Professor Liviu Librescu
Of all the stories to come out of Blacksburg this week, perhaps the most remarkable has been the life and death of mechanical engineering professor Liviu Librescu.
When Cho Seung-Hui came to his classroom in Norris Hall, looking for more people to kill, Librescu, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, put himself between the shooter and his students, and told his kids to run for it.
“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said in a telephone interview from his home outside of Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”
Inside Norris, the attack began with a thunderous sound from Room 206 – “what sounded like an enormous hammer,” said Alec Calhoun, a 20-year-old junior who was in a solid mechanics lecture in a classroom next door.
Screams followed an instant later, and the banging continued. When students realized the sounds were gunshots, Calhoun said, he started flipping over desks to make hiding places. Others dashed to the windows of the second-floor classroom, kicking out the screens and jumping from the ledge of Room 204, he said.
“I must’ve been the eighth or ninth person who jumped, and I think I was the last,” said Calhoun. He landed in a bush and ran.
Calhoun said that the two students behind him were shot, but that he believed they survived. Just before he climbed out the window, Calhoun said, he turned to look at his professor, who had stayed behind, apparently to prevent the gunman from opening the door.
The instructor was killed, Calhoun said.
Erin Sheehan, who was in the German class next door to Calhoun’s class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of about two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded, she said.
What an amazing final lesson to teach his students, whether they had the Monday 9 a.m. class with him or not.
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“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.�
Comment by Mark — April 17, 2007 @ 19:04