She survived a high school shooting. At Michigan State, it happened again.
Emma Riddle had felt this fear before.
It was just past 8:30 Monday night, and the freshman at Michigan State University was in her dorm room, staring at an email on her phone.
“Secure-in-Place immediately,” it read. “Run, Hide, Fight.”
Emma, 18, took a screenshot and texted it to her parents.
“I’m sorry babe,” her dad, Matt Riddle, wrote back. “Let’s hope it is nothing.”
His daughter called a few minutes later. It wasn’t nothing.
“There’s an active shooter,” she whispered, hiding beneath her desk, the lights off and the windows covered. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
On a winter afternoon a little more than a year ago, Emma had been 80 miles east, in the band room at Oxford High School, when someone rushed in, panicked. Something bad was happening. Then an emergency alert blared through the intercom. They had drilled on what to do next for years.
Run. Hide. Fight.
Emma, who played clarinet, waited in terror behind barricaded doors until the students decided to try escaping. A door at the back of room led out to a field where the marching band practiced. They peeked out into the daylight, then fled.
Dozens of police cars sped by, and helicopters circled overhead. Sprinting through a neighborhood, Emma called her father.
“Dad, there’s an active shooter,” she said, weeping and out of breath. “I’m scared.”
Emma, then a senior, didn’t know that in the building behind her, in the town she’d spent all her life, a 15-year-old sophomore had opened fire, wounding 11 people. Four of them - all teenagers - died, including Justin Shilling, who was a friend.
The weeks that followed were a haze of funerals and memorials and community gatherings. It was hard to say no to anything, but all the trauma and grief exhausted her, as it did many of her classmates.
The sounds of police sirens and helicopters overwhelmed Emma, yanking her back to that frantic sprint through the neighborhood.
She refused to let any of it derail her senior year, though. Emma attended therapy sessions at school and learned to manage her flashbacks. An excellent student, she decided on Michigan State because of its history program. She liked that it was close to home, too.
As a freshman, Emma thrived. She made good grades and lots of friends. She joined a history club and a book club and a Taylor Swift club, where members discussed lyrics and favorite songs (she was torn between “Willow” and “August”).
Emma, one of about 20 Oxford survivors at the university, decided to minor in women’s studies, hoping to one day get a doctorate, maybe become a professor and teach students like her.
And then came Monday night.
“I’m so scared,” she texted her family.
“I known,” her dad replied, typing too fast to correct the typo. “I love you. He isn’t going in the dorms. They have locked the buildings.”
“Why haven’t they caught him yet,” she continued. “He’s so close dad.”
She and her roommate hid in the darkness for hours, and at 12:31 a.m., in a moment of fury and frustration, Emma composed a tweet: “14 months ago I had to evacuate from Oxford High School when a fifteen year old opened fire and killed four of my classmates and injured seven more. Tonight, I am sitting under my desk at Michigan State University, once again texting everyone ‘I love you.’ When will this end?”
Around 1:30 a.m., they learned that the school would allow students to leave campus. Her dad sped to East Lansing, pulling up outside his daughter’s building at 2:30 a.m. Emma wrapped her arms around him, then she and her roommate got in the car.
Matt Riddle took the week off to support his daughter at home. The memories of Oxford have all rushed back, but her dad also realized that, in her mind, she felt prepared for what’s to come.
She’s been an adult for only nine months, but she is a veteran of school shootings. She won’t overextend herself this time. She’ll know when to say no. She’ll know when to talk about it and when not to.
“It’s heartbreaking,” her dad said, “that she has those tools.”