to the students who shot their classmates at columbine high school. in forceful language he expresses 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 whale — mate what appears to be a video confession. >> when the time came, i did it. >> in a separate written document he includes 24 photos he apparently took of himself. he looks normal in only the first two. in the rest he strikes the pose that was likely what his victims saw on monday. he aims handguns at a camera. in his 1,800 world diatribe, he expresses rage, resentment and a desire to get even. with whom, he never says. >> you had 100 billion chances and ways to have avoided today 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. >> much of it is incoherent laced with profanity. >> you loved crucifying me. >> though he tried to cover his tracks by filing down the serial numbers 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. i will no longer run. if not for me, for my children, for my brothers and sisters, the [beep] i did it for them. >> and tonight the investigators tell us they have interviewed the postal clerk who received this package in blacksburg, and he said he recalls receiving just the single package. to us and everything i read in this package. >> it’s not addressed to anyone. >> now, pete, the first piece of sound we used there and subsequent pieces were in the past tense. i wrote down, he says, the time came and i did it. i had to do what i did. which led to speculation among some of us that he, perhaps, in addition to mailing something between to — the two shootings, actually videotaped himself. >> there’s no way to know. we can tell by looking at the information on the computer …