Michigan State gunman ‘felt slighted’ before attack
Note found on him listed other targets
EAST LANSING — The gunman who killed three students at Michigan State University and critically injured five others carried a note targeting his former employer and other businesses because he “felt slighted,” police said Thursday.
At a briefing Thursday, Michigan State Police spokesman Lt. Rene Gonzalez said Anthony Dwayne McRae, 43, who fatally shot himself Monday when police confronted him, listed a church and several local businesses on the note found on his body. The sites included a Meijer pharmacy warehouse, where he once worked, and schools as far away as New Jersey, where he once lived.
McRae also said he was the leader of “20 killers” — a claim police said was untrue, because his father told police he had no friends and rarely left his room.
“He just felt slighted,” Lt. Gonzalez said. “That’s sort of what the note indicated.”
Authorities said they have not yet established a clear link between the shooter and MSU, although they are investigating whether he once applied for a job at the school. They are also investigating whether he suffered from mental illness.
“We believe there were no other suspects involved and McRae was the lone shooter,” Lt. Gonzalez said.
Michigan State University’s interim president, Teresa Woodruff, said Thursday that the university had resumed “standard” operations but that classes would be canceled through Sunday. Ms. Woodruff said Berkey Hall, where one student was killed, will be closed for the remainder of the semester. Officials have not decided whether to reopen the student union, where two others died.
Ms. Woodruff said that although classes would resume as of Monday, officials were still discussing whether accommodations would be made for students.
Authorities said McRae entered a classroom at Berkey Hall on the sprawling East Lansing campus just before 8:30 p.m. Monday and began firing before moving onto the student union. The attack terrorized students and employees at the school, and many hunkered down in classrooms and bathrooms for over three hours as a manhunt ensued.
Police said Thursday that McRae was carrying two 9mm handguns when he died that he had obtained legally but not registered, as well nine loaded magazines of ammunition and a pouch with additional bullets.
A third handgun — confiscated by police in 2019 after McRae pleaded guilty to carrying a gun without a permit — remains in police custody, officials said.
Chris Rozman, the interim deputy chief of police for MSU, said at the briefing Thursday that the MSU police department was operating on the assumption that there was an active shooter still on campus during the lengthy shelter-in-place ordeal, although McRae was found more than 3 miles away after a citizen saw him walking along a road and contacted police. The citizen’s call came in 17 minutes after police had broadcast photos of McRae entering an MSU building, he said.
The Michigan State shooting was the latest in a long line of high-profile mass killings so far this year and ignited a debate on campus about gun control after “The Rock” — a boulder that served as a community message board — was painted with anti-gun, then pro-gun rhetoric before being painted over yet again with the victim’s names.
The Rock was the site of an emotional vigil Tuesday night for the victims, who included Arielle Anderson, 19, a straight-A student who dreamed of becoming a doctor; Alexandria Verner, 20, a three-sport high school athlete; and Brian Fraser, 20, who led his fraternity and was called a “great friend.” All were from communities in the Detroit area.
One of the five wounded students was upgraded to stable condition at Sparrow Hospital. The others remained in critical condition but with “signs of improvement,” Ms. Woodruff said.
Two of the students are from China, according to a statement from the Chinese Consulate in Chicago.
“Our hearts break for those lives that were shattered by gun violence,” Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said Tuesday night, calling gun violence a “uniquely American problem.”
A Wednesday night vigil on campus also drew thousands of students. Tom Izzo, the university’s revered basketball coach and father of a student, offered words of comfort.
“Our hearts are heavy. Our loss has been great. Our lives have been permanently changed,” said Mr. Izzo, head coach since 1995. “But with a shared commitment to help each other, and a promise to remember those we have lost, we will learn to find joy once again.”
Ms. Whitmer and other Democrats have called for measures tightening access to guns, which they hope to push through after flipping the state legislature in the November midterm elections. Ms. Whitmer has said she wants three policy changes passed: universal background checks, safe storage laws and extremerisk protection orders, also known as “red-flag laws,” that prevent a person who is deemed a threat to themselves or others from possessing a gun. Republicans in Michigan and nationally have remained opposed to tightening access to weapons.
So far this year, there have been 68 mass shootings in the United States, more than at this point in any year since the archive began tracking in 2014, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.
McRae’s father, Michael McRae, told The Washington Post in an interview that his son had changed after his mother’s death from a stroke in 2020, and that he had become withdrawn, sullen and rarely left the house.
Michael McRae said his son had bought a gun sometime after he was arrested in 2019 on a weapons violation, but never admitted that he had it in the house and refused to show it to his father.
When the father confronted the son about gunshots he heard in his backyard in Lansing, he said, Anthony McRae told him it was fireworks. Lansing’s police chief said at the briefing that they did not have any reports from neighbors of shots fired at the home.