Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard lobbies for gun control

NEW YORK  It's a spring evening in Midtown Manhattan and Colin Goddard is working a reception on the top floor of the HBO building.

Waiters carry trays of hors d'oeuvres through the crowd while Goddard, a 25-year-old who could model for a J.Crew catalog, chats amiably. He doesn't have to move much because people flutter around him. The lights flicker, and the crowd moves to a screening room to watch Gun Fight, a documentary on the nation's firearms debate. The film prominently features Goddard, a survivor of the April 16, 2007, shooting at Virginia Tech.

Scenes like this are typical of Goddard's life since he became assistant director for federal legislation at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a Washington-based group pushing for more gun control. When Goddard visits lawmakers on Capitol Hill or speaks to groups, listeners latch onto his words. Some say they respect how he has turned the trauma of being shot four times into something productive. Before Gun Fight, filmmaker Kevin Breslin made a documentary featuring Goddard called Living for 32, so named for the number of people shot dead by Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho before he fatally shot himself. That documentary was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

"He looks good, he speaks directly and honestly, he's not programmed, he's not scripted," said Paul Helmke, president and CEO of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "Sometimes, it's not quite what I think he should say," Helmke added , "but, hey, that's him."

Barbara Kopple, director of Gun Fight, said there was little footage shot of Goddard for the documentary that she didn't use. "He's approached all this with an amazing levelheadedness and a sense of purpose."

"He's just very unique for a young guy," Kevin Breslin said. "He could have collected the insurance policy and taken a walk. A lot of people would have."

By Sean Dougherty, USA TODAY Colin Goddard lays in his hospital room in Christiansburg, Va., a few days after he was shot at nearby Virginia Tech.

This new life is all a whirlwind to Goddard, who shows no obvious signs that three bullets remain in his body. When Goddard first arrived at Virginia Tech's campus in Blacksburg, Va., he had plans to become an astronaut. Now, he is working seven days a week for federal legislation to keep felons and people with mental problems from getting guns.

"Sometimes, I'll be going somewhere and I'm like, 'What the hell am I doing? How did I get to be on this plane going to Los Angeles right now to speak to these people,' " Goddard said during an interview at Brady Campaign headquarters in downtown Washington.

April is proving to be a busy month for Goddard, one of 17 survivors wounded in the massacre by a troubled Virginia Tech senior who bought at least one of the two semiautomatic pistols he used in the shooting at a shop. HBO's Gun Fight premieres April 13. There are gruesome anniversaries too. Along with Virginia Tech, there is the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and the April 3, 2009, shooting at an immigrant services center in Binghamton, N.Y.

At 6'3" and 190 pounds, Goddard looks like a typical, healthy twentysomething. He wears a rubber bracelet on his right wrist in honor of a cousin who died of leukemia. He plays volleyball and he snowboards. His ruddy complexion belies the discomfort his father says he feels daily from the titanium rod in his left leg and bullet pieces throughout his thigh.

"He knows there's something different about his body, no doubt about that," Andrew Goddard said.

Colin Goddard's early life may have prepared him for the chaos of the day of the massacre.

His parents were international development workers  his father a mechanical engineer for the British government and his mother a Peace Corps volunteer  who met in northeastern Kenya. Anne Goddard gave birth to her son at a hospital in Nairobi. He was a good baby who rarely cried and who followed his parents to cities in developing countries  Mogadishu in Somalia, Djakarta in Indonesia and Cairo in Egypt. He saw deep poverty at a young age, his father said. He was self-assured and easily mingled with adults as a toddler.

"That gave him more of an ease which he's carried over into adulthood," said Andrew Goddard, 57.

When Goddard reached college age, he visited Virginia Tech and loved it. He started out as a physics major, but his astronaut career plans were dashed when he learned he was colorblind. Taking part in ROTC gave him second thoughts about the military.

"He said, 'I don't want people to follow me because I frighten them.' He said, 'I want people to follow me because of the example I set,' " Andrew Goddard said.

By 2007, Colin Goddard was rethinking his life. He had recently lost a cousin and a friend, both to car accidents. He had shifted his academic focus to international affairs with an eye toward joining the foreign service.

The morning of April 16 was unusually cool in Blacksburg, a university town of 43,000 in southwest Virginia. Wisps of snow blew around campus, and Goddard was a few minutes late for his French class in Norris Hall. He and the other 16 students in room 211 heard a commotion in another part of the building. Their professor, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49, ordered everyone under their desks and told someone to call 911.

