A Florida State University student recalled the terrifying moment he and his classmates used chewed-up gum to cover their classroom windows with paper as gunfire rang out during Thursday’s mass shooting.
Jeffrey LaFray told Good Morning America gunshots erupted as he and other quick-thinking students frantically started chewing gum after the professor realized they had no tape available to secure sheets of paper over the windows to block the crazed gunman’s view into the classroom.
“I hear pop pop pop,” he said during Friday’s interview.
“The teacher was asking if any of us had tape to tape up some paper. And no one had tape and so some of us, we just got out gum and started chewing so we could stick some paper to the windows.”
The shooter, identified by police as Phoenix Ikner, a 20-year-old FSU student who is the son of a Leon County sheriff’s deputy, killed two people and wounded five others when he opened fire on the Tallahassee campus with his stepmother’s former service weapon Thursday afternoon.
The deadly rampage began near the campus’s student union building, with harrowing footage capturing the moment the gunman walked through the area unloading multiple slugs.
Graduate student, Madison Askins, 23, was walking with a friend near the student union when she was shot in the buttocks from behind — and then fell to the ground, kept her eyes shut and played dead.
“I released all the muscles in my body, closed my eyes and held my breath. And I would take short breaths in between when I needed to,” she told ABC News.
“I know for certain if I was moving he would’ve shot me again,” Askins said — adding she heard the killer reload his weapon and mumble, “Keep running” as students scattered.
Heavily armed first responders converged on the area and confronted the gunman, who officers said refused to comply to orders before he was shot by police.
Ikner was among those being treated at a local hospital and is expected to survive.
Two Aramark employees — Tiru Chabba, 45, and Robert Morales — were identified as the two victims killed in the deadly attack.
A motive behind the fatal shooting has not been revealed.
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