Emergency alerts, desks barricading doors, shoes abandoned in the grass: How the FSU mass shooting upended the campus

By Alaa Elassar, CNN

(CNN) — It was an ordinary afternoon for Jayden D’Onofrio, who was spending time with a friend at their apartment complex when they received a text that made their blood run cold.

An active shooter was on campus, and their friend was hiding in the library.

Without a second thought, they ran to her.

A perfect, sun-drenched Florida spring day had suddenly descended into horror when a gunman began firing at victims near Florida State University’s student union building, marking the next chapter in America’s grim epidemic of gun violence.

“That is one of the most gutting feelings possible, to not know if your friends are okay… and if they’re going to make it through that moment,” D’Onofrio told CNN.

“There’s no words to sort of describe that feeling and that experience.”

Another college campus – and thousands of students – are now scarred by the lasting trauma of gun violence, transforming the once-idyllic lawns, where students usually gather with books and coffee, into a dreadful reminder of where innocent lives were taken.

Two weeks before the semester’s end, just as seniors were gearing up for graduation, two people were killed and five others injured when the suspect, a student at the university and the son of a local sheriff, police said, opened fire.

D’Onofrio is no stranger to the reality of how gun violence can tear a community apart. Thursday’s shooting comes seven years after the bloodbath in Parkland, Florida, when a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed 17 people and wounded 17 others, ripping the community apart.

He was in his 7th grade English class when he got the phone notification that there was a shooting 15 minutes away from his school. Following the massacre, D’Onofrio had school shooting drills every month growing up, he says, “and this is just another chapter of that.”

Scrambling to dodge bullets

As the university went into lockdown, students and staff received emergency alerts urging them to shelter in place. Inside the buildings, students crouched beneath desks, texting loved ones in fear. In one classroom, they piled desks against the door in an attempt to barricade themselves.

“I saw this police officer with an assault rifle, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is real,’” Holden Mamula told CNN. He was in his calculus class when he heard sirens in the distance and an active shooter alert sounded on campus.

The political science and statistics major 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, describing the experience as traumatizing. “I don’t think you feel the emotion until you’ve been through that.”

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 frantically scrambled to dodge bullets, their screams filling the air while gunshots rang out, one after another.

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 “let off a shot” in her general direction, where other people were also walking.

She witnessed the man turn around and pull a handgun out of the car, turn toward the student union and shoot 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 started running until she made it back to her apartment, around a mile away. For the first 20 seconds, she heard continuous gunfire. “It was just shot after shot after shot,” she said.

Meanwhile, ambulances and a swarm of police vehicles sped toward campus, their sirens swallowing the calm that had existed just moments before. Students lounging on the lush lawns of the university’s sprawling Tallahassee campus were sent fleeing for their lives, abandoning their shoes and backpacks in the grass.

Taking shelter at a church

Many of those fleeing ran to the Co-Cathedral of St. Thomas More, a church across the street from Florida State University, where the priest was helping terrified people find shelter.

Father Luke Farabaugh was attending a staff birthday party when he heard pops, which gave him a bad feeling, he said. People started pouring into the cathedral with “a fear that I had never seen before,” Farabaugh said. “It was surreal to be thrust into a life-and-death situation.”

Once the all-clear was issued hours after the shooting, streams of students, some with their hands in the air, were evacuated from campus buildings and brought to safe locations, where many were seen collapsing into hugs and breaking down in tears.

“You go to school to get your degree, make friends, you make memories, not to go to school to experience stuff like this,” FSU student Garrett Harvey told CNN from a building where he had been evacuated to with hundreds of other students.

D’Onofrio shared the sentiment, saying he managed to get his friend — who was in shock — to safety.

“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, especially here in Florida.”

Gun violence in the US has turned into a relentless crisis, claiming lives daily and leaving shattered communities to pick up the pieces every time. There have been 81 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

As students returned to collect the belongings they’d left behind while fleeing the gunfire, evidence markers dotted the lawn near the student union building, where shell casings lay scattered in the grass.

On the night of the shooting, a mass was held at the church where people fled for safety. What was meant to be a joyous time for the community as Easter approaches, Farabaugh said, turned into tragedy.

“We will be entering into this Holy Week in a different way this year,” Farabaugh added. “I don’t have any spiritual conclusions. I only say that as we enter into this service, many of us were thrust into service today.”

CNN’s Sara Smart, Nick Valencia, Dalia Faheid, Elise Hammond and Asya McDonald contributed to this report.

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