As Jews worldwide honored on Monday the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust, a 76-year-old survivor sacrificed his life to save his students in Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech College that left 33 dead and over two dozen wounded.
Professor Liviu Librescu z"l
Photo: Virginia Tech website
Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, threw himself in front of the shooter when the man attempted to enter his classroom. The Israeli mechanics and engineering lecturer was shot to death, "but all the students lived - because of him," Virginia Tech student Asael Arad - also an Israeli - told Army Radio.
Several of Librescu's other students sent e-mails to his wife, Marlena, telling of how he had blocked the gunman's way and saved their lives, said Librescu's son, Joe.
"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."
Librescu was respected in his field, his son said.
"His work was his life, in a sense," said Joe. "That was a good place for him to practice his research."
Investigators search Norris Hall for clues to the shooting at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.
Photo: AP , AP
The couple immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1978. They then moved to Virginia in 1986 for his sabbatical and had stayed since then, Joe told Army Radio.
The gunman was later identified on Tuesday afternoon as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a South Korean citizen who was studying legally in the United States as an English major at Virginia Tech.
Earlier, Virginia Tech's president said the gunman in the second of two campus attacks was a student at the university. He also defended the school's delay in warning students about what became the deadliest shooting rampage in US history.
Though university president Charles Steger did not explicitly say the student, who he identified as an Asian male, was also the gunman in the first shooting, he said he did not believe there was another shooter. The gunman struck down two people at a dormitory Monday before killing 30 more people in a campus building and finally killing himself with a shot to his head.
"We do know that he was an Asian male - this is the second incident - an Asian man who was a resident in one of our dormitories," said Steger in an interview with CNN, confirming for the first time that the killer was a student.
Some students said their first warning came more than two hours after the first shooting, in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. By then the second shooting had begun.
"I think the university has blood on their hands because of their lack of action after the first incident," said Billy Bason, 18, who lives on the seventh floor of West Ambler Johnston, a high-rise coed dormitory where the shooting began and two people died.
Steger said the university was trying to notify students who were already on-campus, not those who were commuting in.
"We warned the students that we thought were immediately impacted," he told CNN. "We felt that confining them to the classroom was how to keep them safest."
He said investigators did not know there was a shooter loose on campus in the interval between the two shootings because the first could have been a murder-suicide.
Two students told NBC television's "Today" show they were unaware of the dorm shooting when they reported to a German class where the gunman later opened fire.
Derek O'Dell, his arm in a cast after being shot, described a shooter who fired away in "eerily silence" with "no specific target - just taking out anybody he could."
After the gunman left the room, students could hear him shooting other people down the hall. O'Dell said he and other students barricaded the door so the shooter couldn't get back in - though he later tried.
"After he couldn't get the door open he tried shooting it open... but the gunshots were blunted by the door," O'Dell said.
President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush were planning to attend a 2 p.m. (1800 GMT) convocation Tuesday, and people sought comfort Monday night at a church servide.
"For Ryan and Emily and for those whose names we do not know," one woman pleaded in a church service Monday night.
Another mourner added: "For parents near and far who wonder at a time like this, 'Is my child safe?"'
That question promises to haunt Blacksburg long after Monday's attacks. Investigators offered no motive, and the gunman's name was not immediately released.
The shooting began about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of the dorm.
Police were still investigating around 9:15 a.m., when a gunman wielding two handguns and carrying multiple clips of ammunition stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building a half-mile away on the other side of the 2,600-acre campus.
At least 15 people were hurt in the second attack, some seriously. Many found themselves trapped after someone, apparently the shooter, chained and locked Norris Hall doors from the inside.
Students jumped from windows, and students and faculty carried away some of the wounded without waiting for ambulances to arrive.
Police commandos swarmed over the campus. A student used his cell-phone camera to record the sound of bullets echoing through a stone building.
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.
