'Deceptively Strong'

How Much to Tell?

Jamie Bishop's family was the first to approach him. The request came to his parents: Was Derek up to talking about what happened? He agreed to meet the instructor's young widow. At the funeral home, he found Bishop's grieving parents and siblings waiting for him as well. Joanne and Roger hovered anxiously as Derek tried to answer the heartbreaking questions:

Did he try to protect his students?

It happened too fast, he was the first one shot.

Was he in pain?

I don't think so.

Variations of this same desperate encounter would play out again and again over the summer as the parents of students killed in Room 207 turned to the most visible survivor for solace. O'Dell felt morally obligated to let them question him. He tried to gauge how much of the truth these anguished strangers needed to know. 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.

At the family's beach house in the Outer Banks, his mother was surprised to discover Derek locking his bedroom door at night.

Are you having nightmares? she wanted to know.

Don't ask me anymore, he snapped.

Running With Angels

The $2,000 Armani silk suit was tailored to fit him. Derek wondered if he was supposed to give it back. His girlfriend, Laura Jones, looked like a starlet when the stylists were done creating her long tumble of blond curls and smoky eyes. Their hotel suite was strewn with the textbooks they'd brought along on the whirlwind 48-hour trip to Los Angeles; it was finals week back at Tech, and they needed to study.

GQ magazine had flown the young couple to Los Angeles for a celebrity-studded gala this past December. O'Dell was one of the glossy's "Men of the Year," with a full-page portrait beneath the headline "Lifesaver," and an article touting his role in Room 207. O'Dell felt uncomfortable being called a hero. Liviu Librescu, the 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who had been killed while holding his classroom door shut as he urged his students to leap out the window -- he was Derek's hero. Ryan Clark, the honors student with three majors who performed in the band and was a resident adviser in the dorm, who died when he went to check on what turned out to be Cho's first shot fired that morning -- he was Derek's hero.