Shooting at Michigan State University in Parkland, Fla: Three killed and five wounded on the day of the 25th anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting

A mass shooting at Michigan State University left three people dead and five others critically wounded Monday evening, triggering an hourslong manhunt and shelter-in-place orders before the suspect died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

The massacre of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was an outrage that shocked the nation, but didn’t open the politics of gun reform. Two days before the mass shooting at Michigan State University, some of the students who survived the Oxford High School shooting escaped with their lives, in what is an extreme example of howgun violence is a constant companion for todays young people.

More horror, in yet another city, in the cycle of sudden death that can strike anyone, anywhere. With macabre irony, the shootings at Michigan State on Monday night, which killed three students and injured five more, took place on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. The 15th anniversary of a shooting at Northern Illinois University that left five students dead is Tuesday.

FBI profilers are analyzing the letter to see if there was a connection to location, according to law enforcement officials. The note doesn’t say why the locations are targets or list grievances, officials said.

Local authorities said the suspect, a 43-year-old man, was found dead off the campus in East Lansing, Mich., from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. They said there is no reason why the man isn’t associated with the university. Police also said they believe there is only one suspect.

The Night of March 29: When the First Officers and Student Staffs walked Down to the Sides of Grand River Avenue – An Emergency Procedure on Campus –

Trush said he was watching TV just after 8 p.m. in his apartment when he saw police cars and ambulances speeding down Grand River Avenue. The people were running out of the building.

In regards to how quickly the student staff took action, I am most proud of how fast the faculty quickly took action. The interim president of the school said in an overnight news conference that she had been told that the people had sheltered in place for hours.

In order to stay out of harms way, the students in the dorm hunkered down and called for help from the police.

Another MSU student, Nithya Charles, told CNN she was sheltering within a lounge area at Campbell Hall on the north side of campus with about 30 other people.

Charles told CNN earlier in the day that she didn’t hear any gunshots herself, but that some of her co-workers heard shots.

After officials said there is no longer a threat to the campus, the school will move into emergency operations for the next two days, during which time students will experience a continued police presence.

All classes, athletics and campus-related activities at MSU are canceled for 48 hours, campus police said, adding, “Please DO NOT come to campus tomorrow.”

We want to give peace to every family that is touched by this tragedy and give them the knowledge that peace can come in moments like this. We can’t allow this to happen again.

The Florida State University Shoots Fired Tuesday: What have we learned from the East Lansing High School shooting? — Mayor Schor says “It’s a tragedy”

Tuesday is the anniversary of the deadly shooting at a Florida high school, and all public schools in East Lansing are closed.

It has been terrible. It has been awful for the students in the region. Schools have been closed. This has affected our whole region, our whole community. It’s affected families, everyone across our community,” Lansing Mayor Andy Schor said.

“This has turned out to be an awful nightmare for us tonight,” he said. He said they are relieved to not have an active threat on campus, and that healing will need to take place after this.

In response to the shooting, Lynch said it was a monumental task because of the size of the campus.

We have over 5,300 acres of land and over 400 buildings, so we were able to divide and organize to find evidence and share information as the search goes on. But with a university our size and the areas that we are responsible for, that becomes a task,” Lynch said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/us/michigan-state-university-shots-fired-tuesday/index.html

The Center of Monday’s Shootings is Open and Open for the general public, and it’s not going to end in the early hours of Monday night

The two buildings at the center of Monday evening’s shootings are accessible to the general public during business hours, police said Tuesday.

Hundreds of officers from different agencies responded to the scene, Rosman said. Sparrow Hospital is where the victims were taken. They were listed in critical condition, but no other information about the victims was available, Rozman said.

By 10:15 p.m. ET, police said Berkey and other buildings, were secured, and the shelter in place warning was lifted early Tuesday morning. Police told parents to stay away from campus earlier in the evening.

“For parents, we understand,” Rozman said. “I can only imagine the emotion that’s involved right now. It’s going to help us, and it’s going to help our response, and it’s going to help us identify the shooter the less people that are on campus at this point.”

