A 20-year-old student at Florida State University in Tallahassee shot and killed two people on Thursday and injured six, the police said. The gunman was identified as the son of a deputy in the local sheriff’s department, and was taken into custody after being shot by the police, law enforcement officials said.
Officials said that the gunman, identified as Phoenix Ikner, was armed with a former service revolver of his mother, a deputy who has worked at the Leon County Sheriff’s Office for 18 years and was allowed to keep the gun for personal use.
Mr. Ikner had been involved in training programs at the Sheriff’s Office and was a member of its youth advisory committee, Sheriff Walter McNeil told reporters.
“He has been steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family,” the sheriff said. “It’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”
Chief Lawrence E. Revell of the Tallahassee Police Department said Mr. Ikner also had a shotgun with him, but Chief Revell said he was not sure that gun was used in the attack.
The two people killed in the shooting were not students, law enforcement officials said. They had not been identified as of Thursday evening.
Mr. Ikner was shot and wounded by responding officers after he did not obey their commands, officials said.
Chief Revell said he believed that Mr. Ikner acted alone. “There is no further threat to our community,” he said. He added that Mr. Ikner had “invoked his right not to speak to us.”
The shooting occurred shortly before noon, sending students and staff to seek cover on a warm and sunny day in Tallahassee when many were outside. The university soon issued a shelter-in-place alert, and officers raced to the campus and began escorting people out of academic buildings.
Television footage captured the chaotic aftermath of the shooting: shoes scattered on the lawns of the campus; chairs in one classroom piled in a makeshift barricade against a door; students leaving the campus with their hands raised in the air.
Students and a professor in an environmental science class sprang into action when an alarm went off, said Will Rhoades, one of the 135 students in the class. The students barricaded the classroom doors with tables and used sweatshirts to tie the door handles together, he said.
Victor Castillo, who was in the student union, near the shooting, said he had been momentarily confused by the sound of gunfire but quickly took cover.
“All of a sudden, I hear boom, boom, boom,” said Mr. Castillo, 20, a sophomore studying business management. “My ears started ringing. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t think it would happen here.”
Mr. Castillo said he sheltered in place until the police evacuated the building.
Ilana Badiner, 21, said she huddled in the student union basement with about 30 people during the shooting. In 2018, she was a student at a school adjacent to the high school in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were shot dead. “It was the same situation today, where people were just on the phones calling everybody and there were people crying,” she said, adding, “It’s terrible that this keeps happening.”
President Trump said that he had been briefed on the shooting. “It’s a shame, a horrible thing, it’s horrible that things like this take place,” he said.
Some gun-control advocates said the attack illustrated the need for more firearms restrictions, though with a Republican governor and legislature supporting gun rights, any such moves were unlikely in Florida.
“Today, students at FSU sheltered in place during a shooting on their campus,” read a post on X by Giffords, the organization founded by the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was seriously wounded in a 2011 assassination attempt. “Seven years ago, some of these same students survived the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS. Our children are being traumatized over and over again. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
University officials canceled all classes, events and business operations for the rest of the week. All athletic events were canceled through the weekend. The last day of classes is next Friday.
Florida State was also the scene of a deadly shooting in 2014, when an alumnus of the university shot three people at a campus library before being killed by the police. A student who was left paralyzed reached a $1 million settlement with the university, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Amanda Holpuch, Patricia Mazzei and Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.
Adeel Hassan is a reporter and editor on the National Desk. He is a founding member of Race/Related, and much of his work focuses on identity and discrimination. He started the Morning Briefing for NYT Now and was its inaugural writer. He also served as an editor on the International Desk.
Thomas Fuller, a Page One Correspondent for The Times, writes and rewrites stories for the front page.
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