Students Recall Shooting Horror
Lori Calasano was in her dorm room when she found out Monday morning that a gunman had fired shots on the campus of Virginia Tech. "I actually woke up at nine o'clock yesterday morning, and the first shooting had already happened and I was in my dorm, and my roommate came and said, 'You need to look at the news there was a shooting,'" she tells Katie Couric.
For Lori, it is hard to believe the massacre unfolded on the usually peaceful campus. "In Blacksburg, I mean you think you're safe and you feel safe, it's a community," she explains.
Trey Perkins was in German class when he became aware that something horrific was unfolding. "It was around nine o'clock when the class started. We gotten through almost the entire class and the last time I remember seeing the time, was about 9:35…and about 10 minutes later we started to hear some loud noises," he recalls.
The gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, then walked into Perkins' classroom. "He just opened the door pretty quickly, and immediately started shooting. He took aim at the professor first, and then turned onto the rest of the class," he remembers.
Asked what his classroom looked like, Perkins tells Couric, "I mean it looked like something what you would imagine a war would look like, chaos and blood on the desks and walls and everywhere."
"Can you describe the gunman's demeanor when he walked in, what he was wearing what he was doing, what he was saying?" Couric asks.
"His face was just expressionless," Perkins recalls. "He was taking people's lives and showed no emotion at all. I don't understand how someone could do that."
"He said nothing throughout the whole ordeal. I mean not even when he was at the door, when he was firing, before he started firing he never said a word," he adds.
During the shooting spree, Perkins saw his professor, Jamie Bishop, get hit.Click here for an interactive gallery of the victims.
Remember Bishop, Perkins says, "He was a great, great guy. Very friendly, very personable. I mean he really cared about students."
Lori Calasano also knew one of the victims, her friend Ross, a sophomore. "We had American literature together and he was very smart and very funny, and he always said 'Hi,' always had a smile on his face. He was a funny guy. And it's going to be awful to go to class and have him not be there," Lori says.
Asked how she is doing, Lori tells Couric, "I'm gonna spend the rest of the week with my family, and it's hard. It's hitting me slowly and as the day progresses it's getting a little worse."
"I've heard a lot of people talking about how Virginia Tech didn't handle it well, but I don't think that's the case at all. I don't think you can put anyone at fault except for the gunman," Perkins adds.
"How are you doing?" Couric asks.
Says Perkins, "I don't think it's fully set in yet I mean I know what happened. I understand what happened, but I don't think I comprehend the effect it's gonna have on my life."