America’s latest mass shooting wrote its own community on the roll call of colleges stigmatized by tragedy. To Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and the University of Virginia, add Michigan State University.

Even though there have been more deaths caused by firearms due to the tortured politics of gun control and splits among Americans, nothing will be done.

The Nessel Experience: How gun violence touched our community a year ago, or how it affected our kids, our community and our schools,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel

“And unfortunately, as it turned out, the answer is no,” Nessel said. “We couldn’t get our kids through college without subjecting them to a mass shooting at their school.”

The survivors and family members of Michigan State were terrified, as evidenced by the words of Michigan Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin. “It’s terrorizing and we either do something about something that is terrorizing our population, or we don’t care about it.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told CNN that when she dropped her kids off at Michigan State a year-and-a-half ago she thought, “It is going to be a miracle if we get these kids through four years of college without some sort of an incident like this taking place, because they happen so frequently.”

Monday’s killings led to a heartbreaking only-in-America moment, when a young Parkland survivor counseled stricken Michigan State Spartans on how to process their nightmare and what they would experience in the years ahead.

The governor spoke to the crowd that included students who had also been through another mass shooting at a Michigan high school and said that campuses, churches, classrooms and communities should not be battlefields.

Each kid is now familiar with active shooter drills. Every parent knows the lurking anxiety that the worse could happen one day when they drop their child off at class. When the Covid-19 school was shut down for a period of time, fear was gone for awhile.

The 1999 shooting at the high school in Littleton, Colorado that killed 12 students and a teacher and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre that left 32 people dead were both tragedies that marked a previous generation of students.

Billy Shellenbarger remembered Alexandria Verner as everything he would want his daughter or friend to be. The two other students killed were Arielle Anderson and Brian Fraser who both graduated in 2021 from high schools in Grosse Point, Michigan.

“How is it possible that this happened in the first place, an act of senseless violence that has no place in our society and in particular no place in school,” asked Jon Dean, superintendent of Grosse Pointe Public Schools. “It touched our community not once, but twice.”

Such is the inertia surrounding gun politics in Washington, that it’s become a cliche in itself to write that the usual rituals of regret and condolences played out in the capital after a mass shooting but without any expectation that politicians would respond with meaningful measures to stop it happening again.

Although President Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of senators passed the most significant gun safety law in decadeslast year, it failed to ban weapons and fell well short of what gun control advocates and most Americans want to see. With the Republicans holding a narrow majority in the House, it is unlikely there will be any future gun control legislation.

Firearms reform activists will hope that the Democratic sweep of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Michigan will open the possibility of significant changes to the law – but gun politics remain treacherous for lawmakers in swing states who want to cling onto power.

Biden, speaking at a conference of county executives in Washington, decried a family’s “best nightmare that’s happening far too often in this country.”

“We have to do something to stop gun violence ripping apart our communities,” he said, and renewed his call for an assault weapon ban that everyone knows had no chance of passing even in a Democratic-run Congress.

Arguments against gun control are as well rehearsed as those for it. Second Amendment extremists claim that more guns will be on the street to allow people to defend themselves while also making schools and universities harder to break. Many point out that often, shootings are perpetrated by gunmen with troubled mental histories or who become isolated or alienated from their society.

But there is rarely any concentrated effort from Republicans in Washington to spend the vast amounts of money needed to overhaul mental health services. Republican governors and legislators are relaxing the state’s gun laws in a way that will make it more easy to get guns.

While police are still searching for a motive for the Michigan State gunman’s rampage, his father, Michael McRae, said that after his mother died several years ago, he became “more and more bitter … angry and bitter … evil angry.” The gunman’s sister told CNN her brother was socially isolated and a criminal history with weapons. Police said he had a history of mental health issues.

Despite the deadlocked debates over guns rights and gun control, more pro-active action by loved ones and others might allow some red flag laws that could see weapons taken from the mentally ill to work. Katherine Schweit, a former FBI senior official and active shooter expert, said people who see relatives deteriorating mentally need to act.

