Virginia Tech student Guillermo Colman said he survived Monday's shooting by playing dead under the body of a fatally wounded classmate.

Colman, 38, was recovering at his Harrisonburg home after surgery to remove a bullet from his head.

The first attack in Norris Hall came in Colman's graduate civil engineering class, where nine of the 13 students and Professor G.V. Loganathan were killed.

A fellow parishioner at Colman's church, Bill Hopkins, wrote an essay relaying Colman's account of the shooting:

"Saved by the blood"

We sometimes say that we were "saved by the blood of Jesus" when he died on the cross.

... In the hospital room. Gil said, "Can I have a tissue? There's blood inside my nose."

We got him one, and as he cleaned the dried blood from inside his nose he said, "It's not my blood. It's from the guy who was on top of me. His blood was everywhere, on my face, in my eyes, my nose, my mouth, it was all over ..."

It was the blood of the Indonesian student [Partahi "Mora" Lumbantoruan, 34, a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering] who had been seated beside Gil when it all started ...

[On Monday morning] Gil, the Professor, and [12] other graduate students were interrupted ... by someone who opened the wooden classroom ... door and took up a "shooters" stance at the front of the room and began firing his semi-automatic 9 mm pistol directly at students on the front row.

He moved from his left to his right. Gil sat on the last chair in the front row, on the shooter's right. Gil dove for the floor ... He felt the student next to him dive for cover in the same way landing on top of him ...

The shooter emptied the first 15 round clip and ejected it, and inserted another one. He moved about the room shooting. Gil felt a bullet strike the guy on top of him, then he felt some searing pain in his neck ...

Then the shooter left the room, and they heard shots being fired nearby. Lots of gunshots.

Gil and a couple of others strategized, that the best thing to do was to remain in the positions they were in and "play dead" because the shooter was right outside the door and might very well return ... so, that's what they did.

Gil was underneath the bleeding student from Indonesia. No talking, nothing was heard from him ...

[The gunman] came back firing at people strewn about the room ... At one point, the shooter was standing right beside where he was lying underneath the Indonesian and felt 3 or 4 more bullets impacting into the body above him.

[At the hospital] ... That's where we learned that he was "saved by the blood" of the Indonesian student.

-- John Cramer