Aimee Kanode was in her dorm room on the third floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall yesterday when a resident assistant frantically knocked on her door at 8 a.m.
There had been a double shooting in the building about 45 minutes earlier and the heavy knocking was to alert her – and others on the floor – to stay put and take cover.
“We’re all locked in our dorms surfing the Internet trying to figure out what was going on,” the freshman said.
At about 9:45 a.m., while Kanode scanned the Internet for information and remained barricaded in her room, John Wargo was sitting in his engineering class in Norris Hall across campus when, “all of a sudden, we heard these loud banging noises.”
“We thought it was construction,” Wargo, a junior, told ABC News.
But then, he said, “We heard screaming coming through the walls . . . We could hear people screaming, ‘Oh, my God!’
“Everybody started to panic. We were going to run out the front door and someone opened it, and we heard shots coming down the hall . . . It sounded like he was just around the corner, and I was scared.
“So everyone started jumping out of the window,” Wargo said.
As he and others jumped two stories to safety, a heavily armed gunman was blasting his way through the building and its classrooms in a rampage that would leave another 30 innocent people dead.
Wargo landed safely after falling two stories to the ground below.
But he saw one classmate break his leg on impact and another, a young woman, land on her back.
“When I landed, I don’t know, I was kind of in a daze,” Wargo said. “I heard a shot go through glass, and that’s when it hit me that I need to get out of there.”
Upstairs, the gunman – described as a 6-foot-tall Asian man in his 20s – was going down the hallway classroom by classroom, pumping up to 100 rounds from two pistols into groups of students and professors.
Among them was Wargo’s 75-year-old professor, Liviu Librescu, a Romanian immigrant who decided not to jump.
“They told me that my professor was shot in the face and didn’t make it,” said Wargo, who also learned that three classmates survived after being shot in the legs and arms.
As the rampage continued in Norris Hall, police swarmed through West Ambler Johnston Hall and the surrounding dorms as they searched for the gunman, who two hours before had fatally shot two students on the dormitory building’s fourth floor.
As cops searched the dorms, they apparently feared there were several gunmen prowling the sprawling campus.
Students said their first notification that something had occurred came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. – more than two hours after the first shooting.
The e-mail was sparse on details. It read, “A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.”
The message also warned students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.
One student, 24-year-old Jason Joseph, was relaxing in his room in a dorm building near West Ambler when “I heard sirens.”
“A lot of sirens,” Joseph said. “And then our doors were banged in and there were SWAT teams everywhere. I couldn’t believe it. They were there for a long time. They checked every room, and no one was allowed to go anywhere – not even down the hall or to another floor, until 1:15 p.m.
“Now that I think about it, I was terrified,” Joseph said. “But it would have been worse if they weren’t there and there was no SWAT with all this going on outside.
“I haven’t talked to all of my friends. I’m still trying to get in touch with them. They could be busy or, you know, worse.”
Back in Norris Hall, the gunman was still on his deadly stroll.
In cellphone video-camera footage that was later broadcast on television, police are seen tentatively approaching the building before a volley of bullets is clearly heard echoing inside.
“Shots fired! Shots fired!” an officer shouts.
The student who took the video, Jamal Al Barghouti, a graduate student who was born in the Palestinian territories, told CNN he had been on edge because of two bomb threats on campus last week.
“I knew this was something way more serious,” he said.
Nickolas Macko said his classmates held a table against the classroom door to keep the gunman from coming in.
“The shooter shot the door twice at chest level,” with bullets hitting a podium in the classroom and the other crashing through a window, Macko said. “At this point, he reloaded, shot the door again . . . and moved on to the other classrooms.
“Thankfully, nobody in our room was hurt.”
When cops escorted Macko and his classmates out of the room, they saw someone had been seriously wounded in the hallway not more than a few paces away.
“I did not look in the adjoining classrooms, but those who did simply told me after that. It was sad,” Macko said.
In one of those rooms was a German class taught by Jamie Bishop, a computer whiz from North Carolina. Only four people of the two dozen students inside were able later to walk out on their own – and Bishop was not among them.
A student in Bishop’s class, Katelyn Carney, told a friend that she and the other students hid under desks when the gunman came inside.
A shaken Carney later called that friend and said, “I got red on me,” referring to the blood from a bullet wound she sustained to her hand, the friend wrote on the Web site LiveJournal.com. “I remember Kate crying on the phone saying she didn’t think the teacher, Herr Bishop, made it out of the whole thing. I’m not sure on that one either.”
Trey Perkins, 20, who was sitting in the same class, told The Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room and opened fire – squeezing off 30 shots in a span of almost two minutes.
“Everyone hit the floor at that moment,” said Perkins, a sophomore from Yorktown, Va. studying mechanical engineering. “And the shots seemed like it lasted forever.”
Three buildings away from Norris Hall, Madison Van Duyne was taking a communications class when an administrator came into the room, saying, ” ‘Everyone, get away from the windows. Get down, get under your desk,’ ” she recalled.
“We turned off the lights and we locked the door. That was at about 9 a.m. We stayed there until 1:15 p.m., when they said campus was all clear,” Van Duyne said.
At the end of the day, the people who got out of Norris Hall alive, and those who were lucky to have been elsewhere, scrambled to learn whether their roommates, friends and teachers were among the dead, dying or injured.
“My friends have a few people, a few really close friends, that they haven’t heard from, who aren’t picking up their phones. It’s very scary,” said Caroline Terry, a 19-year-old freshman.
“This is like Columbine, but so much worse,” said a shaken Terry, as she accompanied a friend to look for surviving pals. “I think we’re still in shock.
“We’ve got each other’s back, and we’re just trying to figure out how to go on.”