A vigil to mark the anniversary of the shooting death of William J. McRae, MSU’s head men, Brian Fraser and Arielle Anderson

She told Jake Tapper that they had to report things. “It’s the ‘see something, say something’ that has prevented us having the terrorist events in the United States. We have to do the same thing for these types of situations.

Thousands of people gathered around a landmark rock to honor the 3 students killed in the shooting: Alexandria Verner, Brian Fraser and Arielle Anderson.

The governor told the crowd that they shouldn’t have to live like that. “We shouldn’t have to subconsciously scan every room for an exit, go through the grim exercise of figuring out who our last call would be to.”

At Wednesday’s vigil, MSU’s head men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo told the students to allow themselves to show their emotions as they process the tragedy.

There was a note made threatening other schools hundreds of miles away in New Jersey. Police there said that there was no longer a threat after the death of McRae.

Law enforcement officials who have access to the note told CNN there are targets that include a warehouse, an employment agency, a discount store and a fast-food restaurant.

law enforcement officials said the businesses were warned, but that there is no credibility to the man’s claim that he was the leader of the team.

Also unclear is how McRae – who previously pleaded guilty to a firearm charge – obtained the firearm used in the attack. Authorities have said the type of firearm used remains under investigation.

At the federal level, a misdemeanor conviction does not preclude someone from buying a gun. But in Michigan, “the charge under Michigan law is either a low-class felony or high-class misdemeanor,” the state attorney general’s office said.

A law enforcement source said that McRae would buy two guns in Michigan in 2021. One was a Taurus pistol, and the other was a Hi-Point 9 mm pistol, according to the source.

He was able to purchase a gun legally. He was allowed to purchase the gun. There was nothing in place to prohibit him from purchasing a firearm,” MSU police interim Deputy Chief Chris Rozman said Thursday.

Something needs to change after seeing how easy it was for a man with mental health issues, who had been arrested, to obtain a gun.

A Memorial Scholarship to the Three Students Loss Involved in the Clawson High School Student Shooting, Assembled by Brian Fraser

The three students who were lost in the shooting were honored by the speakers. They remembered their smiles, their kindness, and their sense of humor.

Anderson was studying to become a doctor, her aunt Chandra Davis posted on Instagram. “How is it that she was in class doing what she was supposed to be doing and yet and still her life was taken by a coward who clearly didn’t understand the devastation he was about to cause my entire family,” Davis wrote. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children.

The parents of Brian Fraser have created a memorial scholarship with the hope that recipients will embody his infectious smile and caring spirit.

In her hometown of Clawson, Michigan, Verner was a student leader and fantastic three-sport athlete in volleyball, basketball and softball, said Shellenbarger, who is the Clawson Public Schools Superintendent.

The mass shooting also left five other students in critical condition. The National HEP/CAMP Association, which one of the injured students was a member of, has verified that Huapilla-Pérez is among the wounded.

The organization said that time away from work and the long recovery road would place both emotional and financial burdens on her family.

Michigan State University Athletics President and Deputy VP Alan Haller: ‘We Are All Healing together’ after the Spartan Shooting

“There will never be a return to normal. This event has changed what that will feel like for us forever. But that is alright, Kovach said. I love the fact that Spartans come together in times of need.

Michigan State Police provided security at the vigil to allow the university’s police to grieve, the department said, adding, “We are all healing together.”

Due to the shooting, some of the athletic events have been canceled or postponed, but will resume this weekend and classes will resume Monday, according to officials.

“Athletics can be a rallying point for a community in need of healing, a fact many of our student-athletes have mentioned to me,” MSU Vice President and Director of Athletics Alan Haller said in a statement Thursday. “The opportunity to represent our entire community has never felt greater.”

Student athletes may opt out of participating, Haller said, explaining, “there are some who aren’t ready to return to athletic events. Those feelings are valid.

There are signs of improvement in the injured students, according to the interim president. One of the individuals has been moved from critical to stable condition, while others remain in critical condition, according to the Board of Trustees chair.

