Before they even knew a mass shooter was on campus, Dakota Bages and her classmates heard screams of terror and started barricading themselves.
It was shortly before noon Thursday at Florida State University. The students were in the library just steps away from the student union – which soon devolved into a scene of carnage when a gunman opened fire, killing two people and wounding several others.
“We just kind of heard ruckus,” Bages said. “We heard these kind of screams from what sounded like a man … and then we heard a woman scream – kind of like she had been toppled over.”
Instinctively, the students ran and jumped into action – even though they still weren’t sure what was happening, Bages said.
“Some are crying. Some are trying to keep their cool. Others are screaming: ‘Get in, get in! Push the table! Cover the door!’ They ended up lifting up these huge desks – that are meant to be computer desks – lifting them up and putting them against this glass wall,” Bages said.
“Just hearing that screaming from behind you, and in front of you, to your left, to your right – you don’t know how to compose yourself. You don’t know where to hide. There’s nowhere really to run.”
The same library was the site of a shooting in 2014. Three people were injured, including a student who was left paralyzed. The gunman was shot and killed by campus police.
When the chaos erupted Thursday, one of the students holed up in the library texted their friend Jayden D’Onofrio with a chilling message. An active shooter was on campus, and D’Onofrio’s friend was hiding in the library.
“That is one of the most gutting feelings possible – to not know if your friends are OK … and if they’re going to make it through that moment,” he told CNN.
D’Onofrio is painfully aware how gun violence can devastate a community. In 2018, he was a 7th grader in southern Florida when a gunman opened fire at nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The assailant killed 17 people and wounded 17 others in a massacre that prompted new laws.
Seven years later, D’Onofrio is reliving the horror.
“This isn’t normal. It keeps happening again and again,” he said. “It’s depressing, and there’s no real action being taken to change it.”
People evacuate FSU’s campus. – Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat/USA Today Network/Imagn Images/Reuters
Witness says the gunman seemed to shoot victims randomly
McKenzie Heeter was leaving the student union when she saw an orange Hummer parked nearby on a service road. She then saw a man next to the car holding “a larger gun,” when he fired in her general direction, where other people were also walking.
The gunman then pulled out a handgun, turned toward the student union and shot a woman wearing purple scrubs in the back.
“When he turned to the woman and shot her, that’s when I realized there was no target. And that it was anybody he could see,” Heeter said. “And I took off.”
She ran all the way back to her apartment, about a mile away. The first 20 seconds of her sprint were pierced by the sound of continuous gunfire, Heeter said. “It was just shot after shot after shot.”
A video taken by a student who hid behind a bush during the attack captured someone’s body lying still in the grass as others scrambled to dodge bullets, the sounds of gunfire and screams filling the air.
Students hold a vigil Thursday near the scene of a shooting on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee,. – Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images
Active shooter drills from childhood helped students react
Thousands of students and staff received emergency alerts about the attack and went into lockdown.
Senior Sam Swartz quickly recalled his high school training on how to respond to school shootings. He hunkered down with others in the basement of the student union, hoping to “hide it out.”
Together, they shoved trash cans and stacked plywood to create a barricade – a tactic he learned years earlier.
Students barricaded a classroom at Florida State University after a gunman on campus opened fire. – Courtesy Gabriel Santoro
“The best thing to do is to try and deter the shooter,” he told CNN’s Omar Jimenez. “Their goal is always just to try and (shoot) as many people as possible. So if you can try and delay that, you’re going to be pretty good.”
‘Oh my gosh, this is real’
Across campus, students crouched beneath desks and texted loved ones in fear. Some piled desks against doors to try to block the shooter.
Holden Mamula was in his calculus class when he heard sirens and an active shooter alert sounding on campus.
“I saw this police officer with an assault rifle, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is real,’” he said.
Law enforcement respond to the scene of the shooting on FSU’s campus. – Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat/USA Today Network/Imagn Images/Reuters
Mamula texted his parents and sat on his knees, preparing to run, as classmates hid behind desks and turned off the lights.
“It’s insane to me how we keep having these incidents, after incidents, after incidents, of just mass shootings,” Mamula said. “I don’t think you feel the emotion until you’ve been through that.”
An incoming student on campus isn’t deterred
The gunfire erupted just two weeks before the end of the semester. While seniors were getting ready to graduate, dozens of incoming freshmen were eagerly touring campus when they were suddenly forced into lockdown.
High school senior Kylie Byun and her parents had just left FSU’s student union about five minutes before the popular site turned into a scene of terror.
They took their seats in a nearby auditorium filled with 80 to 100 teens and parents for “an admitted students tour,” Byun said.
Moments later, an FSU student “busted into the room and yelled, ‘Everyone! There is word of an active shooter on campus!’ and repeated that a couple of times,” Byun told CNN.
“I definitely felt some degree of panic for not only me and my family’s safety, but for all the other students on campus.”
For the next two hours, the visitors were “locked in a room with no windows, and no one was allowed in or out,” the 18-year-old said.
When officials finally cleared the families to leave, “they were offering medical help,” Byun said. “And they were saying that if you needed to talk to anyone for, like, mental health reasons, they also had people there to tend to that.”
The future biology major and aspiring medical school student said the ordeal hasn’t deterred her from attending FSU this fall. In fact, the way FSU managed the situation made her feel more secure.
“This is definitely scary, but I think the way the school handled it made me feel pretty safe,” she said. “Because no matter where you go, there’s a possibility of (a) shooting. And that’s the sad truth of the world that we live in.”
CNN’s Sara Smart, Nick Valencia, Dalia Faheid, Elise Hammond, Asya McDonald and Hanna Park contributed to this report.
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