EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The 43-year-old gunman who killed three students and wounded five others at Michigan State University had no apparent connection to the campus, police said Tuesday as they searched for a motive for shootings that terrified the community for hours.
Investigators were sorting out why Anthony McRae fired inside an academic building and the student union just before 8:30 p.m. Monday. An hourslong lockdown at the campus in East Lansing ended when he killed himself miles away while being confronted by police.
The shooting happened the day before the fifth anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17 and is the latest in what has become a deadly new year in the U.S.
“We have to do something to stop the gun violence that’s ripping apart our communities,” President Joe Biden said in a speech Tuesday, mentioning Michigan State.
Meanwhile, a school district in Ewing Township, New Jersey, closed for the day after investigators said that McRae, who lived in the area years ago, had a note in his pocket indicating a threat to schools there. But it was determined there was no credible threat, local police said later in a statement shared by the superintendent.
The dead and injured in the gunfire at Berkey Hall and the MSU Union, a popular place to eat and study, were all Michigan State students. Five remained in critical condition at Sparrow Hospital, said Dr. Denny Martin, who fought back tears during a news conference Tuesday.
“We have absolutely no idea what the motive was,” said Chris Rozman, deputy chief of campus police, adding that McRae, of Lansing, was not a student or Michigan State employee.
“This is still fluid,” Rozman said. “There are still crime scenes that are being processed, and we still are in the process of putting together the pieces to try to understand what happened.”
The dead were all from the Detroit area. Two gradated from separate high schools in the Grosse Pointe district: Brian Fraser, president of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and Arielle Anderson. Alexandria Verner, a graduate of Clawson High School in another Detrot suburb, also died.
“If you knew her, you loved her and we will forever remember the lasting impact she has had on all of us,” Clawson Superintendent Billy Shellenbarger said in an email to families.
The shootings took place in an area of older, stately buildings on the northern edge of the Michigan State campus, one of the nation’s largest at 5,200 acres. Just across busy Grand River Avenue lies East Lansing’s downtown, teeming with restaurants, bars and shops.
“Our Spartan community is reeling today,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Michigan State graduate, said at the morning briefing.
Biden pledged his support during a phone call, she said.
“We mourn the loss of beautiful souls today and pray for those who are continuing to fight for their lives. … Another place that is supposed to be about community and togetherness is shattered by bullets and bloodshed,” Whitmer said.
Michigan State has about 50,000 students, including 19,000 who live on campus. As hundreds of officers scoured the campus, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) northwest of Detroit, students hid where they could Monday night.
At 11 p.m., police were still searching for McRae when he turned up on school security cameras, and his image was quickly released to news media. An “alert citizen” saw the picture, recognized him in the Lansing area and contacted police within minutes, Rozman said.
“That was exactly what we were trying to achieve by releasing that picture. We had no idea where he was at that point,” the deputy chief said.
Officers confronted McRae about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from campus in an industrial area, where he killed himself, Rozman said.
In 2019, McRae was accused of illegally possessing a concealed weapon, according to the state Corrections Department, but pleaded guilty to having a loaded gun in a vehicle, a misdemeanor. He completed 18 months of probation.
A large police presence was in his Lansing neighborhood overnight. Suzanne Shook said she has lived a block away from McRae for about a year.
“We never spoke to him,” Shook said. “When he would be walking or riding his bike, he was always straightforward and wouldn’t look at anybody.”
Students, meanwhile, recalled the previous night’s terror. Dominik Molotky said he was learning about Cuban history around 8:15 p.m. when he and the other students heard a gunshot outside the classroom. He told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that a few seconds later, the gunman entered and fired three to four more rounds.
“I was ducking and covering, and the same with the rest of the students,” Molotky said.
Claire Papoulias, a sophomore, described on NBC’s “Today” how she and other students scrambled to escape a history class through a window after the gunman entered from a back door and began firing.
“As soon as I fell out of the window I kind of hit the ground a little. I just grabbed my backpack and my phone, and I remember I just ran for my life,” she said.
All classes, sports and other activities were canceled for 48 hours. Interim university President Teresa Woodruff said it would be a time “to think and grieve and come together.”
Dozens of people have died in mass shootings so far in 2023, most notably in California, where 11 people were killed as they welcomed the Lunar New Year at a dance hall popular with older Asian Americans. In 2022, more than 600 mass shootings occurred in the U.S. in which at least four people were killed or wounded, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
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Associated Press writers Ed White and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.
Michigan State urges: ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ as gunfire erupts
EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — They broke out windows to escape, barricaded doors and hid under blankets. They silenced their phones — afraid to make even the slightest sound for hours as police searched for a gunman who had already killed three students and critically wounded five others on the Michigan State University campus.
