No amount of training or experience could have prepared Virginia State Police Sgt. Matthew Brannock for what he saw when he walked into Virginia Tech's Norris Hall last Monday.
Dozens of students and staff members lay dead or dying on the building's second floor, victims of gunman Seung-Hui Cho. The senior English major had ended the shooting rampage minutes before by putting a bullet in his head.
But the chaos he wrought was just beginning.
"There was no way I could have planned for what I would see when I got on the second floor. It looked like a war zone," Brannock said Sunday. A 1993 graduate of Magna Vista High School who now lives in Goodview, he was among the first officers to respond to the shootings on the Blacksburg campus.
"I've never been in a war zone, but just by the amount of carnage ..." Brannock paused. "I would assume it was consistent."
A nearly nine-year veteran of the state police, Brannock learned about Cho's first shootings around 8:30 that morning, when a dispatcher told him there appeared to have been a double homicide on the Tech campus. Later, as calls over the police radio indicated that a suspect was surrounded in one of the school's buildings, Brannock left his Salem office for Blacksburg.
"Due to the severity of the incident at that particular point, I was expecting it only to get worse," he said. "I wanted to provide assistance if needed."
With lights and a siren running on his vehicle, the trip took Brannock between 15 and 20 minutes. When he was 5 or 6 minutes from campus, a trooper stationed near Norris Hall came over the radio and said the suspect was believed to be armed. Then he said shots had been fired.
Brannock arrived at Norris, where he saw police officers with their weapons drawn, taking positions of cover. He and another trooper took cover in a walkway that divides the building.
Soon they were given the signal to go in. Brannock said he was one of between 50 and 100 officers and emergency personnel who swarmed into the building. Some of its doors, they saw, had been chained from the inside.
As they headed for the second floor, Brannock passed people with minor injuries who were panicked and running.
"It was pretty noisy," he said. "You could sense that there was a lot of activity. There was some screaming and yelling, sounds of agony and pain."
On the second floor, medical personnel and police officers were tending to the most severely injured. Brannock tried to help a medical technician insert an IV into the arm of a woman who had been shot in the head. The technician couldn't get the IV to work and asked that the woman be taken to an ambulance.
There was no time to wait for a stretcher, so Brannock and other officers carried her downstairs, where an ambulance was waiting. He does not know if she survived.
As the ambulance left, Brannock and the other officers went back upstairs. There they found senior Kevin Sterne lying in a hallway. He had used an electrical cord to apply a tourniquet to his wounded leg, and emergency personnel were applying a second, more conventional one.
When that was done, Brannock and the others carried Sterne from the building. As they rushed him down a grassy hill, a photographer snapped a picture. It has become one of the most iconic images of that terrible day, Brannock acknowledged.
But he says it is Sterne who should be applauded.
"He saved his own life," Brannock said, echoing doctors who spoke to the media last week about Sterne. "All we did was help carry him down. He's the hero in all of it."
With Sterne on his way to the hospital, the officers again returned to Norris Hall. They carried another young man, also with a wound to the head.
He was alive when the ambulance carried him away, but Brannock later learned that the man didn't make it.
Soon the only people left in the building were among the 32 Cho killed that day. Less than an hour after Brannock arrived at Norris, the immediate crisis was taken care of.
"At that particular point, I had just about reached physical and mental exhaustion," he said. "I think I just took a minute to try to gather myself and process the information that I'd just been witness to and part of."
A week later, it is something he's still trying to do. He's had some trouble sleeping, and the memories are with him. A particularly poignant one is the sound of cell phones ringing from the bags and backpacks of students who would never again pick them up.
"I think it was a very humbling moment," Brannock said. "To hear cell phones ringing, and nobody answering."
Talking with his family helps, said Brannock, whose parents, Danny and Donna Brannock, live in Ridgeway. So did visiting Sterne, whom Brannock says has extensive therapy ahead of him but is "doing really well."
On Sunday, still in Blacksburg assisting with campus security, Brannock watched as returning students played soccer and had picnics on the campus's Drillfield, part of which has become a memorial to those who died.
The mood is "pretty somber," he said, "yet it appears to be the students that are coming back today are trying to return to routine college life. ... (They're trying to) return to normal, but in a pattern that allows them to process the shooting on Monday on their own speed."
It's what Brannock plans to do as well. Regardless of all he saw, the Air Force veteran says he has no doubts about police work.
Being able to help on Monday "makes it all worthwhile," Brannock said. "I'd do it again tomorrow."
Republished with permission of the Martinsville Bulletin.
