As gunfire erupts, students urged to ‘run, hide, fight’
EAST LANSING, Mich. — 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-yearold 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.
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.”