Colour Me as one who thinks this story is quetionable from the get-go. Having dealt with several injured individuals in the past (and being injured personally on more than one occasion) I do not believe the details of this story lend great credence to the account of ‘distracting someone to save someone else’. I see nothing in that account that immediately jumps out to make that distinction. I see it more as someone attempting to either attribute grander qualities to the referred individual or with a more ulterior motive (read: Specific Talking Points) in mind. Nothing I can think of in past experiences better fits the published circumstances and actions than that and the playing-it-up-for-the-media attitude.
This is a desperate attempt to manufacture a hero after-the-fact from a debacle that produced only victims and a villain (apart from the holocaust survivor prof, who, the evidence clearly shows, acted heroically). It has the added benefit from a leftist PC perspective of making the hero Muslim, which the media might well be expected to use as an indirect but not-so-subtle gouge in the eye of the Bush administration over its prosecution of the WOT.
The Muslim student did NOT deserve to die. He was a victim in the saddest and most complete sense of the term. But any reasonable interpretation of the evidence suggests that he was not anything more than a victim, a passive unoffending target of flesh for a skinny psychotic punk with a handgun.