'Completely numb': MSU students filled with anxiety during, after mass shooting
EAST LANSING - The morning after a lone gunman killed three people and left five others in critical condition at a Lansing hospital, people who were on campus shared their experiences as the gunfire erupted and police descended on the university.
About 8:18 p.m. Monday, a single man entered Berkey Hall near Grand River Avenue and shot several people, killing two. Police say 43-year-old Anthony McRae then went to the student Union and killed another person and wounded others before fleeing campus. He was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police on Tuesday identified the three victims of Monday night's mass shooting at Michigan State University's campus as students Brian Fraser of Grosse Pointe, Alexandria Verner of Clawson and Arielle Anderson of Harper Woods.
In the aftermath of the shooting, people who were on campus, and others, reacted to the carnage.
'Completely numb'
Julia Wallace, an MSU senior, placed three bouquets of flowers at the feet of the Sparty statue at MSU on Tuesday.
"With other mass shootings and school shootings, I sadly see people do the same thing and host memorials and just show respect and for some reason that was the first thought on my mind this morning to go show my community that I'm impacted and that I feel for others," she said. "I kinda didn't think, I just did. I got the three (bouquets) for the three lives lost because it's just horrible.
"I was just completely numb last night. It's just so hard to fathom and wrap your head around it. This is where you do homework. This is where you go to class. I've walked from the Union to Berkey so many times in my life and I couldn't even imagine what those people went through in those halls. If I was scared shitless from two buildings away, I could not imagine facing it face on and seeing it," she said.
Wallace was at Bessey Hall Monday in a club meeting, talking to an alumni panel on video conference, when the alert came across the screen.
"Once it was announced, I was like, 'Oh shit,' I need to get out of here. Then we all awkwardly got up," she said. "Do we hide? I was like, 'I'm not going to sit here and be a sitting duck,' that's the last thing I'm going to do.
"We got up and left and calmly walked out of the building. And once we hit the outside doors we all just started sprinting to our cars and booked it home," she said.
'A complete loss of security'
Cooper Burton, a senior, was practicing with his acapella group in IM Circle, about a quarter mile southwest of the MSU Union. He was moved into the building’s basement locker rooms about 8:50 p.m.
“We kept hearing reports of shootings all around campus and we didn't know what to believe – one would be really close to us and then another would be all the way across campus,” Burton said. “It's just hard not to latch onto the ones that are close by and think that it's about to come to where you are.”
Burton said while barricaded, two students near him were talking about how this lockdown was different than the last school shooting they had lived through.
“It just felt very dystopian,” he said.
Police cleared IM Circle after about four hours and let students leave on their own afterward. Burton said his feelings of safety on campus will likely never be the same.
“I haven't gotten out of bed this morning and I don't really want to go outside,” he said. “I just feel kind of like a little kid again. I feel like the places that were safe for me before are not at all any more, and I feel like the things that I took for granted are just completely gone now.”
“Definitely a complete loss of security and a lot of anxiety about leaving the house or doing anything really,” Burton said.
We were just spectators
Eleanor Hoss, a senior nursing student, was at The Graduate’s rooftop bar for a friend’s birthday celebration when she saw droves of emergency vehicles approach the MSU Union about 8:25 p.m. Monday.
“We saw two cop cars come, and then we saw three, and then we saw four. And then we saw a fire truck pull around the other way, and we saw more come from the Okemos side and they just swarmed the Union.”
Hoss then saw students running out of exits with their hands up at about 8:30, which continued for 10 to 15 minutes.
“We were just spectators,” she said. “Every time I looked down it just looked like more (responders) had arrived. It didn't look like anything was dissipating.”
Hoss said the bar and hotel locked down around 8:50 – hotel guests were allowed to move through the hotel, but bar patrons had to stay. She remained in the bar until around midnight and was offered a room voucher to remain in the hotel overnight. The shelter in place order was lifted soon after and Hoss returned to her car.
“I got in my car and just cried,” she said.
Hoss, a resident assistant in Armstrong Hall, estimated that at least half of her residents, mostly freshman, went home following the shooting.
“It's very quiet on my floor. I'm on an all-girls floor, and they’re usually very loud. It's dead silent,” she said, adding all of her residents were accounted for.
