Witness To NVCC Shooting: "There Was Nothing Stopping Him"

By Jonathan Wilson

Classes were canceled at the Northern Virginia Community College Woodbridge Campus today, a day after a student reportedly fired a rifle at a teacher there.

Jessica Gilbert says 20-year-old Jason Hamilton, the young man arrested yesterday, was a student in her math class, and was waiting outside the door for the teacher before class began.

She says students were starting up their computers, when there was a loud bang behind them. "And so we're all freaking out; we thought a computer blew up, or something fell," says Gilbert. "And so we turn around, and he's in the doorway, reloading his gun."

Gilbert says her teacher had ducked behind her desk, and shouted at students to get out and call 911. Gilbert says Hamilton seemed uninterested in the students scrambling past him. As she ran down the hallway Gilbert says she heard another shot.

"And so the thing that I was thinking was, 'Oh my god, my teacher's dead. There's nothing stopping him from shooting her,' no one was in the class room, everyone had left-- there's was no one stopping him," says Gilbert.

The teacher, in fact, escaped without injury. Hamilton, now in police custody, lives with his parents in an residential subdivision not far from the school.

Classes are expected to resume Thursday morning.