No one can tell me that if some were armed, it would not have saved lives...
Sunday NT Times
Sunday NT Times
April 22, 2007
Students Recount Desperate Minutes Inside Norris Hall
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and KATIE ZEZIMA
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 21 — The Elementary German class was under way in Room 207, reviewing German translations of computer parlance. A young man peeked in, saying nothing, and withdrew. Students who noticed him thought that either he was searching for someone or trying to locate his class. He did the same thing across the hall in Room 206, and again in Room 204.
Later, some of the students would conclude that he was not actually looking for anyone but was gauging mass — calculating a plan for the limited time he was likely to have, so that he could achieve the greatest carnage.
During the brutal interlude that Seung-Hui Cho spent last Monday on the second floor of Norris Hall, the engineering building at Virginia Tech, he would slaughter 30 people in a matter of minutes, in a furious fusillade of gunfire. From interviews with eyewitnesses who survived the attack, these are accounts of what happened.
Sometime just past 9:30 a.m., Mr. Cho reentered Room 206, Advanced Hydrology, a graduate level class taught by Prof. G. V. Loganathan. He shot the teacher and then turned and fired at everyone else in the class.
Guillermo Colman, 38, dove to the floor and huddled against the radiator; another student fell on top of him. At first, he thought this might be a stunt of some sort, something with ketchup substituted for blood, until a bullet hit behind his left ear.
The gunman left, and the students who were still conscious heard gunfire in nearby classrooms. It was not long before the killer returned and pumped more bullets into the students sprawled on the floor. Mr. Colman’s head was bleeding, and for that reason he might not have been shot again, and he lived.
In Room 204, the students in Solid Mechanics were learning about strain displacements when they heard what they took to be construction noise, what to them sounded like an enormous hammer pounding.
“It was like someone would hit a nail, pull back, hit a nail, pull back,” said Alec Calhoun, a junior in the class. “Then, after about three hits, we started hearing screams.”
Prof. Liviu Librescu, the teacher, said, “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”
The big hammer was a gun.
One student shouted, “That’s gunfire, I’m getting out of here.” He grabbed his belongings and dashed into the hallway, trailed by one other student. But the killer was in the hallway. The first student was shot twice, but managed with assistance from his classmate to hobble downstairs. They tried the doors, but they had been chained shut and they could not get them open, so they ducked into a ground-floor classroom to hide.
Professor Librescu said, “Someone call 911.”
From the back of the room, Mr. Calhoun waved his cellphone in the air. He had already called.
Desks were hurriedly flipped on their sides as protective shields, and the students crouched behind them. Four students had skipped class, because they had a homework assignment for third period that they had not completed. Another happened to just then be in the bathroom down the hall, and a professor wounded in the hallway ran in and locked both of them inside.
Others, hearing the gunfire, had locked themselves in the lounge and the offices on the floor. The classrooms alone were without locks.
Fearing the door led to death and recognizing that it could not be locked, the Solid Mechanics students chose the windows and whatever fate they would bring. “It was the most helpless feeling I had known,” said Caroline Merrey, a senior. Soon after class was to end, she had a telephone interview scheduled for her first job as a graduate.
One of the students opened a window, leapt onto the windowsill and kicked out the screen. The teacher was yelling at the students to get out as quickly as possible. Students clambered through and began dropping the two stories toward grass that had been drenched by a Sunday rain. Ms. Merrey tossed her knapsack and windbreaker out the window and climbed onto the sill: “I hung from the window from my fingertips and I just closed my eyes and said to myself, ‘Here we go.’ ”
She landed next to a friend moaning that he had broken an ankle.
Nine or 10 jumped, and Mr. Calhoun said he was the last to go. As he stood on the sill, he wavered. He saw students ahead of him fall and get injured, screaming in pain. One would break a leg.
Jump? Don’t jump? A gunman controlled the hall. He spied a shrub and aimed for it. He successfully landed in it, bounced off and finished on his back on the grass. Picking himself up, he sped for the nearest building.
Matt Webster had not yet jumped. Professor Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who was 76, had his weight against the door, but the gunman bulled his way in and shot the professor and then fired at the remaining students.
“He walked over to everyone individually and stood over us and shot down on us,” Mr. Webster said. A bullet grazed Mr. Webster’s head and penetrated his bicep.
A woman near him was moaning from her wounds, and another student was hit in the leg.
Oddly, in all the mayhem, there were no screams. “There was no time for it,” Mr. Webster said. “It all happened so quickly.”
