Virginia Tech victim emerged from ordeal as a different person

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Spring comes fitfully to this Blue Ridge valley, the wind carrying snow flurries one day and kites the next. In the cold sunlight, the dogwoods bloom and then the lilacs, defiant. It is a season of struggle. Derek O'Dell digs out his favorite fleece jacket, studying the holes in one sleeve.

April fills him with dread, sounding an internal alarm he can't silence: Something bad is going to happen ...

He turned 21 this month, but his haunted blue eyes seem much older. O'Dell is tall and thin, bordering on gaunt. "But I'm deceptively strong," he says, flexing a rock-hard biceps. Just beneath the muscle bulge are two small pink scars — proof in their own right — where the bullet pierced his flesh.

No bones were broken or tendons shredded. Three hours after the campus shooting spree ended, O'Dell was out of the hospital and on national television. He was able to return to Virginia Tech within a week. He credits God, not luck.

A year later, O'Dell is a junior majoring in biology, hoping to become a veterinarian. He is studious, polite, shy. He is president of the college chess club. He roots for the Phillies, and rescues abandoned guinea pigs. He will likely marry the same girl he took to his high-school prom. These are the familiar traits of Derek O'Dell.

But he has become someone else now, a stranger. He startles at loud noises and scans every room he enters for an escape route. He locks bedroom doors and smells gunpowder in his sleep. He distrusts the tender beauty of springtime. Like the season, he is unsure how to define himself.

Survivor, hero, victim, witness.

Scene from the second row

Play to the future, analyze quickly. Anticipate what the opponent is going to do. Derek O'Dell began playing chess at 6, and in eighth grade became Virginia's middle-school champion. The game suited his quiet nature and quick mind.

Shyness typically made him gravitate away from the front of most classes. German was the exception.

He didn't really belong in Jamie Bishop's elementary class; he was nearly fluent in the language. But he liked the charismatic "Herr Bishop" and had settled happily into the role of unofficial teacher's aide. He sat in the second row.

When Seung Hui Cho flung open the door to Room 207 and began spraying bullets on the morning of April 16, the first thing O'Dell saw was Bishop crumpling to the floor.

The girls in the front row were methodically mowed down, too, and the friend who sat next to O'Dell was shot in the face at point-blank range. The killer's eyes were black and empty, a shark's gaze, when they locked on O'Dell, who hit the floor to duck beneath the flimsy plastic desk, then began scurrying to the back of the room.

The gunman left, and O'Dell surveyed the carnage. Of the 13 students in class that morning, only four were still conscious. Gunpowder clouded the air and left a bitter taste in his mouth. There was blood everywhere; he was soaked in it. The floor was strewn with backpacks, books. Bodies. The classroom door was still wide open.

The chess player analyzed his options.

Jumping out the second-floor window might save his life, but it would mean leaving wounded classmates behind. "When I heard shots in the hall, that jump-started me," he recalls. Missing one tennis shoe, he sprinted across five desktops to the front of the room to shut the door. Katelyn Carney followed him, and the two crouched down, wedging their bodies against the door frame.

O'Dell called 911 on his cellphone. Discovering the bullet wounds in his numb right arm, he used his belt to tie a tourniquet.

Trey Perkins tried to stanch the bleeding of a classmate's leg. Erin Sheehan went to the window to try to attract the attention of SWAT teams beginning to surround Norris Hall.

The gunman returned and pushed against the door. It opened a crack, and O'Dell saw the barrel of a gun come through. The students heaved the door shut again, and Cho began shooting through it. O'Dell could hear bullets whistling past his ear. "I couldn't look," he recalls. Carney's hand was bleeding. The gunman retreated. Screams and more gunfire came from a nearby French classroom, and then Cho's final, suicidal shot as police moved in.

The first of the injured students released from the hospital that day, O'Dell was besieged by reporters. His natural reserve was quickly replaced by a sense of obligation, a need that became almost obsessive: to bear witness. "When I told my story, that became my numbing," he says.

What happened that morning takes longer to recount than it did to unfold.

He's spent a year analyzing his strategy, a year quietly honoring the fallen, collecting the details of their lives as if he can somehow reassemble them. More of the wounded survived in his classroom than the others, where the gunman had returned to pick off survivors. O'Dell claims no credit, finds no comfort.

"I heard those shots. I had all that time to react. Forty-five seconds," he chastises himself. "Why didn't I do something ... instead of hiding under the desk and crawling away? Encounter him when he first came in, I don't know, throw a book at him ... "

"Never ... normal again"

The doctor wonders about Derek: Is he still interacting with his peers, is he socially withdrawn, is he sleeping enough, or too much? Joanne Hawley is a clinical pharmacist at the veterans hospital in Salem, where she treats soldiers with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. But questions that come so naturally to her are the ones she doesn't dare ask. Derek is her son, not her patient.

Stop, he told her when she started in with her questions. I need you to be my mother.

"I don't know if anyone believes in closure," Hawley says. "We're all living with this forever."

Sitting at their kitchen table, her husband, Roger O'Dell, nods: "People would call and ask are things back to normal yet. I'd think, 'Of course not. It's never going to be normal again.' "

Derek felt drained by the mediation talks, the 3 ½-hour conference calls, the claims to file, the red tape. He was disheartened to discover that the university hadn't, in fact, waived tuition for the returning survivors; it had paid itself from the nearly $8 million in donations in the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund.

It was left to the parents, for the most part, to demand answers, voice concerns, negotiate reparations. Derek refused to hire a lawyer, and was so worried about offending the famed "Hokie spirit" that he had his father read his testimony for him before the governor's review panel.

Derek discovered two more holes in his fleece jacket, most likely from the bullets fired through the classroom door as he held it shut. One of the holes was over his chest. He fingers the silver cross he always wears, a gift from his girlfriend; it was the only shield, he thinks, between a bullet and his heart. A Catholic, he remembers asking his priest why his life was spared that day, what this all meant. It's a mystery of faith, he was told.

He kept the worst of it to himself, how horrible it was to hear the gurgle of a dying breath, or the startling thump of another body sliding to the floor, or the killer's footsteps coming closer.

The classmate shot in the face had survived but had no memory of what happened; O'Dell sat with him at a Burger King and told him.

"His chess face"

Derek is carrying 15 units instead of his usual 18 this semester, and he can laugh when his friends joke whenever he gets a good grade, that the professors just feel sorry for him.

His parents worry that he's "lost his sparkle," that he's learned to give everyone, including them, the answers they need to hear. He wears the purposeful mask his father recognizes too well: "his chess face."

Katelyn Carney, who helped block the door, is in his German class this semester, too. Whenever there's any unexpected noise — a book dropping, construction outside — they exchange a reassuring glance. The survivors get together once a month at the home of Jay Poole, who acts as liaison between the university and the families under the new Office of Recovery and Support.

They don't talk much among themselves about the specifics of the horror they alone know, Derek says. Conversation at the monthly dinners is more likely to flit from sports to politics to movies.

But in the secret language they share, a simple "How are you?" carries much deeper meaning, and Derek's standard answer, "I'm OK," is more complicated still.