Posted at 12:51 a.m., Tuesday, April 17, 2007
A typical day on campus, and then carnage began
By Michael E. Ruane and Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post
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"It couldn't have been much more normal," said Richard Mallalieu, one of Liviu Librescu's students.
Suddenly, a young man walked into the German class with two handguns and shot instructor Christopher James Bishop in the head.
Then he began firing at the students. Shot after shot, "some 30 shots in all," said Trey Perkins, who was seated in the back of the German class. There were about 15 students, and Perkins said the relentless gunman had a "very serious but very calm look on his face."
"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Va., a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. "And the shots seemed like it lasted forever."
The gunman left, and Perkins, sounding shaken in a telephone interview, said "three or four" students appeared to be dead.
In room 204, the engineering students were watching Librescu's slides on the subject of virtual work when they began to hear shots from what sounded like an adjacent classroom, said Mallalieu, 23, an engineering student from Luray, Va.
"At first I tried to convince myself they weren't gunshots, that if anything, maybe a presentation was going on, to try to convince myself it wasn't," Mallalieu said in a telephone interview from his Blacksburg apartment. "It became evident pretty quick what was going on."
Plus, he said, "There were a few screams." At first, he got down and hid behind a desk as Librescu held the classroom door closed. Then the students went to the windows.
As they pondered whether to jump, the gunshots went on. "A steady pop, pop, pop, pop," Mallalieu said. The gunfire was "more or less continuous." He said he heard 20 to 30 shots as he and other students noticed there was grass below and decided it was time to jump. "It was scary," he said, "but it wasn't as panicked as you might think it was."
The engineering students pushed open the windows and started to jump.
door held closed
Back in 207, Perkins, a student named Derek O'Dell and a female student headed toward the heavy wooden classroom door and held it shut with their feet.
Other students were crying. One vomited. Two minutes later, Perkins said, the gunman came back. But now he couldn't get in. So he started shooting through the door, Perkins said, before leaving again. "Fortunately, we were lying down and weren't in front of the door," he said.
Whispering and trying to compose himself, Perkins, an Eagle Scout, said he told Derek and the female student to keep their feet on the door in case the gunman returned.
Perkins said he went around the room, tending to the injured students. A student named Garrett was shot in both legs. Perkins wrapped his gray pullover sweater around Garrett's right leg.
Perkins used Garrett's tank top to wrap the other leg. A female student was shot in the mouth, he said. Perkins saw a sweatshirt on a desk and covered her mouth with it.
"He knew exactly what he was doing," Perkins said of the gunman. "I have no idea why he did what he decided to do. I just can't say how lucky I am to have made it."
In 204, the students had opened the windows and were jumping for their lives.
"It's kind of hard to believe that something like this would happen," Mallalieu said. "You hear things about Columbine. ... But you never think you'd be involved in that. But at that point, I realized it was really happening."
hung from ledge
Mallalieu, the son of a chemist, said he climbed out, hung for a moment from the ledge, looked down and let go. "I kind of tried to roll when I landed," he said.
He suffered some scratches. He's not sure everybody got out. Those who did ran for a nearby campus building. As they did, Mallalieu said it sounded as though the gunshots, and the screams, were now coming from 204. He said he heard about 40 shots in all.
There was little conversation as the students fled. "At that point it was just, get away," he said. "I think everybody kind of had the same feeling about what was going on. We didn't really need to talk about it.
"I don't think it's settled in yet," he said. "I haven't heard how my other classmates who I think were still left behind, you know, what happened to them, be it good or bad."
something happened
Brittany Zachar, 18, a freshman who lives at West Ambler Johnston, the dormitory where the first shooting happened, decided to attend an economics class even though she saw a handwritten sign on pink paper posted in the dorm bathroom saying something had happened and going to class was optional.
As she walked on campus, she heard the pop of gunshots coming from the direction of Norris Hall. She saw police running.
"I heard the gunshots and just sprinted," she says, adding that she took cover in another school building.
A man identifying himself as one of Bishop's relatives said the family had no comment. Last night, a woman who answered the phone at Librescu's home and identified herself as his wife said she did not know whether he had survived.
