'Deceptively Strong'
After a Year, a Virginia Tech Survivor Is Coming to Terms With a Tragedy

By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 15, 2008

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 past Sunday, 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 as proof. 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, wearing a tie his father had to knot. The arm is fine now. 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 loves playing soccer. He 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.

The yellow rubber bracelet circling his wrist reminds him how to move forward each day.

LIVESTRONG, it says.

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

Shyness typically made him gravitate away from the front of most classes, choosing seats where he could hear the lecture with minimal risk of being called on. German was the exception.

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 . . ."

A 'Mystery of Faith'

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 has spent years treating 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.

She's tried to back off these past months, appeased by the waiver Derek signed allowing his therapist to share information with his worried parents. The counselor was the one who advised them not to throw away the bloodstained book bag his father retrieved from police after the attack. Let Derek decide what to do with it, the therapist said, because he has so little control over anything else. The book bag sits in a big brown sack atop the old upright piano in the O'Dell living room.

"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, nods in agreement: "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.' "

Hawley was at a conference in Colorado when the attack occurred; her cellphone was turned off when Derek called from the emergency room to report that he had been shot but was okay. She kept the message for six months, just so she could play it and hear her son's voice when she needed to. When Derek grew impatient with their daily phone calls -- just checking in!-- his parents learned how to text instead.

Over time, other parents of Tech victims began to get in touch. They formed an e-mail group, and met for an occasional lunch or dinner. They shared frustrations and concerns, comparing notes on their grown children as if they were anthropologists studying a lost tribe. With one another, they were free to worry out loud. Every single student wounded that day, except for the six who graduated, returned to Tech, their loyalty unwavering.

Derek felt drained by the mediation talks, the 3 1/2 -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.

Roger O'Dell, a semi-retired civil engineer, became deeply involved in the round-robin discussions about the equitable disbursement of the millions in donations the university had collected on behalf of the 26 injured survivors and the families of the 32 slain students and faculty members. He spent long hours pondering accountability and crunching numbers, and even more time grasping for ways to somehow ease the great, collective heartache. What if thousands of people joined hands to ring the sprawling campus in a symbolic embrace?

"It puts you in the ocean and keeps you there," he says. "You feel carried by the tide, and you can fight enough to stay afloat, to not drown, but you don't have the strength to get out of it. People outside, on the shore watching, don't understand how engulfing it is."

Derek discovered two more holes in his fleece jacket, most likely from the bullets fired through the classroom door as he held it shut. He tried the jacket on; 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.

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.

At the GQ party, he and Laura stayed close to another honoree, a medic from Iraq. Josh Brolin came up and introduced himself, first name only. Kanye West drifted past with a phalanx of bodyguards.

Back at college, the survivors were invited backstage at a Dave Matthews concert. They became a stop on the presidential campaign trail. Former president Bill Clinton asked to meet them, and signed autographs.

It was fun, but the attention was vaguely unsettling, too, like the earnest assurances of the cashiers who told Derek he was in their thoughts whenever he went to buy something at the campus bookstore.

"I want to be a person, not this victim."

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. He lives with three roommates in an apartment furnished with an aunt's hand-me-down sofa, a foosball table, a poker table and a bigger table for "beer pong." Christmas lights zigzag across the ceiling, and Hokie memorabilia decorates the walls.

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, who taught him the game, recognizes too well: "his chess face."

It slips as he recounts his first test of strength as a survivor.

Roger O'Dell had undergone successful surgery for ocular cancer the year before, and Derek had been anticipating the university's annual Relay for Life fundraiser for months. The overnight marathon fell on the Friday after the Monday massacre. His parents tried in vain to talk Derek out of going. Beneath his jacket, a small photograph of each of the five people killed in Room 207 was pinned to his sling, and mentally, he checked off another name each time he circled the track. This is Lauren's lap, that was Nicole's lap, Mike's lap, Maxine's, Herr Bishop's. Luminarias lit the field, arranged to spell the word CURE. As the night wore on, the candles were rearranged, and Derek saw the new message they spelled: HOPE.

Weak and fatigued by the time the event ended just after dawn, O'Dell was amazed to hear that another student had run an entire mile for each victim of April 16. He caught up to offer congratulations to the stranger. "Man, that was incredible, how did you do it?" O'Dell exclaimed. His voice catches even now, repeating the answer a year later.

"It was easy. I had 32 angels running with me."

'How Are You?'

He can't bring himself to deal with the book bag yet. The bloodstains aren't his own.

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 -- Derek finds himself looking for her, and 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. Jay and his wife, Shelly, make dinner for everyone, and Shelly sends all the kids home with leftovers. Sometimes they bring flowers from the grocery store.

Not long ago, some of the survivors gathered for a form of art therapy, creating circle collages to represent what is most important in their lives. Derek decided on faith, hope and love. Most of the pictures he chose are infused with the same color, a young life's themes rendered through a haze of red.

The survivors 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 okay," is more complicated still.