Tuesday - April 17, 2007

The Killer And The Hero

Courageous Final Act Of Professor
Fatally shot as he protects students
_{(NY DAILY NEWS) - Tuesday, April 17th 2007, 9:53 AM}

Liviu Librescu was killed as he blocked his classroom door to keep the gunman out as students escaped out the window. Ryan Clark was shot as he went to investigate a disturbance in the dorm where he was the resident student adviser, witnesses said.

Virginia Tech University Prof. Liviu Librescu, described as a family man who once did research for NASA, sacrificed his life to save his students in the shooting rampage yesterday. “When he heard the gunfire, he blocked the entrance and got shot through the door,” his daughter-in-law Ayala Schmulevich said.

“He realized he had to save the students,” she said. “That was the kind of man he was.”

The hero educator was beginning a class on solid mechanics when all hell broke loose on the second floor of Norris Hall. First came the terrifying gunshots from a classroom next door. “It wasn’t like an automatic weapon, but it was a steady ‘pow,’ ‘pow,’ ‘pow,’ ‘pow,’” student Richard Mallalieu, 23, told The Washington Post. “We didn’t know what to do at first.”

The students in the class dropped to the floor and started overturning desks to hide behind as about a dozen shots rang out, he said. Then the gunfire started coming closer. Librescu, 77, fearlessly braced himself against the door, holding it shut against the gunman in the hall, while students darted to the windows of the second-floor classroom to escape the slaughter, survivors said.

Mallalieu and most of his classmates hung out of the windows and dropped about 10 feet to bushes and grass below - but Librescu stayed behind to hold off the crazed gunman. Alec Calhoun, 20, said the last thing he saw before he jumped from the window was Librescu, blocking the door against the madman in the hallway.

He died trying to protect the students.

UPDATE: Librescu was a Romanian by birth and had survived the Nazi Holocaust before his family migrated to America after WWII.

Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who survived the Nazi killings and later escaped from Communist Romania, was one of several foreign victims of Monday’s shootings, which coincided with Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.

When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, the young Librescu was interned in a labor camp, and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed by the collaborationist regime during the war. 

“Holocaust Survivor Saved Students Lives” (AP)

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 11:34 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime •  
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