MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguayan engineer plays dead and is saved from Virginia killings

Uruguayan engineer Guillermo Colman will probably not want to tell about his odyssey during the Monday Virginia Technical University carnage when he saved his life on two occasions playing dead.

Colman, a Virginia Tech university graduate, was in one of the classrooms on a PhD course when South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui broke in and begun shooting alumni and professors with a death toll of 32, before committing suicide. "I feel fine", said Colman in an interview from Blacksburg, Virginia with a Montevideo newspaper. Colman is recovering from a wound in the shoulder and according to his own words saved his life on two opportunities. The first time the South Korean student killed thirteen of his fifteen classmates. Colman threw himself on the floor to avoid the shots and a fellow student mortally wounded fell on him protecting him from the killer. The second time he played dead when Cho Seung-Hui returned to the classroom to kill the survivors of the first attack. Colman, 27, is married with a North American and has a ten year old child, Daniel. He's been living in the US for the last fifteen years. "The guy came in and begun shooting line after line, one by one, bang, bang, bang" repeated Colman on the phone shocked by the experience he had lived and survived. Colman was shot in a shoulder and the bullet reached the neck, but was operated and sent back home to recover. A second bullet grazed his head, with much bleeding. "I'm a hard head, a hard head", said Colman half crying, half joking on the phone talking with his relatives in Uruguay. "As soon as he arrived back home, he rung to tell me was recovering from the bullet wounds and operations. He was fine but shocked remembering how his class mates fell dead shot one after the other. He's in a state of shock", said his aunt Susana Colman in Uruguay. Virginia Tech which is renowned for its Agriculture and Engineering schools has an enrollment of 26.000 students, with a significant percentage of foreigners including from Latinamerica. A Peruvian student was among the 32 dead.