MIAMI — Two people died and six others were injured at Florida State University in Tallahassee on Thursday when a 20-year-old man armed with a handgun opened fire near the student union, law enforcement officials said.
The suspect was shot and wounded by police officers after he disregarded their commands, authorities said. He was taken to the hospital and identified as a student and the son of a local sheriff’s deputy.
Officials were working on “multiple crime scenes” at the Florida State campus and dealing with at least “hundreds” of witnesses, said Chief Lawrence E. Revell of the Tallahassee Police Department, the lead investigative agency.
Here is what we know.
The shooting happened near the student union building.
Around 11:50 a.m., gunfire erupted near the student union building at Florida State, a public university with an enrollment of more than 43,000, eight days before the last day of classes for the spring semester. The gunman used a handgun, law enforcement officials said during an afternoon news conference.
Officers from the university’s Police Department responded. When the gunman did not comply with their commands, they shot and wounded him. He was taken into custody and to the hospital, where he invoked his right to remain silent, Revell said.
The chief said that the suspect was also armed with a shotgun but added that it was unclear whether he had used it in the attack. Police believe he acted alone.
Once the shooting began, an emergency alert told the university community to shelter in place, an order that was not lifted until 3:20 p.m. Some terrified students huddled in the student union basement, crying and using their cellphones to let loved ones know what was happening. Police officers cleared classrooms using a safe word, “Seminole,” to identify themselves as the authorities.
The university canceled classes and business operations for Friday, and student athletics through the weekend.
Two people were killed, and six others were injured.
Law enforcement officials did not identify the two people who were killed, other than to say that they were not students. At least some of the six people who were injured were students; Richard McCullough, the university president, said he had visited some of them in the hospital.
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare said it had treated six injured patients. All six were listed in fair condition as of Thursday evening.
The suspect is the son of a sheriff’s deputy.
Sheriff Walter McNeil of Leon County identified the gunman as Phoenix Ikner, 20, and said that his mother was a sheriff’s deputy. The handgun had been his mother’s service weapon, which she had bought for personal use, McNeil said. It’s not unusual for deputies to be allowed to purchase their former service weapons, officials said.
The sheriff’s office website listed someone who appeared to be the mother as a school resource officer at a Tallahassee middle school. McNeil said she had been with the office for more than 18 years and called her service “exceptional.”
The sheriff said the suspect was a “long-standing member” of the department’s youth advisory council, which engages young people and seeks their input, and had taken part in a number of training programs.
“So he has been steeped in the Leon County sheriff’s family,” the sheriff said, calling Thursday’s shooting “tragic.”
He vowed to do everything possible to prosecute the suspect and “make sure that we send a message to folks that this will never be tolerated here in Leon County.”
Some students experienced their second school shooting in seven years.
Among the Florida State students who had to shelter in place were young adults who had been students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, during a 2018 mass shooting.
Joshua Gallagher, a law student at Florida State who went to Stoneman Douglas, wrote on social media Thursday that he never thought he would experience such gun violence again.
“Then I’m in the FSU Law Library,” where he heard an alarm: “active shooter on campus,” Gallagher wrote on social platform X. “No matter your politics, we need to meet — and something has to change.”
Ilana Badiner was in eighth grade at a school near Stoneman Douglas when the mass shooting took place in 2018.
“It’s terrible that this keeps happening,” said Badiner, now 21 and a communications major at Florida State who is set to graduate in two weeks. “This is crazy that it’s happened twice to me. Like, what are the odds?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
