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Goddard heard a few more shots. Then another. Then the shooting stopped again. Goddard was lying on his stomach, and didn't move. He thought the shooter was still in the room, waiting for someone to move. Then he saw a girl near him sit up and start looking around. There was a banging noise at the door, and shouts: it was the police, trying to push their way into the room. It sounded to Goddard as if there were something blocking the door, but the police forced their way in. Almost immediately Goddard said he heard one of them shout, "The shooter is down! The shooter is black!" The police fanned into the room, checking victims and shouting out color codes, depending on how badly they were injured. "I was a yellow level. There were a few green, a few red, and a few black. I assume black means dead," Goddard told NEWSWEEK. [Among the casualties: Goddard's teacher, Madame Couture-Nowak.] He was dragged out into the hallway with two other students, then onto a grassy knoll outside of Norris Hall. His clothes were cut off as paramedics looked for his wounds. He lay like that, freezing, for five minutes or so before someone covered him with some blankets. Soon after, Goddard was transported to New River Valley Medical Center. He'd been shot three times, in the shoulder, thigh and buttock. Surgeons would place a rod in his leg on Wednesday morning [he's now out of surgery] to support his fractured femur. "I just wonder why he decided to do what he did," Goddard told NEWSWEEK from his hospital bed.
Shortly after he got to the hospital, Colin called his mother, Anne Goddard, in Richmond. The family had moved from Atlanta two months ago so that she could take a job as president and CEO of the Christian Children's Fund. Colin couldn't remember her new cell phone number, only where she worked, so the hospital called the Children's Fund to reach her. She was at her first board meeting in Richmond on Monday morning when the shooting began. "We went on a lunch break, and someone told me there was a phone call from my son. Usually when he calls me, it's because he got a good grade, so I thought it was good news. But the receptionist didn't look happy, and as I was on the phone, the secretary handed me a printout about the shootings at Virginia Tech," Anne Goddard told NEWSWEEK. "Colin said he had been shot. He thought it was twice. He didn't say much else, just 'Come.'" She drove home immediately to pick up her husband, Andrew; the two then went to the high school of the family's daughter, Emma, to pick her up. Blacksburg is on the other side of the state from Richmond, but when Goddard took the call from her son, "the board members were all there, and one of them made his private jet available to fly us straight to Virginia Tech's airport. We were in the air by 1:30 and here [Blacksburg] by 2:15," Goddard's mother said.
Already traumatized by news of the shooting, Anne, Andrew and Emma had to endure a harrowing flight in a twin-engine executive jet being buffeted by 40-knot winds. "It was the scariest ride of my life," Anne said. Her daughter tried to calm her by getting Anne to sing along with "99 bottles of Beer." The family had little information about the shootings. Andrew had heard reports about a multiple shooting in the engineering building and they knew Colin had been wounded, but they got no updates while the plane was in the air. When they landed at Tech's airfield, they were intercepted on the tarmac by a police official. "He said, 'Don't be frightened by all of the police you're going to see,' Anne told NEWSWEEK. "That's when I realized how big [of a massacre] it must be."
They were driven straight to the hospital and taken to see Colin. Andrew, a former aid worker in Africa, had seen gunshot victims before, and tried to prepare Anne and Emma for the sight of Colin looking pale from the loss of blood. But Colin had had a reaction to a dye he'd been injected with for X-rays; he was beet red. He was also surprisingly animated, which his mother attributes to adrenaline. Colin had five open wounds, two from shots with both entrance and exit wounds [right shoulder and left thigh/leg] and one with no exit wound [right buttock]. Goddard says the family has received hundreds of e-mails and offers of support from all over the world. She's overjoyed that he's alive and expected to make a full recovery. But that doesn't mean she's happy about all his revelations—especially the fact that he was thinking about cutting French class that morning. "Even though he got shot, I'm glad he didn't because he shouldn't be cutting class," she says.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. | Subscribe to Newsweek
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