‘It’s just all tainted now’
Monday nights are “vodka pasta” nights for MSU journalism senior Veronica Bolanos and her roommates, but this week a night of fun quickly turned into a night of fear.
The dishes went untouched like an apocalyptic scene as everyone messaged group chats during the shooting, trying to find out who was on campus. They ultimately barricaded the doors of their home just north of Grand River Avenue, not far from where the shooting took place.
“It felt like the most vulnerable I had ever been, or like the most helpless I could have ever been,” Bolanos said.
Her friend, Jane Nodland, was at the Union during the shooting and ran with her boyfriend to the Graduate East Lansing hotel for safety. Bolanos’ little brother, Michael, was in the MSU Auditorium and she picked him up at a nearby dorm.
"Yesterday showed that it could still happen anywhere, any time, any place,” she said.
She said people should be thinking about their graduation pictures or spring break plans. But after Monday, “it's just all tainted now.”
MSU 'felt so far' with daughter on campus
Geri Zeldes, a tenured journalism professor and West Bloomfield resident, was worried for her daughter Jordyn, who is a sophomore.
“It felt so far,” Zeldes said. “I wanted to hop in my car and pick Jordyn up. But I also wanted to be respectful toward the law enforcement agents who were asking parents not to go on campus and especially during the active shooter portion.”
Jordyn Zeldes was sheltering alone in her sorority room Monday night, worried that moving to join others in another part of the house would make noise and cause fear.
Geri Zeldes said she was in “anxiety mode,” huddled with her husband and three sons that night, between hearing from family members and students, trying to FaceTime Jordyn and listening to the police scanner.
“I was crying at some points, because I was hearing back from students. It was tears of joy,” Zeldes said. “And then I was angry. I got angry at policies or culture."
'He hurt thousands’
Michigan State University journalism teacher Joe Grimm said he didn’t know the extent of the shooting until he woke up this morning.
“I felt like throwing up,” he said. “And then I just wondered about, we're all so interconnected in that community. And we know so little.”
He didn’t know who had been hurt or connected to those who had been.
“These students are all victims of this terrible incident,” he said. “I mean, you can hurt just three or eight people, but he (the shooter) hurt thousands.”
Grimm said he was working on sending a note to students Tuesday morning, letting them know not to stress about assignments right now. What he hoped they would do instead was call their families, call friends and reach out to professionals for mental health if they felt distress.
Shooting destroyed sense of innocence
Nate Strauss, assistant director at Jewish student life center MSU Hillel, felt his sense of innocence was gone.
“And I say innocence because I think in this country right now, people are numb to the impact that gun violence can have on a community until it happens really close to them,” Strauss said.
Strauss attended MSU and graduated in 2016. He was never worried about anything like Monday.
He said he communicated with about 100 students Monday, and every time someone responded to a message, a wave of relief would wash over him.
On Tuesday, he wanted to focus on coming together to grieve.
“And just knowing that the healing process from this is not going to happen immediately,” Strauss said. “It's going to be very much a process.”
Feeling the need to be on campus
Judy and Tim Goth-Owens said they needed to be on campus Tuesday morning.
“We’ve had classes in there throughout our lives,” Judy Goth-Owens said. “We are both MSU graduates and we live just down the street. Just being here, by this building, seemed important. It seemed important to just get outside and see the campus, sort of feel reassured that everything is still here and it’s another day.”
They said the shooting made them feel sad, especially for students and their parents.
“I taught at MSU for many years and I just keep thinking that these are somebody’s kids,” Tim Goth-Owens said. “You send them off to college, full of promise and hope and bright futures. Trusting this is a reasonably safe thing for people to do. It just makes me devastated."
Quiet on the streets
Aaron Ituralde, a senior, said he was on his way home to the Flint area when he heard from friends that there was a shooting.
“I'm watching this like an hour away and I just felt sort of helpless that I can't be there with my community right now,” he said. “But I understood that the safest place I was was away from the area.”
“I drove back East Lansing this morning so I could be with our community and coming back onto campus, the moment I turned onto Hagadorn, it was this rush of emotion knowing that this is this is my community, this is my home, this is where I've had memories and fun times and good laughs – and now it's just this sort of somber feeling now. It's quiet on the streets,” Ituralde said.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU shooting leaves mark on students, others: 'Completely numb'
