As a younger officer, Brannock had helped out with traffic at Virginia Tech games, but he didn’t really know his way around campus very well. He had to stop a student on the sidewalk and ask for directions to Norris Hall—the classroom building at the center of the gathering storm. As he got a little closer, he could see blue lights up ahead. “I drove up on the grass in front of Norris Hall, and noticed that the officers who were already there were taking positions of cover, and had their rifles and pistols drawn. I grabbed my M-4 rifle and took up my position behind my car with Trooper Gary Chafin, who had arrived right behind me.” He heard one gunshot, then a second. It was around that time that Brannock, who stands 6 feet 4 inches tall, realized that he didn’t have his bulletproof vest with him. “It’s not something I normally wear,” he says, shaking his head. “I felt vulnerable in my position, because there were a lot of open windows above me, so I ran up the hill”—toward the east side of the breezeway that connects the two sides of the H-shaped Norris Hall. The shooting had stopped, so Brannock, along with the county sheriff and another trooper, ran up the stairs to the second floor. “We could hear screaming and yelling at the far end,” he said. They followed the sounds to the other end of Norris.
Nothing he had ever seen in his life—not during four years in the military, not in eight years of car smashups—prepared him for the sight that met him as he came around the final corner.
“The amount of blood in the hallway,” Brannock said, pausing, searching for words. “There were bodies all over. It was just overwhelming. That hallway is where the majority of the carnage was located. It seemed like everything was happening in slow motion. I was just taken aback. It was just surreal for a few seconds. It was mass chaos. I had never been in a war environment, but I thought, this must be what it’s like. Disaster and chaos. People screaming and crying, sobbing out in panic. And then I snapped out of it and started working it like it was a normal emergency.”
Seconds before, a handful of emergency medical technicians and police officers had entered from the other end of the hall. There were reports that a shooter had been taken into custody, Brannock said, and that there might still be another shooter around. But no one hesitated. “We all just trusted that we’d all be watching each other’s backs,” he said. The emergency medical services [EMS] personnel and police immediately focused on the wounded who were crying out for help. Those who could walk with assistance were already being moved toward the stairs.
Brannock headed into a nearby classroom. There were five or six people on the floor. He saw an emergency medical technician [EMT] working on a young female student lying on the floor. “She had a gunshot wound to the head,” he said, “but she was conscious. I tried to run an IV in her arm, but I was unsuccessful. The way she was lying, I couldn’t get her in a good position so it was safe to do, so I decided not to do it. She wasn’t talking, but her eyes were open and she was looking around. We kept encouraging her to keep her eyes open and to keep her mind active and to stay awake. I remember looking at her, trying to read what was in her eyes. I have a 4-year-old, and I know sometimes you can read more in their eyes than in their words. I could see she was really scared, but that she understood that we were there to help her. The EMS gentleman there said, ‘She needs ALS-advanced life support’—and said we needed to go immediately and put her in an ambulance.
“Two Blacksburg police officers were there almost immediately, and so the four of us grabbed her and took her out.” But carrying her was treacherous; the floors were slick with blood. “We were afraid of slipping and falling, so we had to be careful not to cause more injury,” Brannock said. “We didn’t know if there would be an ambulance waiting, but when we got down there, one was just pulling up. We loaded her onto a gurney, covered her with a bed sheet, and they pulled out of there.”
Brannock headed back upstairs. “I saw one young male—maybe 23-25 years old—lying in the hallway. An EMT was putting a tourniquet on his leg.” Aided by several Blacksburg police officers, Brannock and an EMT lifted him up. “He was conscious, and talking. I remember him saying that we were hurting his arm, where his IV was. He was conscious enough to realize he was in pain, but he was focused on the minimal pain he was feeling in his arm, not his legs. We adjusted our grip and took him downstairs, as we offered words of encouragements. You just keep saying, ‘You’re going to be OK. We’re taking you to get some help. Concentrate on staying awake.’ He was already in shock. And like everyone else, his eyes spoke volumes. You could tell he was thinking a million things that he was not relaying to us verbally.
The men loaded the young man into an ambulance, then turned and ran back inside. Another shooting victim was being carried out. This one was bleeding from the head. “Both eyes were open, but he didn’t say anything. I do remember one of the officers saying to him, ‘Keep squeezing my hand. Stay awake.’” By the time he’d been safely transported to an ambulance, the scene surrounding Brannock was beginning to sink in. “I was just overwhelmed by the amount of people who were deceased. The hallway was clear by this point, and I tried to gather my thoughts, and started surveying the classrooms as I walked. That’s when I noticed the bullet holes shot through the doors.” It began to dawn on him that there were more than 10 victims, more than 20, more than 30. “I realized that I would never experience anything like this again in my life.
The emergency-response phase of the operation was winding down; the detective work was just beginning. “The investigators asked everyone not involved in the investigation to leave so they could establish a crime scene. After that … I don’t know what I did. I know I should know, but I don’t…. I just went over and talked to other first responders. Everybody was just overwhelmed. The EMS personnel and the police officers were speechless, shocked. No one had ever experienced anything like that before,” Brannock said.
Sgt. Brannock is still trying to make sense of what happened. “I think I was in shock for 12 or so hours. I just kept going over it all in my mind in slow motion. Constantly. Even now, I keep going over what I saw in those classrooms. It’s like watching the same movie four or five times and each time, seeing something you didn’t notice before. I try to think about it, was there anything I missed that may have been important?”
He is asked whether he’s had nightmares. “No,” he says. “But that’s because I haven’t slept very much.”
