She remembers his “smirky, grimacy smile” — just before he pumped five bullets into her body.
Despite getting shot in the arm and chest, Bianca de Kock is still here, counted among one of the survivors instead of one of the victims of Elliot Rodger’s mass shooting last Friday that claimed the life of her two sorority sisters and four other innocent UC Santa Barbara students.
De Kock, 20, was walking back to her house with her two Tri Delta sisters, Veronika Weiss, 19, and Katie Cooper, 22, when she heard a loud popping noise. At first she thought it was fireworks.
“And then I realized I’m bleeding, I’m in pain,” de Kock said Friday morning on “Good Morning America,” her first interview since the incident. “It didn’t seem real.”
As her blood soaked the grass below her, de Kock reached for her phone and managed to call her mother, Sharrese.
“I’ve been shot,” she recalled telling her. “I don’t know what happened. It’s crazy. But I love you. I love you so much. I’m afraid I’m going to die.”
That’s when a fellow student came to her rescue, bringing a police officer over to de Kock. Kyle Sullivan was just leaving a nearby frat he was pledging at when he heard the rapid-fire gunshots ring out. He stayed by de Kock’s side, assuring her she was going to make it.
“I was just trying to be there for her and just … and make sure she would make it through it,” he said.
De Kock, in tears, said Sullivan saved her life, adding: “We’re going to be bonded forever now.”
She’s happy to be back at home in Alameda, Calif., surrounded by her family, but misses her friends whose lives were tragically cut short. De Kock hopes to divert the public’s attention from the madman behind the massacre to people like Weiss and Cooper.
“I want people to know that all of the lives lost were people. They were beautiful, incredible individuals,” she said. “I want the focus to be on honoring them and not giving the person who did it any recognition.”
Also Friday, an ex-roommate of Rodger’s said he regrets not stepping in to help the disturbed young man when he saw warning signs — and believes the community “failed.”
“I felt that this was someone who needed help and he had put himself in a position where he couldn’t help himself and that puts it on the community to help those who can’t help each other,” University of California, Santa Barbara, student Chris Rugg told ABC.
The junior film major moved out of the apartment he shared with Rodger and another student last June after his living situation became too “uncomfortable” to endure.
But he regrets quietly stepping out of the murderer’s life without getting him help. “I just didn’t want to put myself out there when it mattered,” Rugg confessed.
After Rodger cold-bloodedly killed six people during the Isla Vista massacre, including two of his current roommates, on May 23, Rugg started questioning why he hadn’t intervened sooner.
“I realized that if I am not surprised that this is something he would have done, then why did I not say anything?” he said.
Rugg’s roommate even suspected that Rodger kept a firearm in the apartment.
“I didn’t hear the clicks, but he (the roommate) said that he would click the gun over and over and the way the room is set up you could see the silhouette of everything that’s going on there,” Rugg said.
The student and another roommate, Jon, were mentioned in the killer’s chilling manifesto as “nerds” who were “friendly and pleasant.”
While Rodger initially joined his roommates for meals and trips to the gym, he bowed out of all social excursions with them after the fourth or fifth time, Rugg said. The future murderer started avoiding conversations and kept his loud, sometimes angry phone calls hidden behind closed doors.
Though it’s too late to prevent the carnage Rodger caused, Rugg hopes that people will learn something from the tragedy.
“For situations like this, it’s a community’s responsibility to help these people before something like this happens,” he said. “And in Elliot’s case, I guess we failed, but if we take from this and move forward, hopefully we can identify these people before anything happens in the future.”