Helpless in the Face of Madness

By BOB HERBERT
NYT

The second semester French class began a little after 9 on the morning of April 16, 2007. The weather that day was unusually cold for April. A light snow was falling.

One of the students, Colin Goddard, now 25, recalled what happened that morning in a new documentary film, “Living for 32.”

“We started hearing loud banging noises outside of our classroom,” he said. “The teacher went to the door to look into the hallway to see what was going on. ... As soon as she opened it, she shut it back again and said, ‘Everyone get underneath your desk and somebody call 911.’ I pulled out my phone and dialed 911, and I said, ‘We’re in Norris Hall. There’s a shooting going on.’ And as soon as I basically got that out, we saw bullets coming through the door.”

Norris Hall is one of the main academic buildings on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, known as Virginia Tech. The gunman was a crazed student named Seung-Hui Cho, who was armed with a pair of semiautomatic pistols. It was not the first class he had visited that day.

(More here.)