I’m sitting here watching the CNN coverage of this horrific story. How could a 23 year old think this was his only course of action? Listening to the accounts of the survivors is horrifying. One group of students saw the gunman in the hall and decided to barricade the door with tables and desks. The gunman tried to get in the classroom but could not. He even shot the door trying to get the ones blocking the door away. Those students saved their lives and the lives of the others in that classroom. After unsuccessfully gaining entrance, the gunman moved down the hall away from them. I can’t imagine the terror that these poor college kids faced. A classroom should be a place where a kid can feel safe, not somewhere they need to be worried for their life. I haven’t heard any cause for motive, but one girl stated that she heard horrible screams and then maniacal laughter. Someone would have to be really unstable to be able to cause this massacre and then laugh.
Inside Norris, the attack began with a thunderous sound from Room 206 — “what sounded like an enormous hammer,” said Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior who was in a solid mechanics lecture in a classroom next door. Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks to make hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said. I must’ve been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last,” said Calhoun, of Waynesboro, Va. He landed in a bush and ran. Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at his professor, who had stayed behind, apparently to prevent the gunman from opening the door.
The instructor was killed, Calhoun said.
Oh, it’s too horrific for words…
So sad, so very sad.
Tragic!