Students tell of shooting horror

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The gunman cut down his victims in two attacks two hours apart on Monday, before the university could grasp what was happening and get the warning out to students.

The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33 at the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains.

Trey Perkins, who was in a German class in Norris Hall, told The Washington Post that the gunman barged into the room at about 9.50am and opened fire for about a minute and a half, firing 30 shots in all.

The gunman, Perkins said, first shot the professor in the head and then turned on the students. Perkins said the gunman was about 19 and had a "very serious but very calm look on his face".

"Everyone hit the floor at that moment," said Perkins, 20, of Yorktown, Virginia, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. "And the shots seemed like they lasted forever."

Erin Sheehan, who was also in the German class, told the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, that she was one of only four of the approximately two dozen people in the class to walk out of the room. The rest were dead or wounded.

"It seemed so strange," Sheehan said. "The gunman peeked in twice, earlier in the lesson, like he was looking for someone before he started shooting. But then we all heard something like drilling in the walls, and someone thought they sounded like bullets. That's when we blockaded the door to stop anyone from coming in".

She said the gunman "was just a normal-looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout-type outfit. He wore a tan button-up vest, and this black vest, maybe it was for ammo or something".

"I saw bullets hit people's body," Sheehan said. "There was blood everywhere. My professor, Herr Bishop, I'm not sure if he's alive."