The terror felt by thousands of students — some experiencing their second mass shooting — was evident in texts to parents, posts on social media and in 911 calls.
It started around 8:30 p.m. Monday when Anthony McRae, a 43-year-old with a previous gun violation, opened fire inside an academic building and the student union.
Alerts sent out to students urged them to “run, hide, fight,” and video showed them fleeing as police swarmed toward the chaos. The massive search that ensued ended roughly three hours later when McRae fatally shot himself in a confrontation with police miles from campus, officials said Tuesday.
McRae was neither a student nor an employee of the university. The motive is a mystery.
Jaqueline Matthews, a member of the Michigan State rowing team, crouched for so long when gunfire erupted at Sandy Hook Elementary that her back is permanently injured. Now a decade later, the 21-year-old international law major was watching chaos outside her campus window, stunned to find herself here yet again.
“The fact that this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible,” she said in a TikTok video that she recorded in the early morning hours, demanding legislative action. “We can no longer allow this to happen. We can no longer be complacent.”
She wasn’t the only one experiencing her second mass shooting. Jennifer Mancini told the Detroit Free Press that her daughter also had survived the November 2021 shooting that left four students dead at Oxford High School in southeastern Michigan. Now a freshman at Michigan State, her daughter was traumatized anew.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” said Mancini, who didn’t want her daughter’s name used.
Others across campus experienced the terror for the first time.
Ted Zimbo, a 26-year-old astrophysics major, said he was heading back to his residence hall after an off-campus meeting when he saw police cars everywhere and a blood-covered woman hiding behind a car. She told him that someone came into her classroom and started shooting.
“Her hands were completely covered in blood. It was on her pants and her shoes,” he told The Associated Press. “She said, ‘It’s my friend’s blood.’”
That, he said, is when it hit him: “There was a real shooting, a mass shooting.”
The woman picked up her phone and started crying, unsure of what happened to her friend. Zimbo spent the next three hours hunkered down in his Toyota SUV, a blanket tossed over him.
In a nearby residence hall, Karah Tanski said she spent two hours “crunched under a desk, crying, thinking I was literally going to die.”
The 22-year-old resident assistant said about 40 freshmen relied on her, social media and police scanners for updates during the lockdown. From empty bomb threats to incorrect details about the shooter, the updates were sometimes wrong and added to the “mass hysteria” of the night, Tanski said.
About a half-mile east of campus, junior Aedan Kelley hid with his roommate, locking his doors and covering windows.
“It’s all very frightening. And then I have all these people texting me wondering if I’m OK, which is overwhelming,” he said.
Ryan Kunkel, 22, said he and his classmates turned off the lights and acted like there “was a shooter right outside the door.” For more than four hours, as they waited, “nothing came out of anyone’s mouth,” he recalled.
“This is supposed to be a place where I’m coming, learning and bettering myself. And instead, students are getting hurt.”
Dominik Molotky said he was in a Cuban history class when he and the other students heard a gunshot right outside the classroom. He told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that a few seconds later the gunman entered the classroom and fired three to four more rounds while the students took cover.
“After that we broke out the window, and I climbed out of there. And then I booked it back to my apartment,” he said.
Claire Papoulias, a sophomore, told NBC’s “Today” show she was listening to a history lecture when she heard gunshots and dropped to the floor.
“At that moment,” she said, “I thought that I was going to die, I was so scared.”
She said she quietly called her mom while classmates opened a window and helped people to jump to safety. Once outside, she grabbed her backpack and phone.
“And I remember,” she said, “I just ran for my life.”
Sophomores Jake Doohan and Nicole Stark were walking off campus when they heard about the shooting and took shelter, barricading a door with a dresser.
With the blinds closed so “not a speck of light could get out,” Stark said she felt like they were watching the news, as though “it’s not actually happening to us.”
The senselessness of it left Doohan stunned.
“It’s sad to think,” he said, “that things like this will happen just out of the blue to anybody or anywhere.”
John and Rona Szydzik, who both graduated from Michigan State University, left flowers on the campus Tuesday after spending the previous night hiding as ambulances wailed past their home.
As a high school teacher, Rona Szydzik has drilled for years to “run, hide, fight.” But she added: “To actually be in it, that’s very shocking.” For her husband, the flowers were a way to let the victims’ families know they cared, that they were praying.
“It really was tough,” he said, becoming emotional as he spoke.
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Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri. Associated Press writers Rick Callahan in Indianapolis; Ed White and Corey Williams in Detroit; Summer Ballentine in Jefferson City, Missouri; Trisha Ahmed in St. Paul, Minnesota; and Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.