Three Trees. A masked, armed man. How horror unfolded in a Michigan classroom.
EAST LANSING, Michigan – Prof. Marco Díaz-Muñoz stood front and center in room 114 on the first floor of Berkey Hall on the Michigan State University campus Monday night, flipping through PowerPoint slides in front of a room full of several dozen students.
Suddenly he heard a loud bang from outside the long, narrow classroom. Then another. And another.
Probably a transformer, Mr. Díaz-Muñoz remembers thinking, something electrical has gone wrong with the building. Moments later, he saw a figure in the doorway.
“It looked like a robot, not a human, covered with a mask and a cap,” he recalled in an interview on Thursday. “It just seemed unreal.”
The man stepped into the room and Mr. Díaz-Muñoz, 64, glimpsed something silvery or metallic in his hand. The man raised it in the direction of the students and started firing.
“A shooter!” exclaimed one of the students. The shooter did not speak.
What had started as a typical Monday night, in a class for students about Cuban cultural identity, immediately became a scene of death and terror. Mr Díaz-Muñoz said he watched as the gunman, identified by police as Anthony McRae, 43, shot at least seven students in the classroom, killing two of them.
“I’ve never had the experience of hearing gunfire close to me,” he said. “Now I will never forget it.”
After the shooting started, Mr. Díaz-Muñoz, he was too shocked to run for cover. But his students, well trained in classroom target practice, responded immediately. They began to rush to escape, trying to hide under desks or running to another door in the classroom away from the shooter.
Some of them seemed to be slowed down by the design of the seats, which were clamped to the floor, making escape difficult.
“Everyone who could threw themselves on the ground,” said Mr. Díaz-Muñoz, who has taught at Michigan State since 2008. “Some were already standing and frozen. He was shooting and shooting and shooting, at least 15 gunshots. I don’t know if he ever stopped to reload.”
After what felt like a minute or two, Mr. Díaz-Muñoz said, the gunman left the room.
Two students were killed, Arielle Diamond Anderson and Alexandria Verner. At least five other students were injured by the gunfire. A student gasped, apparently suffering from an asthma attack.
Mr. Díaz-Muñoz positioned himself at a door and blocked it with his body so that the gunman could not return. He told students to smash windows so they could escape. They began smashing them and with some difficulty climbed through the broken glass to the ground below.
Some students stayed in class and cared for the injured. “There was a student curled up next to my blackboard and saying, ‘It hurts, it hurts,'” he said. “The students who stayed put extra pressure on them, helped them, so they wouldn’t bleed to death.” He said he believed those students survived.
Within about 10 minutes, the police arrived and paramedics quickly began treating the students who had been shot.
Mr. Díaz-Muñoz and the students who escaped the gunfire were eventually escorted from the classroom to the art museum next door.
At a press conference at the university on Thursday, Chris Rozman, the interim deputy chief of the state of Michigan, said Mr. McRae legally purchased the two guns he brought to campus Monday night, despite a 2019 arrest on charges of misdemeanor for carrying a Ruger LCP .380 semiautomatic pistol.
With no history of violent crimes and only minor abrasions, mostly vehicle charges, he eventually pleaded guilty to a felony in Ingham County, which encompasses much of Lansing, and was sentenced to 18 months probation, which left open the possibility of carrying guns in the future. to buy.
When Mr. McRae was found, Chief Rozman said, he had two handguns, along with extra magazines and ammunition. Mr. McRae had no known connection to the university.
“There’s always room for some kind of discrepancy or discretion,” said Lansing Police Department Chief Ellery Sosebee of the prosecutor’s decision to accept the plea deal. “However, it will be under scrutiny for a long time to come.”
Dana Nessel, the state’s attorney general, told reporters at the Michigan State Capitol on Wednesday that the guidelines for imposing concealed weapons are minimal without prior violations.
“Right now it’s almost impossible for a person to actually put in the time,” Ms Nessel said. “So when I see people saying, ‘Well, he should’ve gotten five years for carrying a concealed weapon,’ that’s such a common crime, first of all, that we should be building new prisons.”
The way the laws are written, Ms Nessel said, it would be “impractical and unlikely” for someone to be convicted of carrying a concealed weapon without significant previous offences.
Carol Siemon, then Ingham County prosecutor, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. In an email to Bridge Michigana not-for-profit news site, Ms. Siemon defended her decision, adding that plea deals like Mr. McRae’s were “standard” practice.
“When something terrible like this happens, it’s normal to look back to the past, but often the decisions would be the same,” Ms. Siemon told the news outlet.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Democrats in the state legislature have vowed to push for stricter gun laws, including universal background checks and red flag and safe storage laws. Attempts to pass gun control measures in a Republican-controlled legislature were unsuccessful following the 2021 Oxford High School mass shooting.
A December poll in Michigan commissioned by the Detroit Regional Chamber found that when asked about legislative priorities this year, Democratic and independent voters preferred gun control laws over any other issue. Nearly 90 percent of all Michigan voters support background checks before gun purchases, according to the poll.
Chief Rozman said on Thursday officials were still trying to determine whether Mr McRae had motive for targeting the university. A note written by Mr McRae appeared to indicate that he had felt “belittled” by employees and companies, Chief Rozman said.
“Did a mental health issue amplify that or was it part of it? We’re not sure at this point,” Chief Rozman said. “We’re doing our best to determine that as accurately as possible.”
University officials said Thursday that one of the victims was stable and the four other victims remain in critical condition.
Ms Whitmer said at a vigil on Wednesday night that she had encountered two victims earlier in the day. One victim told her that a student took off his shirt and pressed his chest, an act that most likely saved his life.
Classes remained suspended through Sunday, but the university offices were open on Thursday, said Teresa Woodruff, the university’s interim president. Ms. Woodruff said Berkey Hall would remain closed for the rest of the semester. It was still unclear when and if the student union will reopen, she says.
University officials have also discussed the possibility of allowing students to take classes virtually for the remainder of the semester, but no official decision has yet been made, Mr Woodruff said, adding that the university was offering counseling and other services to students.
“None of us has all the answers, but we do have each other,” said Ms Woodruff.
University officials also discussed how Berkey Hall and the sorority would be used in the long run, Ms Woodruff said.
The editors of The State Newsthe university’s student newspaper, published an opinion column on Thursday calling on the university to give them more time to grieve and process Monday’s shooting before returning to class.
Our home will never be the same again. “We cannot physically sit in a classroom on Monday. It’s been less than a week since we lost three fellow Spartans in those classrooms. We are not ready.”
Mr. Díaz-Muñoz is also mourning. He spent Tuesday and Wednesday in a state of shock and grief. “I withdrew into myself,” he said.
Now he is calling for action from Congress and lawmakers. “If they saw what I saw, if this had happened to their children, they would act,” he said. “I saw the horror of these two kids who didn’t have to die.”
Amanda Holpuch reporting contributed.