Making of a Massacre

As Steger and his lieutenants debated in the University Board Room in Burress Hall at around 9:45 a.m., a police report came in: there had been another shooting. Steger thought he heard something that sounded like gunshots. He looked up, he recalled to NEWSWEEK. He wondered if the noise was coming from a nearby construction site. Then he noticed police running toward Norris Hall. Steger ordered security to lock the doors to the president's office. "I thought it could be a target," he says.

Derek O'Dell, the sophomore biology major taking Elementary German, also thought the popping sounds were coming from nearby construction. Someone in the class wondered aloud if the noises were gunshots, but someone else said no; gunshots are a lot louder. Then a man dressed in a black leather jacket, dark-colored jeans and a cap entered the room. He did not say anything or hesitate.

He shot the teacher, Christopher James Bishop, in the head. Then he gunned down the people near the front of the classroom, room 207, and started down the aisle, executing students. O'Dell dove under his desk and began to crawl toward the back of the classroom. He could feel tingling where a bullet had entered and exited his upper arm. O'Dell heard the shooter reload his gun ("in like two seconds") and methodically and purposefully resume his killing.

And then he left. O'Dell looked up at his few surviving classmates. "Their faces were white," O'Dell recalled. No one spoke, lest the killer return.

Next door, in room 211, Madame Jocelyne Couture-Nowak was teaching Intermediate French when the banging began. "Please tell me that's not what I think it is," she said. "We told her it was no big deal," Colin Goddard, 21, later recounted to NEWSWEEK. "There has been a lot of construction going on at Norris—people were complaining about it all semester." Still worried, Couture-Nowak opened the door and peeked into the hallway. She immediately shut the door. "She had this terrified look on her face," Goddard recalled. "Call 911," she said.

Goddard was clutching his phone, talking to the 911 operator (who was having trouble understanding him), when he glimpsed the killer. "He just started down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times," he says. "He didn't say anything. He didn't demand anything. He was just shooting." Goddard dropped the phone, fearful the shooter would hear the 911 operator. A classmate picked it up and begged the police to hurry. The killer turned toward the woman and shot her in the back; hearing a voice could have gotten his attention, Goddard thinks. Then he shot Goddard in the leg. Goddard played dead. "Nobody tried to get up and be a hero," he recalled.