Continuing Coverage by:

Shooting Survivor ‘Still Piecing It Together’

May 21, 2007

By Michael Owens

WAYNESBORO, Va. — Guilt, questions and paradox have plagued Alec Calhoun in the month since he jumped from a classroom window to escape the deadly Virginia Tech rampage.

There’s the nagging guilt for the two-story plunged to safety just as gunman Cho Seung-Hui burst into the room and shot Calhoun’s friends.

Sure, the survivor’s guilt is "ridiculous," admits the 20-year-old Waynesboro High School alumnus, but he still laments "leaving them [friends] behind."

And then there’s dealing with the memory of Cho, a man with two faces, as far as Calhoun and other survivors are concerned.

One version is of the college kid without confidants to share the pain and loneliness that apparently lurked deep within his heart.

"Pity" is the first word to spill from Calhoun’s lips when initially asked for a perspective on the gunman.

Even a university memorial of stones dedicated to each murdered victim also includes a stone for Cho, according to media reports.

Virginia Tech students littered his stone with notes professing sorrow over his pain in life and a wish that they could have befriended him to avert the massacre.

As the interview with Calhoun continues, however, the notion of pity seems to evaporate and the survivor speaks of Cho, murderer of 32 people in just under three hours, as though a second person exists.

This other version is the one with the rambling manifesto sent to the media as well as a twisted desire to take down as many people as possible.

To repeatedly broadcast Cho’s videotaped manifesto "lets him win," Calhoun replied when asked about the nonstop media exposure.

Cho also would "win" if school administrators decide to raze Norris Hall, where 30 people were killed before the gunman took his own life.

Asked about this apparent paradox, Calhoun, a wiry man with a red beard, smiled and sputtered midway through multiple explanations.

"Maybe … there’s the person and then the shooter," he said while shaking his head.

Missing pieces

When it comes to reconstructing the crime and flight for safety, not everything remains crystal clear to Calhoun.

He was sitting through a solid-mechanics class taught by professor Liviu Librescu, the Holocaust survivor who died blocking the door in a an attempt to keep Cho out, according to media reports.

"It was kind of like hammers, but louder," Calhoun said of the first shots from the hallway.

"My first thought was why were they doing construction so early at 9:30 [a.m.] when class is going on?"

The student is still foggy on the run to the back of the class, where he apparently knocked over desks to create some type of barricade. Calhoun assumes he did this only because he recalls telling people about it the next day, but lacks any memory of actually doing it.

His memory is also spotty when it comes to the sprint to safety after he jumped from the window and hit the ground.

The fall made a definite impact ’ "It really knocked the wind out of me. I remember hitting the ground and trying to scream."

His next memory is of being near another building where he called family and friends on his cell phone.

Recollections also include the friend who figured out how to kick open the triple-paned windows.

"Considering the circumstances, we were decently calm," Calhoun said.

Coping

Rumors about the living and the dead ran rampant in the hours following the shooting. Even so, Calhoun knew within two hours of his escape that professor Librescu was dead.

At 76 years of age, Librescu was hard of hearing, and some speculated that his eyes were starting to fail him, too.

Each session of the solid-mechanics class was to end at 9:55 a.m. Yet Librescu rarely failed to glance at his watch at that exact time each class, only to continue scrawling notes on the blackboard for three more minutes.

The professor seemed confused when the first gunshots rang out. And Calhoun is unsure if Librescu even heard the first scream from outside the room.

At some point, however, Librescu shouted for someone to call 911. Calhoun made that call.

The message Calhoun couldn’t send was the reply to e-mail queries from Librescu’s wife later that day.

She e-mailed all his students to learn if Librescu had survived.

"I didn’t know how to respond," Calhoun said. "… At that point, I was feeling pretty guilty for having jumped … ."

Others felt tinges of guilt, too.

Classmate Jamal Carver sprinted out the door soon after it dawned on everyone that a massacre was under way. Unfortunately for him, he ran into Cho while in the hallway.

"He [Carver] said he didn’t even realize he’d been shot in the back until he got in the ambulance two hours later," Calhoun said.

The first to escape through the window, Jesse Owens, also shared lingering questions that he had to deal with.

What if he’d stayed to take on Cho?

What if they’d all stayed? Would more lives have been saved if they went on the offensive instead?

"I’m still piecing it together," Calhoun said.

Contact Michael L. Owens at mowens@newsvirginian.com.