Two Florida State University students recounted the horror of Thursday’s deadly campus shooting, with one survivor saying the gunman told students, “Keep running.”
On Friday, the two people killed in the attack were identified by family members and their representatives as Robert Morales, an FSU dining coordinator and former Leon High School football team assistant coach; and Tiru Chabba, 45, a regional vice president at Aramark Collegiate Hospitality, a campus vendor that provides college dining services.
Several others were injured, authorities said, when a student opened fire just before noon on Thursday at the Tallahassee institution. At a vigil on Friday, FSU President Richard McCullough said, “This kind of tragedy that shouldn’t happen, not here, not anywhere. We are heartbroken.”
Madison Askins, an FSU urban and regional planning graduate student, was headed to the school’s student union with a friend for lunch when they heard gunfire. The building contains a mall-like food court, meeting rooms and offices for student groups.
She ran, tripped, and fell to the ground, Askins said. Her friend helped her up, but she was quickly struck in the buttocks by a round, went down, and decided to “play dead,” she said.
Askins pondered calling her parents “in case I passed away,” she said. “I started to spiral a little bit.”
She thought the better of it when she realized the gunman was standing over her.
“I remember him saying, ‘Yeah, keep running,’” Askins said.
“I heard the shooter come up next to me, and I heard him reload,” she said. “There was a clip at my feet when everything was said and done.”
Authorities said suspect Phoenix Ikner, 20, believed to be a student as well, opened fire outside the student union with his stepmother’s former law enforcement service weapon, a handgun she had purchased for personal use. She was identified as a current Leon County Sheriff’s Office deputy.
Askins stayed down until an officer came to her side. “She packed my wound, she stood over me, and she kept an eye on the surroundings,” Askins said.
She said her emotions, including thoughts of never seeing family again, overpowered the physical pain of being shot.
“I hadn’t cried once about the wound,” Askins said. “This gunshot wound is nothing to me in the grand scheme of things.”
Doctors told her it would be best to leave the bullet and let her heal and then return to the task of removing it.
“Do I think it’s 100% his mother’s fault?” Askins said. “No. He’s a grown adult. He’s 20 years old. I hope it’s something that he will live with forever.”
Sage Toussaint, a 20-year-old psychology and premed junior who spoke by phone, was inside the student union with a friend, headed toward a Starbucks counter, when they heard gunfire late Thursday morning.
“I was 15 feet away from him and I didn’t think it was real,” she said. “I thought it was a flash mob or a student production or something.”
Toussaint said she ran out, but her friend “was just standing there in shock.”
Once outside the union, Toussaint looked for her friend and called her.
The friend answered — she had been shot.
“All I heard was her screaming and crying, so I just ran,” Toussaint said.
She ended up inside the nearby Leach Center, a campus recreation facility, where a group participating in a yoga session was also hiding inside a bathroom. They stayed on lockdown for nearly two hours, until SWAT team members cleared the area and pulled them out, Toussaint said.
Her friend is recovering and could be released in the coming days, she said.
Toussaint said she headed home, a three-hour drive, after being released from the Leach Center. But she said she hopes to return to campus Monday.
“If we still have class.”
The post ‘Yeah, keep running,’ the gunman said appeared first on NBC News.