The aftermath of the Berkey Hall killings of Arielle Anderson, Alexandria Verner, was shot in the neck by a masked gunman

Berkey Hall, where Arielle Anderson and Alexandria Verner were killed, will remain closed for the rest of the semester, Woodruff said. She said that the student union is still closed, and it’s not yet certain if it will reopen.

But even as the campus transitions back to normal operations, community members like professor Marco Díaz-Muñoz are still working through the pain and shock of Monday night’s tragedy.

Díaz-Muñoz doesn’t want to return to Berkey Hall, where the gunman entered through the back door of his classroom and began firing at his Cuban literature students, injuring several and killing Anderson and Verner, he told CNN’s Miguel Marquez.

“It was like seeing something not human standing there,” he said, describing the masked gunman. After the shooter left the classroom, Díaz-Muñoz threw himself against one of the doors to block him from possibly reentering.

Some students were able to escape through the windows as others stayed behind to help the injured, using their hands to clamp down on the wounds, he said. I have never seen so much blood.

He wants to not have to teach that class so he doesn’t remember the scenes. I need to see my students’ faces again, because there is a strong need for me to see my students again.

The gunman, Anthony Dwayne McRae, was found by police about 4 miles from campus later Monday night after a tipster recognized his photo in the news and alerted authorities, according to authorities.

On his body and in his backpack, investigators found two legally purchased but unregistered 9mm handguns, several loaded magazines and dozens of loose rounds of ammunition, authorities said.

But the lesser charge, negotiated down by a prosecutor, did not prohibit him from purchasing firearms in the future, Lansing Police Chief Ellery Sosebee said Thursday.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/us/michigan-state-university-shooting-friday/index.html

“She was so sweet and so kind,” he told CNN in a letter to McRae about a student’s experience with the Meijer warehouse

Gonzalez said that he had had some contact with some of those places. He confirmed McRae had once worked at the warehouse, belonging to the Meijer supermarket chain.

“In a couple of other businesses, it appears that he’d had some issues with the employees there, where he was asked to leave,” Gonzalez said. It looked like McRae’s possible motive was that “he just felt slighted, and that’s kind of what the note indicated,” he said.

“As the leader of his chapter, Brian was a great friend to his Phi Delt brothers, the Greek community at Michigan State, and those he interacted with on campus,” the statement said.

“She was working diligently to graduate from Michigan State University early to achieve her goals as quickly as possible,” the family said in a statement. “As an Angel here on Earth, Arielle was sweet and loving with an infectious smile that was very contagious. We were devastated by the act of violence against her.

“Her kindness was on display every single second you were around her,” family friend Billy Shellenbarger told CNN. He has known Alexandria, or Alex, as he called her, since she was in kindergarten.

“To lose her on this planet, let alone our small community, it’s tough,” he said. “And it’s going to take a while to recover, but to have known her for the duration of time that we all have, once again, is a gift to all of us.”

The Michigan State University Campus is not going to be Normal for a Class of ’97-years, according to Jeitschko

“No one thinks that we are coming back to a normal week,” Thomas D. Jeitschko, the university’s interim provost, said at a press conference on Sunday. “In fact, this semester is not going to be normal.”

Fraser, from Grosse Pointe, Mich., studied business and was the Chapter President of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, according to The State News, the university’s school newspaper. Anderson, also from Grosse Point, intended to graduate early in order to become a surgeon, according to The State News. A Clawson native, Verner was a league leader in basketball and volleyball, and an all-state softball player.

“We need more time to process without a class to worry about,” the Editorial Board of The State News wrote in an editorial on Thursday. We can decide how to proceed to feel safe after the pause is extended byMSU.

“With Michigan State University being a public campus and an ongoing investigation, it is believed it is in the students best interests to be given a call of action to move forward with the school year,” the petition reads.

Faculty have agreed to reduce the class load on the first week of school, according to Jeitschko at the press conference. The students will be allowed to choose the credit/no credit option for their classes at the end of the semester.

“There are many different things that students need, and I can’t speak to all of them here,” Jo Kovach, the university’s student body president, said at the press conference. “But know that administrators, faculty and staff are listening. This is our campus, and we’re not letting anybody take that from us.”