Students at Florida State University (FSU) were to return to a campus in shock on Friday to retrieve the belongings they abandoned in their scramble to escape a gunman, including laptops, handbags and even shoes, and a vigil is planned in the evening, after a student killed two people and left six others injured.
Many gathered on Thursday night around a makeshift memorial on a sidewalk on campus, bringing candles, flowers, teddy bears and notes for the survivors. The impromptu memorials, dotted around the campus in the state capital of Tallahassee, came just hours after authorities arrested and charged a fellow student, Phoenix Ikner, 20, with the shooting.
Witnesses gave harrowing descriptions of the shooting, which began in a crowded area near the student union. Students used desks and chairs to barricade doors, and one classroom even used a piano, according to ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday. Jeffrey LaFary, a student at the school, told the ABC show that students in his class resorted to using chewing gum – as they didn’t have tape to hand – to stick paper to the windows of their classroom to try to block the shooter from seeing into it.
McKenzie Heeter, a third-year student, told NBC News that she saw the shooter get out of his car and open fire on Thursday at about noon. First, she said, he fired off a shot from a rifle. He then reached back into his car, pulled out a handgun, and shot a woman in the back who was walking in front of him.
The two men who died in connection to the shooting were not students, the Florida State University police chief, Jason Trumbower, said on Thursday. More information about the victims was not immediately available.
“I heard some gunshots and then, you know, just blacked out after,” said Carolina Sena, a 21-year-old accounting student who was inside the student union when the shooting started. “Everyone was crying and just panicking. We were trying to barricade ourselves in a little corner in the basement, trying to protect ourselves as much as we could.”
Ikner is the stepson of a longtime sheriff’s deputy and authorities say he used his stepmother’s former service weapon in the shooting. He was also reportedly a member of the local sheriff’s office youth advisory council, a committee to help the sheriff’s office communicate with young people. The suspect is in hospital and has not so far cooperated with the authorities by talking about the shooting.
“He has been steeped in the Leon county sheriff’s office family, engaged in a number of training programs that we have,” the Leon county sheriff, Walt McNeil, said on Thursday. “So it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”
Reid Seybold, a senior at FSU, told several news outlets he and Ikner had both attended Tallahassee State College before transferring to FSU. At their old school, Seybold said, Ikner had been kicked out of a political club and had voiced “white supremacist” rhetoric that had made others uncomfortable. The Guardian has not independently verified Seybold’s claims.
“He had continually made enough people uncomfortable where certain people had stopped coming,” Seybold told CNN. “It’s been a couple of years now, I can’t give exact quotes, but whether it was in that club or in class, he talked about the ravages of multiculturalism and communism and how its ruining America.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
