In an age when gun violence can seemingly strike any corner of American life, active-shooter drills in US schools have become nearly as ubiquitous as standardised testing. Florida State students not only knew what to do when gunfire rang out, some had been through it before - having endured campus shootings at previous schools.
“We’ve grown up in this era where school and campus shootings aren’t common but regular enough that when you see people panic and running you say, ‘Oh, that’s not right’,” said Ryan Cedergren, a 21-year-old junior who was in the student union when he saw classmates fleeing. He and dozens of others took cover in the building’s bowling alley.
“I think it’s been kind of hardwired into our brains,” Ana Martins, a 19-year-old freshman, said of her years of drills and shooting preparation.
The suspect’s identity sent shock waves through local law enforcement and the campus community.
The deputy’s son “had access to one of her weapons”, Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil said - a handgun that was found at the scene, along with a shotgun. Police said they were still investigating whether he used one or both of the guns in the shooting. It was “not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons”, said McNeil, who added that the suspect was also a member of the department’s youth advisory council.
“This event is tragic in more ways than you people in the audience can ever fathom from a law enforcement perspective,” he said at the briefing. “But I will tell you this: We will make sure we do everything we can to prosecute.”
Officers confronted the suspect, who did not comply with their commands, said Tallahassee police chief Lawrence E. Revell. They then shot and injured him before taking him into custody. He did not appear to have fired at officers, Revell said.
There have been three mass killings - events in which four or more people are shot to death, not including a perpetrator - across the country so far this year. And there have been many more shootings that did not reach that threshold but still killed several people or injured many more, delivering physical and psychological wounds that could last a lifetime.
On Tuesday, a 17-year-old student entered his Dallas high school and shot four of his classmates, police said, inflicting serious injuries before he fled the scene and was later arrested.
Beyond those directly involved in a shooting, students who witness the violence - or who hide from it in classroom closets or beneath desks - can be profoundly traumatised. At Florida State on Thursday, the campus community was still reeling.
Martins, the freshman, had just joined several other students sunbathing on Landis Green, a campus lawn. She sat down and FaceTimed her mom - then saw a crowd running past.
“I thought maybe that people were playing a game,” Martins said. “And then I heard a lot of people saying, ‘Shooting, there’s a gun.’”
The sunbathers bolted, leaving towels and bags strewn over the grass. Martins, who was barefoot, stayed on the line with her mom.
“She was hyperventilating and really panicky,” Martins said. “She just told me like, ‘Don’t stop, keep running.’”
Martins and other students barricaded themselves in the storage room of a nearby church and waited.
Anna Griffin, an 18-year-old freshman, was in her macroeconomics class with about 20 other students when she heard what she believed were gunshots. They piled classroom furniture in front of the door and waited in horror.
“I was freaking out,” she said. “I was shaking.”
A voice on the building intercom told them what they already knew: There was an active shooter. This was a lockdown.
After an hour of panicked waiting, police burst into the building and escorted students outside, ordering them to walk slowly with their hands raised, Griffin said. Officers stopped them near the student union, where she saw about five spent shells marked with white evidence placards. Griffin overheard another student say this was her second shooting, having been through one in high school.
Andres Perez, a 20-year-old political science major, was in the same building as Griffin when he heard the alarm sound. Thinking it was a fire drill, he prepared to leave his Chinese politics class with his fellow students.
But he soon realised it was a different emergency.
“This is something that has affected my generation for a very long time,” said Perez, a junior at the school. “It’s always lingering in the back of my mind.”
Classmates stacked desks against the door and spread out inside the room, trying to get out of the shooter’s line of sight if he happened to peer through the window.
Perez was scared - but he wasn’t surprised.
As president of the FSU chapter of the gun safety organisation Students Demand Action, Perez was part of a group of nearly 100 activists who went to the Florida Capitol this month to oppose a bill that would loosen gun sale regulations.
Motivated by the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in which a gunman had murdered 17 students and teachers 375 miles away in Parkland, Perez urged lawmakers to vote down a bill to make it easier to purchase deadly weapons.
Less than a week later, the Florida House of Representatives passed the legislation.
Now, Perez’s own school community had been added to the list of those affected by gun violence.
“I unfortunately just had to live through it,” he said, after he had evacuated campus and returned to his apartment.
“I’m hoping this is a day,” he said, “that will change things for the better.”
In Washington, however, President Donald Trump dismissed the idea that the latest shooting should spur legislative action to curtail firearm access.
“Look, I’m a big advocate of the Second Amendment,” he said, speaking in the Oval Office. “These things are terrible, but the gun doesn’t do the shooting, the people do.”
Trump, a Florida resident, said he knows the area around the university well.
“It’s a shame,” he told reporters. “Horrible thing. Horrible that things like this take place. And we’ll have more to say about it later.”
For faculty and staff, Thursday’s shooting was frighteningly reminiscent of an incident just over 10 years ago, when a gunman entered a Florida State library and opened fire, wounding three. The shooter, a school graduate, was killed in a confrontation with police.
The university on Thursday cancelled all classes and events for the remainder of the week. Officials told students to either hunker down in residence halls or return home through the weekend as they conduct their investigation on the campus.
One of the cancelled events was the Maura’s Voice Symposium, a speaker series named after Maura Binkley, a Florida State student killed in a 2018 shooting outside a yoga studio. The event was scheduled to take place in a building next door to the student union, where the gunfire broke out.
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was among those killed in the Parkland school shooting, said several of his daughter’s friends were at Florida State on Thursday, some of them at the student union. He said he had spent the day talking with them and their parents.
“I just remind them, especially the students,” Guttenberg said, “that I love them and that they’re okay and that they have their lives ahead of them.”
