Virginia Tech Shootings - Professor Saves Lives

Article. Professor saves students lives by holding door closed at Virginia Tech Shootings. Condition of the professor or whereabouts is unknown.

Mallalieu said his professor held the door shut while students darted to the windows. Some climbed on desks, ledges and a radiator cover to pull down the screens and kick at the metal-framed glass, Mallalieu said. Three windows easily gave way and swung open on hinges as the gunshots got louder. Closer. "It sounded like he was going out into the hallway," said Mallalieu, a civil engineering major from Luray, Va. Once the windows for the sec ond-floor classroom were open, Mallalieu and most of his classmates hung out of them and dropped about 10 feet to bushes and grass below, he said. Some students ran to a nearby building. Others waited to help students who had been injured in the fall, Mallalieu said. But then the sound of gunfire filled their classroom, sending all who had escaped toward nearby Patton Hall, he said. Mallalieu said he never saw Librescu escape. "I don't think my teacher got out." Librescu, a professor of engineering science and mechanics who was educated in Romania and is a U.S. citizen, could not be reached Monday. As of 4 p.m., his wife had not been able to find him either. "I am looking also. I know that he was shot, but I cannot find him," she said, panicked, in a phone interview. "How is it possible that a wife cannot know?"