'I just hugged them and held their hands': Berkey Hall prof, students wait out MSU attacks together

EAST LANSING — Michigan State University professor Tina Timm and four graduate students were engaged in their advanced family therapy course on Monday evening when a series of gunshots rang out in Berkey Hall.

There was no mistaking the sound, she said.

Timm quickly turned off the lights in Room 103 and instructed her students to hide in a corner behind the moveable teacher's desk. Barricading the door wasn't an option. It opens outward into the hallway.

With the students hidden, Timm yanked a laptop charging cord from her bag and tied the classroom door handle to one of the abandoned desks.

“I didn’t think it could prevent him from opening it completely; I just wanted it to be harder,” Timm said. “They look for easy access.”

Timm was refererring to Anthony McRae, who shot and killed three students and wounded five more during a rampage that started at Berkey Hall.

One of Timm’s students immediately called 911. Timm said police officers arrived in what seemed like minutes after she’d secured the door. She and three students were contacting their loved ones, saying what they hoped wouldn’t be their final goodbyes. The fourth student stayed on the phone with police.

“I just hugged them and held their hands,” Timm said.

They were terrified when someone tried to open the classroom door, fearful it was the shooter. It was a police officer looking to confirm whether people were inside and if they were injured. They were told to remain in the classroom until the building was cleared.

So they waited. And listened.

They could hear EMS workers bringing in stretchers and tending to the wounded. They didn’t know what to expect when police retuned to escort them from Berkey Hall to the Broad Art Museum next door.

Timm held one student’s hand and guided her out of the building so the student could keep her eyes closed.

“I’m a therapist and I know a lot about trauma and a lot about visual trauma,” Timm said. “You can’t ever unsee it again. And it does make it so much worse.”

Timm and her students still hadn’t reached safety, though. Their police escort ended outside of an emergency exit at the Broad. The door didn’t open from the inside immediately as intended; they were stuck outside along Circle Drive for what Timm said was about half an hour.

Misleading reports of the shooter’s whereabouts overheard on the police scanner terrified the group. Concerned texts that the suspect may have been nearby or the idea that there may be multiple shooters on campus made getting her class safely indoors Timm’s No. 1 priority. The reports that were later proved false felt very real in the moment, she said.

“I just kept saying, ‘Get us in the building!’” Timm said. “We were safer in Berkey. Everyone was supposed to shelter in place and be off the streets and there we were, the five of us.”

When the door to the museum finally opened, Timm’s students joined students from another classroom at Berkey. The classroom where the shooting took place.

"There was a student in there with his shirt off because it had been covered in blood and there were other students with blood on their clothes," Timm said of the group waiting for them in the Broad. "And this poor student was convulsing still from the shock and the fear."

The group sat together quietly, following the updates coming from the police scanner for several more hours, waiting to hear any updates on their classmates. They heard over the scanner about the shooter's self-inflicted gunshot wound, the attempt at CPR and the confirmation of his death. Finally, after being interviewed by the FBI, they were allowed to leave the Broad and reunite with loved ones after 1 a.m. on Tuesday.

Listening and waiting

While Timm and her students were in the midst of the chaos, her husband, Adrian Blow, was at home with their children.

"We were sitting at home when we got her call just after the shooting," said Blow, chair of the Human Development and Family Studies Department at MSU. "Just sitting here waiting for news."

While continuing to check in with Timm, Blow was also in contact with two professors who had been teaching a human development and family studies course in the Human Ecology Building, located between Berkey Hall and the Union. Those professors were were sheltering in a bathroom with more than 70 students.

"I was worried about them because our building is right next to the Union and it would have been an obvious next place to go," Blow said. "Extended family goes through all the trauma as well, even though it's obviously not anywhere close to what they went through."

Being prepared and moving forward

Timm said she has attended two active shooter trainings during her time as an educator. She credited those trainings with helping her be ready for Monday’s incident.

“At the beginning of every semester, I would go over the syllabus and then we would talk about what would happen if an active shooter came into the class,” Timm said. She didn’t intend to scare students with those warnings, but she said having a plan and thinking ahead helps protect people in the moment.

Timm had a heightened awareness about classroom violence because of an incident on Feb. 7 at Okemos High School, where two of her children attend. The school was locked down because of a fake report of an active shooter. While the report was quickly proven false, Timm was still shaken.

She stepped out of the class she was teaching in Bessey Hall to check on the Okemos reports. When she returned, she discussed classroom safety with her students.

“It terrifies me because it has two doors,” Timm said of the classroom in Bessey. She told her class that she had a plan for how she would secure classroom doors if she needed to.

“Six days later I needed to,” Timm said.

Before the university decided to find new locations for classes in Berkey Hall and the MSU Union, Timm had already known that her class would never set foot in that room again. Being an advanced course in social work, Timm said she and her students have a unique opportunity to work through their trauma and grief.

“I think we’re just going to shift, throw the syllabus out the window and take care of each other for the rest of the semester,” Timm said of her plans for her class. “We’re going to learn about post traumatic stress disorder firsthand, what that looks like, what that feels like, what works, what doesn’t and we’re just going to love each other.”

Jack Moreland is a news assistant at the Lansing State Journal and an MSU student. Contact him at jmoreland@lsj.com.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan State professor was in Berkey Hall with class when shots fired