Goddard dialed his cellphone, whispering as Cho burst into the room.

"The dispatcher was still talking on the phone, and I thought it sounded so loud," Goddard said.

Goddard felt something kick him in the leg. It was a bullet striking above his left knee. The force knocked his phone out of his hand, but another student covered it with her hair and kept the line open. Three more bullets struck him in the left hip, right shoulder  the only bullet that exited  and right hip.

"I was kind of spinning," he said. He felt wetness, blood, slip down his leg. He smelled something like fireworks. "There was no pain and, with that, numbness."

Cho shot everyone in room 211. Eleven students and the professor died. "I have some images that I don't think I'll ever forget of lying on the floor and seeing all the bullet casings. And seeing bodies as well. And getting pulled out of the room and lying in the hallway," he said.

Wide-eyed policemen repeatedly asked him his name and his major. Four of them, one for each limb, picked him up and carried him out of the building.

In the ambulance, he started to hurt. The ride was about a half-hour because the emergency room closest to the school was full.

"It felt like the driver was driving 100 miles an hour," he said. "That caused me to bounce up and down on the gurney table and I was screaming and hollering at the guy to slow down. I kept telling the police officers, 'This is the craziest thing in my life.' "

That morning, Andrew Goddard was at the home in Richmond, Va., where he and his wife had just moved so Anne Goddard could take a job heading ChildFund International, an organization that helps poor children. The move was so recent that Colin Goddard didn't have his parents telephone number. He could only tell the emergency staff where his mother worked.

The hospital staff tracked down Anne Goddard, who was leading her first board meeting. A board member offered the couple a private plane for the 220-mile trip to the hospital in Radford, Va. After a harrowing trip through the wind and snow, the couple found their son at the hospital, sitting up on a gurney.

"He had a huge pit crew working on him," Andrew Goddard said. "He turned his head to the surgeon and said, 'Is all this absolutely necessary?' And apparently the surgeon thought that was very funny."

After six days in the hospital, Colin Goddard went back to the apartment in Blacksburg that he shared with three other students. His father camped out on an air mattress to take care of him. Friends came to visit from morning until night.

"My friends who came were like, 'Dude, what was it like? What was it like to get shot? How were the nurses?' "

In three months of physical therapy, Goddard abandoned his wheelchair. By summer, he had gone from a walker to crutches to a cane to nothing. His father said it was lucky that he'd secured a summer internship in Madagascar, because that motivated him to get back on his feet. While in the country off Africa's southeast coast, he met a journalist who'd dealt with trauma victims. The journalist advised him to talk as much as possible about his experience.

So that's what he did, over and over, with friends. It got easier.

While he returned to Virginia Tech for his final year, his father and parents of others who'd been shot began investigating the school's response to the shooting and Cho's background. They learned Cho had been seen by counselors, written morbid essays for classes and had been cited as making classmates uncomfortable, but he was still able to buy a gun at a shop.

The elder Goddard became involved with the Million Mom March, an organization against gun violence, and took over the Richmond chapter. He asked his son to speak publicly about his experiences. Colin Goddard agreed. Afterward, he received an anonymous e-mail that said, "You are a coward for not throwing your chair at the guy who shot you."

"The message I got was like, wow, if I start talking about this, this is what people are going to tell me?" Goddard said.

On April 3, 2009, he heard a television announcer describe the massacre in Binghamton, N.Y. Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant, shot and killed 13 people at an immigration services center and wounded four more before killing himself.

"I was so sucked into it because it seemed to me like the same montage of images of people crying and policemen running and yellow tape and flowers and candles," he said.

Goddard said the incident unnerved him so much that he contacted Paul Helmke. He'd met the president of the Brady Center through his father.

Goddard interned with the Brady Campaign that summer, spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill, then went to France to teach English in a program he'd signed up for before Binghamton happened. While there, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was charged with killing 13 people and wounding 29 at Fort Hood in Texas. That incident solidified Goddards desire to resume his work with the Brady Campaign.

These days, Goddard divides his time between Capitol Hill, appearances around the country and a sparsely decorated office at the Brady Campaign. He lives with three roommates he met through Craigslist. He likes to read The Economist. He is dating someone. Sometimes, flashes from April 16, 2007, pop up in his mind, and he realizes he could have died.

"People say, 'Well, you're here because God was looking out for you.' But there were good people who were killed in that classroom, and I'm sure he was looking out for them too. People say, 'Oh, well, you're here to do something profound and change the world. I want to just improve things a little bit," Goddard said.

"I've learned some things that I can't help but share."