'I Saw Bullet Holes Coming Through the Door'
He almost cut French class. But Colin Goddard made the fateful decision to attend that Monday morning—and wound up full of bullets. One student in Cho's path.
'Nobody tried to get up and be a hero,' Virginia Tech student Colin Goddard recalled from his hospital bed
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By Daren Briscoe
Newsweek
Updated: 5:44 p.m. ET April 18, 2007
April 18, 2007 - Monday began normally enough for Colin Goddard, a 21-year-old international studies student in his fourth year at Virginia Tech. His first class was French, at 9:05 a.m., in 211 Norris Hall, but Goddard was running a little late because he'd picked up a classmate who was having car problems. After toying with the idea of cutting class that day, the two of them decided to go. There were about 17 students enrolled in the course, many of them International Studies majors fulfilling their language requirements. Many had taken a lower-level French course together the previous semester.
As they entered the room, they heard a series of loud bangs that sounded like they were coming from the hallway, or maybe from the class next door. "Please tell me that's not what I think it is," the teacher, Madame Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, said to the class. "We told her it was no big deal," Goddard told NEWSWEEK. "There has been a lot of construction going on at Norris. People were complaining about it all semester, and it sounded like it could have been a hammer." Couture was concerned enough to open the class door and peek out into the hallway. "She immediately shut the door—she had this terrified look on her face—and she said 'Call 911,'" Goddard said.
Goddard pulled out his cell phone, dialed 911 himself, and with the operator on the line, began trying to explain the situation and where he was calling from. The operator was having trouble understanding Goddard and kept repeating the wrong location back to him. At the same time, other students were trying to barricade the classroom door that for some reason wouldn't or couldn't lock. "After that, I saw bullet holes start coming through the door," Goddard said. "It looked like he was trying to shoot the lock out. When he started firing at the door, I hit the floor."
After a few seconds, Cho came into the room. Goddard, his view of the classroom door partly obstructed by a desk, got his first glimpse of the killer. "He had on boots, dark pants and a white shirt. All of the students were on the ground, and he just started walking down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times. He didn't say anything. He didn't demand anything. He was just shooting." The 911 operator was still on the phone, and Goddard, not wanting to draw attention to himself, dropped it to the floor. A girl named Heidi picked it up, begging the police to hurry. But it was too late, and Cho turned toward them. "I think he heard the police on the phone," Goddard said. "He shot some people near me, he shot the girl across from me in the back. Then I felt a very forceful rush of air and a pinch or a sting in my leg." Goddard felt himself flinch when the bullet hit him, but he did his best to stay still, to play dead. "Nobody tried to get up and be a hero," he said. Then the shooting stopped.
Goddard resisted the urge to move or try to look around. "I thought he was still in the room." Soon the gunshots started again, back out in the hallway; other sounds in the classroom were now audible. A few students were calling out to each other, Goddard said. He heard the voice of the 911 operator, still squawking into his cell phone, and saw Christina, the girl who had been shot in the back. A male student on the floor near him was making a low, constant gurgling sound. "We were just lying on the floor" for what Goddard estimates as 10 to 15 minutes. He heard more gunshots outside. Then, sirens. And shouts.
Suddenly, the classroom door burst open again. The killer was back. "He came back in and started going around the room again, shooting people." Up one aisle and down another, Cho moved through the room, repeating the path he had taken the first time. When the killer reached Goddard, he felt two more bullets punch into his body, one in the shoulder, and one in his buttocks. "My chest and torso were kind of underneath a desk, that's why I think I got shot in my extremities," he told NEWSWEEK.
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