(Continued...) In Room 205, Haiyan Cheng, a doctoral student subbing for her adviser, stood at the lectern and talked. She’d been talking about the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations for more than half an hour.

When Cheng and the 10 seniors in attendance first heard the loud pops, they ignored them.

It was construction next door, they thought.

So Cheng prepared to launch into a new lesson.

But the popping continued, and it grew closer.

Cheng and a female student looked into the corridor.

From across the hall and to the left, Cho appeared from another classroom.

The women darted back into the room and closed the heavy, solid wood door.

An Indian student suggested blocking it .

Four male students pushed a rectangular table against the door as a barricade. Students dropped to the floor, cowered behind the lectern, tables and desks.

For a moment, the shooting outside stopped.

Cheng heard the clink of an empty clip falling to the floor .

Cho pushed against the barricaded door. But the weight of the table and the strength of the students pushing back was too strong.

Cho fired into the door. Bullets smashed through the old wood and metal. One lodged in the lectern.

More shots.

But not into the door. They were echoing down the hallway.

Cole got away from the body on the hallway floor and started running.

“I felt bullets going by my head.”

He ran toward the back stairwell.

“I was scared to death. I didn’t think I could run that fast.”

Down the steps and out the door. He joined in the crush of people fleeing and took refuge in nearby Randolph Hall.

“I just wanted out of there. I knew I was going to die.”

Room 204 — Librescu’s class — would be Cho’s next stop in Norris.

The gunshots outside interrupted a slide show lesson.

At first they didn’t know what they were hearing. Junior Alec Calhoun said it sounded “like an enormous hammer.”

Then screams and more steady pounding.

The reality of danger hit.

Librescu’s students dropped to the floor, turned over desks to shield themselves. Some began kicking out windows after deciding to risk a 10-foot leap.

Librescu blocked the door of his classroom with his body and shouted for his students to hurry.

Many of them began jumping.

Richard Mallalieu climbed out the window, hung from the ledge for a moment and let go. Caroline Merrey followed. Calhoun — the last to jump — looked over his shoulder and saw Librescu, still guarding the door.

“The two people behind me actually got shot, so it’s really lucky that I got out to start with,” Calhoun would later say.

The first shot Cho fired when he burst through the door hit Librescu in the head.

Matthew Webster and a few remaining students hit the floor. The 23-year-old Webster instinctively curled up and pretended to be dead as Cho stood over him with both guns. Cho fired at Webster’s head, too.

The bullet grazed Webster’s skull and ricocheted into his right arm.

When Cho left Room 204, Webster and two other students were the only survivors.

Aislynn Ribbe liked to get to Norris Hall early for her 10:10 a.m. Spanish class. The 20-year-old sophomore from Pearisburg was on her way there Monday when she decided to take a 10-minute detour to Squires Student Center for a cup of coffee.

She drove to the Drillfield, parked and walked toward the fortress of gray limestone buildings. She headed up the concrete steps next to Patton Hall, the building directly in front of Norris. Suddenly, a police officer came at her from the direction of Norris, yelling.

“Get out of here!”

She heard the sound of gunshots from Norris. She ran down the steps to her car and tore away, just as police cars came pouring into campus.

Officers from Tech, Blacksburg, Montgomery County and the Virginia State Police fanned across the Drillfield, clearing it in minutes.

The first 911 call had been received by Tech police at 9:45 a.m, followed by more calls. By the time the first officers arrived, gunshots were cracking and students were leaping out of the tall, narrow second-story windows onto the grass and into boxwoods.

Police discovered that the doors at the building’s Gothic-looking main entrance had been chained shut .

Police burst through the chains as gunshots continued to explode upstairs.

EMTs quickly radioed fellow responders for help with the words: “mass casualty incident.”

Outside Norris and the adjacent buildings, people were ordered indoors.

Students and staff had grown used to lockdowns. The school year began with a double homicide just off campus that forced students to remain locked in buildings for hours. In the past two weeks, two bomb threats had prompted evacuations and building closures. Now this. What a year.

It didn’t take long to realize this was different.

Police with high-powered rifles encircled the buildings. Somewhere, a loudspeaker repeatedly blared the announcement, “This is an emergency … clear the sidewalk.” Over and over. “This is an emergency … clear the sidewalk.”

Then came the ambulances. They came from everywhere. The names on their doors read like a Southwest Virginia road map — Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Longshop-McCoy, Newport and seemingly every town and community with a rescue squad. Tech’s own rescue squad, staffed mostly by students, rolled up from just down the street.

The upper floors of McBryde Hall provided a view of the police and rescue personnel. Martin Arvebro, a student visiting from Sweden, shot video with a small digital camera. He turned the camera toward his fellow Swede, Carl Nordin, and asked: “So, Carl, how do you like America on the second day? It’s just like the movies.”

Amid all this, Cho finished with the promise he had made. “End of the road.”

