‘Run, Hide, Fight’ as gunfire erupts
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 was evident in texts to parents, posts on social media and in 911 calls — as some feared that the police coming to rescue them were actually the shooter.
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.
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.
Aedan Kelley, a junior who lives about a half-mile east of campus, said he hid with his roommate, locking his doors and covering windows as another roommate was locked down on campus.
“It’s all very frightening. And then I have all these people texting me wondering if I’m OK, which is overwhelming,” he said.
Some students were no strangers to mass shootings. 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 as she watched students flee from the gunfire.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” said Mancini, who didn’t want her daughter’s name used.
Annie Heitmeier, a third-year student and volunteer with the gun-control advocacy group Students Demand Action, said it was “horrifying” that the shooting was the second for some students.
“We won’t stand for any more inaction from our legislators because no one should ever experience the terror and fear that we lived through last night,” she said in a news release.
Ryan Kunkel, a 22-year-old student, 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.”