For Jayden D’Onofrio, it began as an ordinary afternoon, spending time with a friend at their apartment complex, until a text message arrived, chilling them to the bone.
An active shooter was on campus, and their friend was sheltering in the library.
Without a moment’s hesitation, they ran towards her.
A perfect, sun-drenched Florida spring day had abruptly turned into a scene of horror when a gunman began firing at people near Florida State University’s student union building, marking yet another tragic episode in America’s ongoing crisis of gun violence.
“That is one of the most gut-wrenching feelings imaginable, not knowing if your friends are safe… and whether they will survive that moment,” D’Onofrio recounted to a news outlet.
“There are simply no words to truly capture that feeling and that experience.”
Advertisement Feedback Another college campus – and thousands of students – now bear the enduring scars of gun violence.
Just two weeks before the semester’s end, as seniors eagerly anticipated graduation, two lives were lost and five others were injured when the suspect, identified by police as a student at the university and the son of a local sheriff’s deputy, opened fire.
For D’Onofrio, the devastating impact of gun violence on a community is a familiar reality. Thursday’s shooting occurred seven years after the horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which claimed the lives of 17 people and wounded 17 others, tearing the community apart.
He was in his 7th-grade English class when he received the alert on his phone about a shooting 15 minutes away from his school. Following that tragedy, D’Onofrio says he experienced monthly school shooting drills throughout his upbringing, “and this is just another chapter of that.”
‘Made enough people uncomfortable’: FSU student describes suspect’s behavior in class 01:53 Scrambling to Evade Bullets
As the university went into lockdown, students and staff received emergency alerts urging them to seek immediate shelter. Inside campus buildings, students huddled beneath desks, frantically texting loved ones out of fear. In one classroom, they desperately piled desks against the door in an attempt to create a makeshift barricade.
Sam Swartz, a senior at the university, found himself relying on his high school training for responding to school shootings. He sheltered with other students in the basement of the student union during the attack, hoping to “wait it out.”
Swartz and his group quickly moved trash cans and plywood into position, stacking them to form a low barrier – a deliberate tactic Swartz remembered from his high school days.
“The most effective thing to do is to try and deter the shooter,” he explained to a news outlet’s reporter. “Their aim is always to try and shoot as many people as possible, so if you can manage to delay that, you significantly improve your chances.”
Another senior, Will Schatz, was inside the student union when the shooting unfolded.
“I heard some commotion earlier, but it didn’t really register until I saw a large group of people just sprinting towards the exit. While some stayed behind to find shelter, I also ran outside the building,” Schatz recounted to a news outlet.
A FSU classroom is barricaded during the shooting. Courtesy Gabriel Santoro Holden Mamula told a news outlet that he was in his calculus class when he heard sirens in the distance and an active shooter alert blared across campus. “I saw this police officer with an assault rifle, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really happening,’” he said.
The political science and statistics major texted his parents and knelt down, ready to run, as his classmates hid behind desks and turned off the lights.
“It’s unbelievable to me how we continue to have these incidents, one after another, of just mass shootings,” Mamula said, describing the experience as deeply traumatizing. “I don’t think you truly feel the emotion until you’ve been through something like that.”
A video captured by a student who hid behind a bush during the attack showed someone’s motionless body lying on the grass as others desperately scrambled to avoid bullets, their screams piercing the air amidst the continuous sound of gunfire.
McKenzie Heeter was leaving the student union when she noticed an orange Hummer parked nearby on a service road. She then saw a man next to the vehicle holding “a larger gun,” and he “fired a shot” in her general direction, where other people were also walking.
She witnessed the man turn around and pull a handgun from the car, then turn towards 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 specific target. It was just anyone he could see,” Heeter said. “And I took off running.”
She ran until she reached her apartment, about a mile away. For the first 20 seconds, she heard relentless gunfire. “It was just shot after shot after shot,” she recalled.
Law enforcement on FSU’s campus following the mass shooting on Thursday. Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat/USA Today Network/Imagn Images/Reuters Meanwhile, ambulances and a multitude of police vehicles raced towards the campus, their sirens drowning out the peace that had prevailed just moments before. Students who had been relaxing on the sprawling, lush lawns of the university’s Tallahassee campus were sent fleeing for their lives, abandoning their shoes and backpacks on the grass.
Seeking Shelter at a Church
Many of those fleeing sought refuge at the Co-Cathedral of St. Thomas More, a church located across the street from Florida State University, where the priest was assisting terrified individuals in finding safety.
Father Luke Farabaugh was attending a staff birthday celebration when he heard popping sounds, which immediately gave him a sense of foreboding, he said. People began flooding into the cathedral with “a fear that I had never witnessed before,” Farabaugh recounted. “It felt surreal to be suddenly thrust into a life-and-death situation.”
Once the all-clear was given hours after the shooting, streams of students, some with their hands raised, were evacuated from campus buildings and taken to secure locations, where many were seen collapsing into comforting embraces and breaking down in tears.
“You go to school to earn your degree, make friends, create memories, not to experience something like this,” FSU
