The Multiple Shootings of Three Students and Five More on the Campus of Michigan State on Monday night, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre
A gunman shot and killed three people and injured five others on the campus of Michigan State University Monday night before fatally shooting himself, police said.
The chaos on the campus began before the police found the suspect, with police reporting that they got a number of wrong calls from people reporting gunshots on the campus.
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 mass shooting that left five students dead at Northern Illinois University is Tuesday.
“The FBI and their colleagues are going through the history of this person to try to understand what his motivations were, to try to understand what brought him to this moment in this community at this time,” CNN senior law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe said. This community is confused by why they are the most recent in what is a uniquely American experience, and understanding the mass shooting in their midst.
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 the man is not associated with the university and that a motive has not been determined. There is only one suspect according to police.
Chris Trush, a student at the university, said that he saw a group of people running out of the Union building shortly after the alert went out to students.
“We are relieved to no longer have an active threat on campus, while we realize that there is so much healing that will need to take place after this,” said Chris Rozman, the interim deputy chief of the MSU police.
When the shelter-in-place orders were in effect, one of the students, Gabe Treutel, said that he and his friends hunkered down and turned to the police for help.
CNN has learned that there are about 30 people in the lounge area of CampbellHall on the north side of the campus.
“We’re not learning very much,” Charles told CNN’s Erin Burnett earlier in the night, saying she did not hear any gunshots herself, but that some of her co-workers heard shots.
The East Lansing High School Campus Planned for Emergency Operations During the First Day of the Florida High School Shooting: A 911 Call to MSU
The university decided to move into emergency operations over the next two days, and students will experience an increased police presence during this time, because investigators are still looking at multiple scenes.
All campus activities, including both in-person and virtual classes and sporting events, have been canceled for at least 48 hours. The school is helping employees with counseling.
“We want to wrap our warm arms around every family that is touched by this tragedy and give them the peace that passeth understanding in moments like this… we will change over time,” Woodruff said. We should not allow this to happen again.
All of the East Lansing schools were closed Tuesday because of the attack at MSU which came about one day before the fifth anniversary of the Florida high school shooting.
“Tonight has been horrific. It’s been horrific for all of the students here and around the region. The schools have been closed. This has affected our entire community. Everyone in the community has been affected, according to Mayor Andy Schor.
“This truly has been a nightmare that we are living tonight,” Rozman said. “We are relieved to no longer have an active threat on campus, while we realize that there is so much healing that will need to take place after this,” he added.
MSU Vice President for Public Safety and Chief of Police Marlon Lynch said responding to the shooting was a “monumental task” due in part to the size of the campus.
We have a lot of buildings on the campus and we were able to group them together and organize to find the evidence as it came through. But with a university our size and the areas that we are responsible for, that becomes a task,” Lynch said.
The Center of Two Student Shootings During the Monday Night Masses: A Heartbreaking Only-in-America Moment for a New Michigan State University
The two buildings at the center of Monday evening’s shootings are accessible to the general public during business hours, police said in an early morning news conference Tuesday.
Hundreds of officers from different agencies responded to the scene, Rosman said. They were taken to Sparrow Hospital. They were listed in critical condition, but there wasn’t any information about the victims.
The shelter in place warning was lifted early Tuesday morning and Berkey and other buildings were secured. The police didn’t allow parents to come to campus.
“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 has created a new community in the roll of colleges stigmatized by tragedy. Michigan State University is added to Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and the University of Virginia.
The day brought the familiar futile anger over the tortured politics of gun control and splits among Americans about firearms that mean that – even after more senseless deaths – nothing will be done.
Studies show school shootings are getting more frequent and exposing more kids to such horrors, and millions more to the nagging feeling that it could happen to them.
“They are terrified, their parents are terrified,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin told CNN on Tuesday after meeting survivors and family members from Michigan State, which is in her district. “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 was going be miracle if they didn’t have any incidents like this happening at college.
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.
