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German Student Witnessed Shooting Rampage

"People Fled, Screamed, Cried"

German postgraduate student Torben Swart was on the campus of Virginia Tech during Monday's massacre in which 33 people died. He was sitting in his office as the shooter executed people in the building opposite. Here's his account.

The most striking thing is the calm. Nine hours after the rampage there's an eery calm on the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. Police have cordoned off the area, the streets around it are deserted, the students are in their apartments. Except for me there's scarcely anyone left on the campus, apart from two dozen police officers standing guard and detectives gathering evidence at the crime scene. Two journalists from Fox News wanted to interview me but I said no. I don't think they'll find anyone else now. The campus is like a ghost town.

That morning everything had been so different. People were running across the campus, they screamed, they cried, they collapsed. Policemen roared instructions, snipers leapt out of armored vehicles, ambulance sirens blared. I sat in my office in the mathematics department opposite Norris Hall where the madman was on the rampage. At first we weren't aware of the scale of the disaster. At first we were told there was a shooting in the student's dorm in which one person had been killed.

At 10.15 we got an e-mail telling us to stay in our rooms and lock the doors. I slowly started to get nervous. The uncertainty worried me -- not knowing exactly what had happened and what was going to happen. From the windows we could see wounded people being carried away.

At 12 o'clock the police stormed the building. We fled out of the north entrance to the car park. A friend drove me home in her car. On the radio we could hear our president Charles Steger holding a press conference. "Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," he said.

Only then did I realize that I had just witnessed the worst shooting rampage in US history. But it will still take me some time to really take in the horror of what happened.

At home I put on the TV. Pictures of the massacre were everywhere. It was so absurd: I saw my university, my campus, my fellow students. I rang my friends and my family to tell them not to worry, that I was OK. I spoke with friends from the university -- all were shocked and appalled. There were reports that the shooter had made his victims stand against the wall. One of my friends works in Blacksburg hospital, he said: "The clinic is completely full, we're only treating the wounded from the massacre."

Five o'clock in the afternoon. After telephoning around like mad I cycled back to the campus. It looked the same as usual -- apart from the patrolling policemen. Some 40,000 people live in Blacksburg, more than half of them are students. That has made the impact of the crime on the community all the greater. I don't think anyone here really knows how things are going to go on after this. Tomorrow the university will commemorate the victims. I will go to the ceremony. There're nothing else one can do at the moment anyway.

Torben Swart, 26, is a Ph.D student of mathematics from Berlin. He is studying at Virginia Tech for three months.