“I was waiting at the University stop to get the bus. Suddenly I heard screaming. Within seconds, everyone started running away. I asked ‘What’s happening?’ and they said: ‘RUN!'”
The 25 year-old Dimitris Siafarikas is a doctoral student at Ohio State University on scholarship and an eyewitness of an attack Monday morning local time, when a Somali national ploughed his car into a group of pedestrians before pulling out a butcher knife to stab people and managing to wound nine, one of whom is in critical condition.
Siafarikas’s parents recognized him in the first pictures broadcast by international news agencies and posted on Proto Thema.
Recounting the event from the calm and safety of his office, Mr. Siafarikas, described the nightmarish moments he experienced. He was one of the first to post a photograph on Twitter, alerting authorities of the armed assailant on campus. “Within a very short time, they began sounding the university’s emergency alarms, and soon the place was filled with police cars and ambulances,” he said. “It was impressive how quickly security arrived. There’s a specific security protocol for dangerous situations,” said Siafarikas. “You see their instructions all over the campus. They followed procedures down to the very last detail and everyone cooperated. At the same time, the university police were sending us messages on our mobile phones to instruct us where we should and shouldn’t go.”
The first thing Siafarikas did when he got to safety was to communicate with his family in Greece. “I was sure they would be worried when they heard what happened so I called them immediately to let them know I was alright,” he said.
Dimitris Siafarikas has been studying in Ohio for the past two years and is already a representative of the generation of the crisis and the brain drain; he sees his life and future in the U.S. “Most of my classmates have gone to European countries, but I came to America on a fellowship,” he explained to Protothema.gr.
According to CNN, an officer reportedly shot the Somali assailant fatally, eliminating the risk to students. And now, while nine people are trying to recover from their wounds in the hospital, investigators are trying to determine a motive, as well as whether the attack was terror-related.