This could save lives in the future. But it’s too late for three Michigan State students who will never graduate, or their fellow Spartans whose college years are now stained by the plague of gun violence.
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. One of the only mercies of Covid-19 school shutdowns was that fear went away for a while.
A previous generation of students was marked by the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 that killed 12 students and a teacher, and the Virginia Tech massacre in which 32 people died in 2007.
One of the students who died, Alexandria Verner, was remembered by her Clawson Public Schools Administrator Billy Shellenbarger as everything you would want your daughter or friend to be. The two other students who were killed were Brian Fraser, who graduated from high schools in Grosse Point, and Arielle Anderson, who was a senior at the time.
“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.”
It is no longer surprising that after a mass shooting, the rituals of regret and condolence played out in Washington, but without any expectation that politicians would take action to stop it happening again.
President Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of senators did pass the most significant gun safety law in decades last year, though it failed to ban any weapons and fell well short of what the White House, gun control advocates and most Americans want to see. GOP control of the House will make future gun control legislation impossible.
Gun reform activists hope that the Democratic sweep of the governorship and the state legislature will open the possibility of significant changes to the law, but gun politics are still a problem for some lawmakers in swing states.
Biden spoke at the conference of county executives in Washington and decried a family’s worst nightmare that is happening 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 for gun control are more detailed than those against it. Second Amendment absolutists often say the answer is more guns on the streets to allow people to defend themselves and to “harden” institutions like schools and universities. Many people point to the fact that some people with troubled mental histories can be involved in shootings.
Republicans in Washington rarely try to spend vast amounts of money on mental health services. In the states, Republican governors and legislatures are busily loosening already lax guns laws in a way that are likely to lead to even easier access to weapons.
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 that he had a history of mental health issues.
Red flag laws that allow weapons taken from the mentally ill for work are more likely to be allowed, despite the deadlocked debates over guns rights and gun control. A former FBI senior official and active shooter expert said people should act if they see relatives becoming mentally unstable.
When crime happened: My mom and grandmother used to hide. Then my dad and I had to run around the field, but it didn’t feel over
She told CNN’s Jake Tapper that they have to report stuff. “It’s the ‘see something, say something’ that has prevented us having the terrorist events in the United States. We need to do the same thing for these types of situations.”
I am in the back seat of an old blue Astrovan with my brother and parents behind me, steering us down a maze of familiar roads. The air is chilly enough in the morning for the whole family to be bundled in coats and I hide the jumper I wore on Saturdays at Spartan Stadium.
Life eventually led me away from Michigan State – but it led my parents, both of whom received graduate degrees from MSU in the ’80s, back to their alma mater. I live 600 miles away in New York City and their jobs are at the university. I’ve remained in the place where I was born since moving away from home and it feels like a place where life feels uncomplicated and the world is kind.
We would take a stroll in the sea of green and white, and there would be a drumline playing in the distance. My mom would scoop me into her arms so I wouldn’t get lost, and I would high-five the other fans we passed on the way into the stadium. On rare occasion, I was allowed to run around the field before the game and talk to the football coach (though even as an adult I haven’t worked out how my mom orchestrated that).
It was past 8 p.m., but knowing that my mom often stayed late at work, I checked her shared location on my phone. The sports facility where gunshots had been reported was down the street from her office.
But as I read her words, I wasn’t sure it would be fine. It became clear as the night progressed that there was more than one tragedy that occurred: three people were dead, five people were wounded, and many thousands more were changed by seeing the mass shooting.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I learned that the shooter had died and that my mom was on her way home. The experience did not feel over. It doesn’t feel over more than a day later.
The list feels endless. I think about the words Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer spoke on Tuesday morning – “Our Spartan community is reeling today” – and I wonder if the “reeling” ever ends and, if it does, what comes afterward.
Guidance to the lived experiences of previous mass shooting survivors, and traditional wisdom that time heals wounds, are some of the answers to these questions. As we wait and hope for that healing to start, we must fight with the fact that more people will join this growing community of loss.