'Deceptively Strong'

He didn't really belong in Jamie Bishop's elementary class; he had entered college nearly fluent in the language. But he liked the charismatic "Herr Bishop" too much to transfer out, 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 around him. 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 began trying 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 the sound of 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. Networks sent limousines to fetch him from his off-campus apartment as his girlfriend tried to soak the bloodstains from his polo shirt in the kitchen sink.

O'Dell's 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, line the pieces back up and start the game over. 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 . . ."