The Virginia Tech Massacre (As Witnessed By A Gunshot Victim)

The gunman in the black leather jacket came into the classroom shooting and did not leave until everything was still, said Virginia Tech sophomore Derek O’Dell.
“He didn’t say anything; that’s the weirdest part,” said O’Dell, who was shot in the arm during Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech. “No screaming, no yelling. He just shot people.”
O’Dell, a 2005 graduate of Cave Spring High School in Roanoke County, said he was in German class on the second floor of Norris Hall when he heard what he thought was a hammer banging on the wall of a nearby room.
Suddenly, the door swung open and the shooter, described as an Asian man wearing a jacket and a maroon baseball cap, mechanically opened fire, reloaded his handgun and then started shooting again, O’Dell said.
“He was very quick in reloading, so it looked like he’d been trained,” said the 20-year-old biological sciences student.
O’Dell said he crouched under his desk while some of his classmates, and possibly their professor, were shot around him.
“No one was really moving,” he said.
O’Dell estimated that 10 to 15 of the roughly 20 students in his class were shot. He did not know how many were killed.
At least 33 people were killed in Monday’s shootings at Norris Hall, a classroom building, and earlier at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory. Authorities had not identified the gunman late Monday night.
After the shooter left O’Dell’s classroom, O’Dell said that he and a man who appeared uninjured shut the door and barricaded it with their feet, fearing the gunman would return.
“We heard more gunshots down the hall and I realized I had been shot,” O’Dell said.
He said he wrapped his belt around the wound on his upper right arm to stop the bleeding.
As they held shut the wooden door, which did not have a lock, the shooter returned and tried to muscle inside, O’Dell said.
“He got the door open maybe an inch or two and then we were able to shut it again,” O’Dell recalled.
The man shot at the door from outside and then left, O’Dell said. More shots were fired outside the room, and the shooter came back again and tried the door. Again he shot at the door and walked away.
The shooter was found in Norris Hall after he killed himself, authorities said.
O’Dell said he was taken from the building after police arrived.
He was treated and released from Montgomery Regional Hospital.
O’Dell’s father, Roger O’Dell, said he heard about the ordeal after his sister-in-law left him a message between 9:30 and 10 a.m., and his son called from the hospital about 10:20 a.m.
Roger O’Dell said he did not know if anyone from Virginia Tech tried to contact him.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” Roger O’Dell said.
“And the magnitude ... I didn’t realize it at first.”