He put one of his guns to his head and pulled the trigger. Moments later, police stormed over him and someone yelled, “Shooter down! Black tag!”

Over the police scanners, a voice soon after recited a spectrum of other color codes that indicated the conditions of Cho’s victims. Greens, reds and yellows were enumerated, citing victims who needed medical assistance but were still alive. Another color sounded far grimmer.

“Twenty-nine black,” the voice said.

In all, 32 students and faculty were killed.

1. Emily Hilscher, 19.
2. Ryan Clark, 22.
3. Ross Abdallah Alameddine, 20.
4. Brian Bluhm, 25.
5. Austin Cloyd, 19.
6. Daniel Alejandro Perez Cueva, 21.
7. Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, 24.
8. Caitlin Millar Hammaren, 19.
9. Jeremy Herbstritt, 27.
10. Rachael Elizabeth Hill, 18.
11. Jarrett Lee Lane, 22.
12. Matthew La Porte, 20.
13. Henh Ly, 20.
14. Partahi Lumbantoruan, 34.
15. Lauren Ashley McCain, 20.
16. Daniel Patrick O’Neil, 22.
17. Juan Ramon Ortiz Ortiz, 26.
18. Minal Hiralal Panchal, 26.
19. Erin Nicole Peterson, 18.
20. Michael S. Pohle Jr., 23.
21. Julia Pryde, 23.
22. Mary Karen Read, 19.
23. Reema Samaha, 18.
24. Waleed Mohamed Shaalan, 32.
25. Leslie Geraldine Sherman, 20.
26. Maxine Shelly Turner, 22.
27. Nicole White, 20.
28. Christopher James “Jamie” Bishop, 35.
29. Kevin Granata, 45.
30. Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49.
31. G.V. Loganathan, 53.
32. Liviu Librescu, 76.

Among the dead students were three Southwest Virginians: Jarrett Lee Lane, Austin Cloyd and Henh Ly.

Lane, 22, was from Narrows, where he was class valedictorian, played four sports and was a member of the band. Recently, he had been offered a full scholarship to the Coastal Engineering Graduate program at the University of Florida.

Cloyd, who would have been 19 this week, lived in Champaign, Ill., until moving to Blacksburg in 2005 when her father came to teach accounting and information systems at Tech. She was majoring in international studies and French and minoring in environmental policy. She had performed mission work in Appalachia, renovating homes the past four summers.

Ly, who was known as “Henry Lee” by his friends in Roanoke and Blacksburg, finished second in his class at William Fleming High School last year. The 20-year-old child of Vietnamese immigrants was shy until you got to know him, then he acted like the class clown.

Friday, Cho’s sister issued a statement from their family.

“We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. … Each of these people had so much love, talent and gifts to offer, and their lives were cut short by a horrible and senseless act.”

The statement also said: “We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”

And this: “He has made the world weep.”

On Tuesday — as grief replaced shock on the Virginia Tech campus, as the national media descended in droves, as university officials faced some tough questions, as the president and first lady of the United States arrived on campus in a motorcade of 12 black Chevrolet Suburbans, as students stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the Drillfield singing “Amazing Grace” — Cole sat in his mobile home watching TV news.

The man who never went to high school spoke of Virginia Tech as if it were his own.

“There was blood all over my hallway,” he said, recalling the horrors of the day before.

And of Cho, the man responsible for the bloodshed: “I can’t understand why he wanted to punish people like that. I guess he went insane.”

As the horrible details of Cho’s rampage came to light, so did the warning signs.

Just last fall, Cho submitted a piece in Ed Falco’s playwriting class called “Richard McBeef” about a disturbed 13-year-old who accuses his stepfather of abuse and murder. In it, Cho’s main character rages against people who work for a living.

People like Cole.

“Guess what, Dick?” Cho’s character says to his stepfather. “ … You wanna know why I don’t like you? Because you can’t provide for my mom. You barely make the minimum wage, man. All you do for mom is this honey-poo s---! … You were a janitor one time. … And now you’re what you like to call yourself a chef, what the rest of the world calls a hamburger flipper. … Just look at yourself, all fat and lazy. Only if you were smart enough to stay in the league, you wouldn’t be like this.”

Some say satire fueled Cho’s words.

But Cole doesn’t understand satire.

“I like to be friends with people,” he says.

In the aftermath of Monday’s catastrophe, Cole found some things to be grateful for. His co-worker Pam Tickle escaped .

But he also felt a heavy sadness as he watched photos of professor Librescu flash on his TV screen.

“I liked him real good,” Cole says, staring at Librescu’s image. “He was something.”

About this story

Staff writers Ralph Berrier, Aaron McFarling and Greg Esposito contributed to this story, which was based on interviews with eyewitnesses and others involved in the events surrounding Monday’s shootings at Virginia Tech. Most of the interviews were conducted by our staff, but some of the information used in creating a narrative account of this story was taken from interviews granted to other print media or broadcast on radio and television.

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