Having calmly relayed his first-hand account of the worst mass shooting in United States history, junior biology major Derek O'Dell insists that he is not hero.
In fact, he finds the title to be insulting to the others who sacrificed their lives and bodies for fellow classmates.
O'Dell labels his actions as the result of his "call to arms."
On April 16, 2007, Derek went to his 9:05 a.m. elementary German class in Norris 207, as he would every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Finding his seat in the second row, two seats in from the aisle and positioned just feet from the door, Derek found himself one of 12 students in the class, accompanied by their instructor, Jamie Bishop.
"Maybe at 9:15 or so, somebody looked into our class, looking lost," Derek said. "Retrospectively, police suggested he was looking to get a casualty count."Moments later, the first shots reverberated throughout Norris Hall. Though the dull bangs did not go unnoticed by the students in the classroom, they were brushed aside, thought to be nothing more than construction. Derek said that it sounded like a compressed nail gun firing, though he was certain that the sound was not loud enough to be such.
While the sounds lasted for less than 60 seconds, Derek noted that the class quickly became alerted to the harsh reality of what was happening around them. The shots were not from construction or a nail gun; they were from gunman Seung-Hui Cho's two pistols.
Seconds later, Cho had entered Derek's classroom and begun firing.
Cho had come from a room directly across the hall and immediately began shooting as he entered the room, first taking aim at Bishop before firing at the others in the class.
With shots echoing around the room, flying past the bodies of himself and his classmates, Derek's reference point was the school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999.
"You hear about other school shootings on the news, but it was still hard to believe that it was actually happening to us, in our classroom," Derek said.
However, this state of disbelief was short-lived, as students came under fire and bore witness to the deaths of their classmates.
"For the first 2 to 3 seconds, everything was happening in slow motion, a surreal feeling," Derek said. "Once everyone got over the initial shock that it was really happening, they scrambled for the ground as quickly as they could and tried to get to the back of the classroom. He probably shot half of our class within 10 or 15 seconds."
Derek said that Cho stood first at the door, firing at the people closest. He then walked over toward the window, all the while shooting. Two magazine clips and half a minute later the shots ceased; Cho had left, going down the hall to a French classroom.
While he did not immediately recognize his injury, Derek was shot once as he slid from his seat to the floor beneath his desk. He was hit in the arm with the bullet piercing his bicep.
Once the gunshots had stopped in room 207, Derek estimates there were two and a half minutes to act, though it was unbeknownst to him at the time. As soon as firing was heard in another room, Derek sprung to action.
An avid chess player, Derek employed his intuition to think ahead and analyze each move he made.
"I figured I had to do something, and I couldn't just sit back and let it happen again," Derek said.
Taking initiative, Derek walked to the front of the classroom, accompanied by another survivor of the initial blasts, Katelyn Carney. Katelyn had been shot in the hand while protecting her head in the midst of the initial wave of gunshots.
Weaving amidst bodies and desks that lay across the floor after Cho's firing, the two shut the door and used their bodies to form a human barricade should the gunman return.
Derek, realizing he had been shot in the arm, fashioned a tourniquet from his belt and dialed 911. Meanwhile, Trey Perkins, one of the uninjured students, surveyed the room, providing whatever aid he could to his injured classmates.
As Derek spoke with emergency operators, Cho returned to the classroom to finish what he had started minutes before. Despite attempting to use his body as a battering ram to gain entrance, Derek and Katelyn held strong and only allowed the door to momentarily open several inches.
Frustrated, Cho shot several times through the center of the door before moving on to another classroom. At this point, Derek, with his body pressed firmly against the door, began to pray.
"I prayed that he wouldn't be able to get back in," Derek said. "Nothing would ever stop him; there were two inches of wood between us. It seemed like there was nothing that we could do that would stop him from killing us."
With the adrenaline pumping and other concerns preoccupying him, Derek failed to realize that he had come even closer to death than he had originally thought. He later noticed two additional bullet holes in his fleece jacket that had not struck his torso.
"The last bullet that he fired through the door came through the front of my jacket, but didn't hit my body," Derek said. "It was shocking that it came that close."
Once more, Cho returned to room 207. Again, though his efforts were still stifled by Derek and Katelyn, he fired shots into the door's core. Having failed again, Cho left once more, directing his ammunition upon himself not 30 seconds later.
Though the air was absent of the sound of gunshots and had been filled with the sound of police presence, Derek, Katelyn and the remaining survivors were unaware of Cho's death. Police officers instructed those who were able to exit the building to do so with their hands in the air.
"We didn't know where he was at all," Derek said. "All we saw were cops using their car doors as shields. I thought he'd be firing at people outside from one of the windows, so I ran toward the Drillfield."
Shortly after 10 a.m. the first group of wounded students arrived at Montgomery Regional Hospital. Upon arriving at the hospital, Derek said it was the first time he had felt safe since Cho had entered room 207 45 minutes earlier.