Misinformation and fearmongering as traumatizing as the MSU gunman's violence

One message, then another, then another, then another; there is an active shooter in Berkey Hall, a 15-minute walk from where me and my closest friends are sitting in our dorm room. You never think it will happen to you, and then it does.

My friend pulls down the shades on our windows and turns off all the lights, performing the movements of every elementary school teacher that taught us sitting crisscross applesauce in the corner would keep us safe from the epidemic of school shootings. My other friend grabs a rosary and lights a candle for the unknown number of students still being terrorized as we mill around the room trying to find something to distract us from listening at the window for gunshots.

I’m sitting paralyzed, reading all the messages coming in from my journalist friends at the State News, updating rapidly as no one really knows what to do with themselves or with the news they are receiving. The shelter-in-place was announced, pressuring everyone on campus to stay in their 11-foot-by-12-foot room with only communication from Snapchat groups and their parents watching the news, wondering if their kid will be able to come home.

There I stayed for the next four hours, taking breaks to barricade the door with my friend’s desk, looking out the window to make sure the suspect wasn’t right around the corner, as fear mongering social media had me believing, and pacing around the room to feel like I was getting far away from this place. But I was stuck along with about 20,000 other students on campus.

Fear and misinformation

If I had to pick one aspect of the Michigan State Shooting that traumatized me the most, it was the misinformation.

This is what was confirmed at the 11 p.m. police briefing, almost three hours since the first shot was heard: The shootings had occurred at Berkey Hall, and then continued to the Union. Five people had been critically injured and the suspect was still at large. None of this calmed my nerves because the scanner was telling a different story.

I was hearing stories of different dorms being terrorized at the same time. There were rumors of multiple shooters in locations across campus, naming landmarks within 0.3 miles around me, like Owen Hall and the Chemistry Building. They reported gunshots heard or suspicious people around. Phillips Hall, where I eat lunch two times a week, was rumored to have been infiltrated.

A picture spread on social media of three men with rifles walking around Grand River, as well as a selfie on Facebook from a man that did not look like the description of the suspect threatening my school, confirmed to me and many other traumatized students that this was a planned attack and there were multiple threats to our lives, only making more tears form every time someone texted to make sure I was still alive.

The worst scanner notifications were that there were rumored explosives in the dorm across the street from mine and that the car they had been keeping eyes on had pulled into the drive to my dorm hall, right underneath our noses. I called the resident adviser on duty in a panic, listing back every word I had heard, practically pleading for someone to validate the panic that I was feeling. But I could hear it in her voice over the phone and I could see it all over my friends’ faces: We were all facing the same emotions.

It was just fear

I heard the conclusion after hours of poring over the scanner: the police approached the suspect, he caused a fatal self-inflicted wound, they performed CPR on him, no pulse and it was over. I thought: How could they say it’s over? What about organized crime and the chaos all over campus? Then realization set in: It was just fear.

None of my friends could sleep, so we stayed up putting the pieces together. Everyone was jumping at their shadows, calling in reports of gunshots that were never confirmed. The threat on Facebook had been a hoax created in 2020. The three gunmen were police in plainclothes. No explosives were found. The cars had been parents picking up children. And worse, I had been a victim of my own brain when I had sworn I saw someone on our street walking with a handgun.

But when I laid down to sleep that night with the door locked and my blinds still shut even at 4 a.m., four hours after the MSUPD told us there was no imminent threat, the reality was even worse than the lies that had been spread: Three innocent lives of the Spartan community I love so much had been taken and five others were in critical condition. I have always said I have never felt unsafe on campus. I can no longer say that.

The day after

I woke up to a week off of school and 100 "How are you feeling?" texts, immediately reliving what I knew had to have been a nightmare. It was a nightmare, but unfortunately, we were all still living in it.

I walked into the community bathroom and another girl was doing her skincare routine like any other Tuesday morning. I smiled, and she smiled back because what would we say now? “Spartan Strong” had been posted all over Instagram and was too tacky, but everything else was too real. Everything was too real.

I asked my mom to come pick me up and I threw myself into her arms after texting her all night with updates, knowing that this night had to be just as hard on her as it was on me. She is a single mother with an only child. As we drove off campus toward my hometown, I finally saw campus post-shooting. It was empty and eerie, with only a couple people walking around with suitcases, ready to feel safe farther away from their second home.

The campus was filled with sunshine the day before, people chatting about the good weather and seeing the dreariness of winter wash away. I did not recognize that campus. While it was just as sunny as the day before, there was a film of gray across the university.

There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 and already 65 mass shootings in 2023.

The Rock on Farm Lane is used as a canvas where students paint messages for campus on the daily. Chills went down my spine as I left campus with Tuesday’s message:

“How Many More?”

Liz Nass has worked as a correspondent in Arts and Entertainment for The Tribune since May 2022. She is a journalism and political science junior at Michigan State University, where she writes for The State News, MSU's independent newspaper. Nass grew up in Edwardsburg.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Michigan State University mass shooting traumatizing on many levels