Soccer Dad: Hero and villain

April 17, 2007

Hero and villain

Usually self-sacrifice is the province of military people. Or law enforcement officers. Sometimes others.

The Baltimore Sun's Doug Donovan writes of a student's narrow escape. (via memeorandum)

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."

No, his teacher didn't get out of the room. He, did, however escape the Holocaust.

The e-mails from grateful students arrived soon after Liviu Librescu was shot to death, telling how the Holocaust survivor barricaded the doorway of his Virginia Tech classroom and saved their lives at the cost of his own.

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.

"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Librescu's son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."

I can't comprehend the courage it takes (not to mention thinking and acting quickly) for someone to sacrifice himself for others. Prof Librescu was obviously an accomplished man who achieved much. He escaped two of the greatest evils of our time. But yesterday he didn't escape; allowing others to live.

Prof Librescu was not the only Virginia Tech teacher in the news.

There was an nteresting op-ed in the NY Times "Black day in the Blue Ridge."

But Blacksburg isn�t a place of massacres � Blacksburg is my home in southwest Virginia. It�s boring � that�s why I like it. We are Virginia Tech, the fighting gobblers, the ones who wear the funny turkey hats and plant tasteless turkey sculptures all over town. We are not the stuff of massacres.

As I write this I am being flooded with e-mail from friends asking if I�m O.K. How do you answer them? What can you say when so many � so many of our young � were slaughtered?

I hit �Reply� � try to type the phrase �I am fine,� but it seems ridiculous to type that. I substitute �safe� for �fine� � another lie, for none of us is safe as long as there are angry young men who yearn to blast a hole in the world.

Interesting less for the content, but because the author, Lucinda Roy identified him as such.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

It isn't clear if Cho got treatment on account of the referral, but even if he did, Neo-Neocon writes that the decision to alert authorities would have been very difficult. (via Dr. Helen. Dr. Helen writes some other observations about Cho, though it doesn't appear that there was a crime of passion involved at this point.)

Blogdigger tags: Virginia Tech Massacre, Seung-Hui Cho, Liviu Librescu, Lucinda Roy, .