Gunman Found Dead; 3 Killed, 5 Wounded in Michigan State Campus Shooting
At least three people were shot dead, and five were critically injured in an on-campus shooting at Michigan State University in East Lansing on Monday night, campus police confirmed. The suspect in the shooting has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said in a news conference early Tuesday morning. All eight victims were students at the university.
The suspect, who police identified as 43-year-old Anthony McRae, was found off-campus and reported dead about four hours after the first reports of shots fired were made. Authorities said he was not affiliated with the university and that a motive is not yet known. (Rolling Stone has found that McRae previously pleaded guilty to weapons charges, for which he served about 18 months in prison.) It is also unclear how long he was on campus before the shooting, and it has not been announced what type of weapon was used in the shooting, though authorities said that they recovered at least one firearm. According to a spokesperson for the Michigan State Police, at the request of the Michigan State University Police, a search warrant was executed at the Lansing home of the suspect. As of 7:20 a.m., teams, including the bomb squad, canine team, and emergency support team had cleared the scene.
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“This truly has been a nightmare that we are living tonight,” said Chris Rozman, the University Police Department’s interim deputy police chief. The shooting started around 8:18 p.m. at Berkey Hall, the school’s college of arts and sciences building, where the bodies of two victims were located. The third fatality was found at the Student Union building. It is unclear where the five wounded victims were shot, Rozman said, though he later clarified that he believed most of them were injured in Berkey Hall. All five victims were transported to nearby Sparrow Hospital and remain in critical condition.
Dr. Denny Martin, the Interim President of Sparrow Hospital and its chief medical officer, teared up as he discussed the condition of the five victims in his care at a press conference later that morning. Four of them, he said, had to have surgical interventions, and all five are still in critical care. He said it was too early to offer a prognosis for any of the victims.
Rozman described the suspect as a Black man “shorter in stature, and wearing red shoes, a jean jacket, and a ball cap.” Images released by authorities showed the suspect wearing a mask. Police said the suspect was identified as McRae shortly after an 11:30 p.m. press conference in which his picture was made public. Berkey Hall, where two of the fatalities occurred, is an academic building with no residence facilities, according to Rozman, and therefore unlocked during business hours. The shooting occurred before the building was secured for the night.
According to the university’s website, an initial shots-fired alert went out around 8:30 p.m., cautioning students to “run, hide, fight,” and the university issued an active-shooter text alert at 10:05 p.m. urging those on campus to secure in place or to evacuate safely. The message warned students about a situation involving “active violence.”
Shortly after, police stated that there were “multiple reported injuries” and that they were “receiving multiple calls of an active shooter on campus.” A shelter-in-place order was lifted shortly after 12:30 when the suspect was found dead.
After the initial calls went out, authorities said that there were several erroneous reports of active shooters on other parts of campus; Rozman said that he couldn’t say how many false reports came in but that there were “more than five” calls of shots that were not fired. He said that part of the investigation would be who made those calls and where they came from.
All campus activities will be canceled for the next 48 hours. The university has roughly 50,000 students, according to its website. About 40 percent live on campus.
At a news conference shortly after 8 a.m. EST, officials, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Rep. Elissa Slotkin, gathered to thank law enforcement for their quick and thorough unified response to the shooting before talking about the ongoing problem of gun violence. “Words are not good enough — we must act, and we will,” said Gov. Whitmer, adding that she had reached out to President Biden, who had committed to bringing additional mental-health resources to the state. Rep. Slotkin noted that it was her second time holding such a press conference in 15 months, following Nov. 2021 shooting at a high school in Oxford, Michigan, in which four students were killed. “I’m filled with rage,” she said. “Either you care about kids, or you don’t.”
“We are devastated at the loss of life,” Michigan State University Interim President Teresa Woodruff said earlier on Tuesday. Woodruff added that students and faculty would be given two days to “think and grieve and come together.”
Representatives for Michigan State University did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
On Tuesday morning, schools in Ewing Township, New Jersey, were closed after police alerted the superintendent that McCrae was found with a note in his pocket that “indicated a threat to two Ewing Public Schools.” Later in the morning, police released an update, saying, “After further investigation, it has been determined that the incident is isolated to Michigan, and there is no threat to Ewing Schools. Information received during our investigation indicated that McRae has not resided in the Ewing area in several years.” The police declined to provide further information about the threatening note and directed Rolling Stone to their most recent press release.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson described the tragedy at Michigan State University as “unfathomable.” Benson tweeted on Monday that the “repetitive terror cannot continue. We must come together and do whatever it takes to protect our kids & communities from gun violence.”
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings in the United States, this is the 67th mass shooting of 2023. It happened on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Parkland shooting, in which 17 students were killed at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
This story is developing…
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