The gunfire had roused the attention of others on the floors above and below, and most of them sought refuge in their rooms. Kevin P. Granata, a professor with an office on the third floor, ventured downstairs to investigate. Mr. Cho killed him in the hallway.
Gene Cole, 52, a custodian, was talking to his supervisor on the first floor when a secretary came downstairs and alerted them to sounds of gunfire. Mr. Cole took the elevator to the second floor. He came upon a wounded woman on the floor, writhing in pain, unable to speak. Before he could get to her, the gunman charged out of a classroom, raised his gun and fired five shots at Mr. Cole. All missed.
“I felt the bullets whiz by my head,” he said.
He darted down the stairs, yelling at his boss to get out. Mr. Cole fled through the auditorium exits. His supervisor, Mr. Cole said, hid in the bathroom.
The Issues in Scientific Computing class in Room 205 had heard the gunfire. Zachary Petkewicz had shoved a table against the door and held it shut. Mr. Cho managed to get the door open six inches, but no further. He fired two shots into the door, splintering wood but hitting no one, and emptying his clip. One bullet struck the podium, and the other hit a window. The students could hear him reloading as he retreated.
In Elementary German, Room 207, students had heard noise outside, but dismissed it as construction racket. The door was closed. Mr. Cho opened it, and before it hit the doorstop, he was firing.
“There was emptiness in his eyes,” said Derek O’Dell, a sophomore. “He was like a stone.”
He shot Christopher J. Bishop, the teacher, then turned on the class. Students dropped to the floor, jostling for cover. The gunfire continued — 10, 20, maybe 30 shots. The volley covered little more than a minute, but it felt like much longer.
Mr. O’Dell was hit in the right arm. “I was under my desk,” he said. “Then I started belly crawling military-style to the back of the room, while he was firing, and hid under another desk.”
Kevin Sterne, 21, a senior, was shot twice in the thigh, his femur artery ruptured. Drawing on his knowledge as an Eagle Scout, he snatched an electrical cord and wrapped it fast around his leg, stanching the bleeding and saving his life.
Five were dead and most of the others wounded. The four or five who had not been hit lay still on the floor, feigning death to live. There was no hope of escaping through windows here, not on this side of the hallway. Only the bottoms of the windows opened, with a crank, and the opening was too slim. There was no lawn below, just concrete. One student cranked open a window and began screaming for help.
The survivors heard gunfire ringing in another classroom. Trey Perkins feared the killer would return and finish them off: “I told people that were still up and conscious, ‘Just be quiet because we don’t want him to think there are people in here because he’ll come back in.’ ”
Using his belt as a tourniquet, Mr. O’Dell stopped the bleeding in his arm and then leap-frogged across a half-dozen desks to the front of the room. He slammed the door shut and barricaded it with his foot, leaning against the blackboard to avoid shots coming through the door. Two classmates propped their feet against the door. The others tried shoving the podium over, but it was bolted to the floor.
Sure enough, the gunman returned. He got the door open an inch, before the students shut it again. He squeezed off half a dozen shots into the door, and left.
Hearing the disturbances, Clay Violand, a junior in the Intermediate French class in Room 211 told Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, the professor, to push a desk against the door. She glanced out in the hallway first, and pulled her head back with a look of frozen terror. She told her students to call 911 and get down. She shoved a desk against the door, but the barricade did not hold.
“I saw a gun emerge into view,” Mr. Violand said. “Following the gun was a man.”
He ducked under his desk.
The professor and nine students were killed.
“Shot after shot went off and I never felt anything,” Mr. Violand said. “I played dead and tried to look as lifeless as possible.”
He whispered to a classmate, “If he thinks you’re dead, then he won’t kill you.”
And he prayed: “I prayed that an invisible blanket of protection be placed around me.”
Colin Goddard had called 911 and then dropped the phone, the line still open to the dispatcher. A bullet hit him in the left leg, breaking his femur. He, too, lay motionless, and the gunman left.
Moments later, he was back. Lying still on the floor, Mr. Goddard saw shoes approach, heard additional shots fired, then the shoes stopped next to him. He felt two more bullets rip into him, in the shoulder and buttocks. He was still conscious, and he would live. So would Mr. Violand. The shoes moved away, headed toward the front of the room. Somewhere nearby, one more shot rang out.
The police had burst through. Mr. Cho had turned his gun on himself.
Alicia C. Shepard contributed reporting.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
