Making of a Massacre

Back in room 207, O'Dell scrambled over the desks and sprinted to the door. "I knew if he got back through that door we would all be dead," he recalled. He and three other survivors took turns trying to brace the door with their feet and hands, while trying to keep their bodies away from it. It was awkward, but there wasn't much else they could do. The podium was bolted to the floor, and the chairs and desks were too light to use as bulwarks. The second-story windows seemed too high to jump from (though some students did leap out of other classrooms). The students spoke in hushed whispers. They could hear blood gurgling from someone's throat and another gasping for breath.

Within two minutes, the gunman was back. He beat loudly on the door and budged it open an inch. Firing about five shots around the door handle, he gave up. There were still plenty of other targets.

In room 211, the door burst open again. The killer had returned. "He came in and started going around the room again, shooting people," Goddard recalled. Up one aisle, down another, until he reached Goddard. Still feigning death, Goddard felt a bullet punch into his shoulder, another into his buttocks. Lying still, he heard a few more shots. Then a single shot. Then quiet.

The police arrived, yelling at the survivors to put up their hands. Cho had chain-locked the main doors of Norris Hall, and police had to use a shotgun to blast their way in. It may have been when Cho heard the shotgun blast that he put his pistol to his head and blew his face off. He had fired as many as 200 bullets.

Virginia State Police Sgt. Matthew Brannock, 31, had taken cover behind his car. He had felt vulnerable without his bulletproof vest and ran up into a breezeway that connects the two sides of the H-shaped Norris Hall. When the shooting stopped, he ran in. "The amount of blood in the hallway—" Brannock later recalled, groping for words. "There were bodies all over. It was just overwhelming. I had never been in a war environment, but I thought, this must be what it's like. Disaster and chaos. People screaming and crying, sobbing out in panic."

Snapping out of it, Brannock helped carry out a badly wounded woman, while trying not to slip on the blood. Three more times he went back to pick up the wounded, until they were all evacuated. The shock began to sink back in. He has not slept much since.