A religion teacher at the Graz school where ten people were killed has shared his harrowing experience of seeing the shooter before escaping down the corridor.
A teacher told how he found himself in a corridor with the shooter who killed 10 people in an Austrian school as he fled his empty classroom.
Religion teacher Paul Nitsche was working on his own with the door open on the upper floor of the Dreierschützengasse secondary school in Graz when the shooting started.
‘I heard this bang. And I blocked it out,’ the 51-year-old told reporters, whose students were elsewhere sitting their final-year exams.
It was only when he heard the sound of bullet casings hitting the floor of a corridor outside that ‘something snapped inside me’ and the realisation dawned, he said.
‘I jumped up and thought, that as a teacher alone in a classroom with a possible attacker, this is a very bad situation.
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‘And I decided to run.
‘I ran out quickly through the corridor, which is only a few metres long, and then down the stairs.’
It was then that the evangelical pastor saw the shooter in the corridor of the floor below.
‘You try to block everything out’
‘He was trying to shoot the door (of a classroom) open with his rifle.
‘He was busy… and I didn’t look around much either… I didn’t hang around,’ Nitsche said.
‘And as I ran down the stairs, I thought to myself, “This isn’t real, this is a film.”’
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But when he got to the lower floor ‘I saw a student lying on the floor and a teacher was there, and I knew, “Ah, this is serious.”
‘As a human being, you really try (to understand what is happening), but (at the same time) you really try to block everything out,’ the pastor added.
READ ALSO: It’s easy to get a gun in Austria, but will the Graz shooting bring change?
‘I think the emergency services were there a minute or two later, thank God.’
What struck Nitsche was the eerie silence that had fallen over the school.
‘There was total silence. No screaming, nothing. That’s not what school is like.’
Nitsche said it was hard to grasp the enormity of what had happened. What he experienced was just one part of ‘a mosaic with lots of pieces’.
He went back to help comfort students outside the school on Wednesday.
A city in shock
A large black banner, ‘Graz stands together’, was strung across a fence nearby as Austria’s second-largest city tried to come to terms with the tragedy.
Small groups of students, most dressed in black and many of them crying, placed candles at the entrance of the closed school.
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Tuesday’s shooting is an unprecedented case of deadly gun violence in the usually peaceful Alpine country.
Police said the shooter, a 21-year-old former student at the school, killed himself in a toilet after leaving 10 dead and wounding 11 others, including two Romanians and an Iranian.
Police found a ‘non-functional’ homemade pipe bomb during a search of his home in the quiet village of Kalsdorf, just 30 minutes from Graz, where he lived with his mother. A goodbye letter and a video message addressed to her was also recovered, though it included no clues to his motive for the attack.
READ ALSO: Austria school shooting: Authorities fear threat of copycat attacks
The suspect usually donned ‘a cap and headphones’ and ‘didn’t greet’, said Thomas Gasser, a 38-year-old supermarket employee who lives nearby.
‘Nothing is the same anymore,’ said the neighbour, recalling that ‘15 to 20’ officers of Austria’s elite Cobra force had raided the suspect’s apartment around noon on Tuesday.
‘Everyone knows each other here, and it will be difficult to get over this,’ said local politician Anna Slama.
For architect Thomas Klietmann, the attack brought back memories of another tragedy that occurred a decade ago, when a 26-year-old man killed a child and two adults by ramming his car into a crowd.
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‘You can see here how the whole city, probably the whole country is reeling,’ Michael Saad, a 22-year-old student, told AFP at a candlelight vigil late Tuesday.
READ ALSO: ‘Incomprehensible’: Austria declares national mourning after school shooting
Hundreds gathered in Graz on Tuesday, placing candles at the feet of a monument in the central square in a sombre atmosphere as people stood in silence.
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