David finished his accounting test early Monday morning and headed back to his apartment. He only made it to the main door of Norris Hall. “There was this chain on the door,” David told The Examiner, asking that he not be identified by his real name. “I didn’t think anything of it and kind of walked around the first floor.”
Around the corner, he ran into a professor and a building janitor. The professor said that he’d just seen an e-mail from Virginia Tech’s administration saying that there had been a shooting on campus.
“I was really surprised,” the 21-year-old junior from Springfield said, his voice quivering. “Where should I go?”
Not knowing what else to do, David trudged back upstairs to his accounting class. A woman in his class followed close behind.
“She said she heard screaming,” David said. “No one was taking the test now. We all just looked at each other.”
Then they heard popping sounds from the second floor.
“At first we thought it was construction, ’cause they were working on a building next door,” David said.
The sounds grew louder. And they were accompanied by screams.
Someone in the accounting class burst into tears. Others whispered a Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer.
The students and the accounting professor shut the classroom door. But there was no lock. And there wasn’t anything big enough to barricade the door. They cracked the door and saw another professor waiting in his office. He gestured the class into his office.
About 25 people squeezed themselves into the office and locked the door.
The shooting continued and then all was silent, David said.
Minutes passed and there were footsteps in the hallway. A radio crackled with voices. A student opened the office door.
“They were the SWAT team,” David said. “They said, put your hands on your head, shout down the stairs and tell them you’re coming.”
David isn’t sure how he missed gunman Cho Seung-Hui as he wandered through Norris that morning. A police officer said it was “a miracle” that he survived.
“It’s one of those things that’s just totally random,” he said. “You finish your test a few minutes earlier and who knows? It could have been you.”
