The suspect accused of gunning down two people and injuring five others at Florida State University on Thursday is the son of a local sheriff’s deputy, authorities say, and spent time training with law enforcement and serving on a sheriff’s advisory council in the years before his alleged attack.
When he was taken into custody, Phoenix Ikner, 20, was carrying a handgun that used to be the service weapon of sheriff’s deputy Jessica Ikner, according to officials and records.
A review of court records show Phoenix Ikner had a tumultuous childhood, with another woman — identified in the documents as his biological mother — accused of removing him from the US in violation of a custody agreement when he was 10 years old.
Sheriff Walter McNeil told reporters that the suspect was “steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family and engaged in a number of training programs that we have, so it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”
Jessica Ikner has served at the sheriff’s department for more than 18 years, McNeil said, adding that “her service to this community has been exceptional.” She did not respond to a request for comment.
Phoenix Ikner was a member of the sheriff’s Youth Advisory Council, which is designed to “provide an open line of communication between the youth of Leon County and local law enforcement,” according to a news release from 2021. McNeil described him as a “longstanding member” of the council.
On Instagram, an account with Ikner’s name and photo that was taken offline after he was publicly identified included a biblical quote on its profile: “You are my war club, my weapon for battle; with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms.”
Ikner is a registered Republican, according to Florida voter registration records. He was quoted in January in an FSU student newspaper article about anti-Trump protests in advance of the president’s inauguration.
“These people are usually pretty entertaining, usually not for good reasons,” Ikner, who was described as a political science major, was quoted as saying. “I think it’s a little too late, he’s [Trump] already going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 and there’s not really much you can do unless you outright revolt, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”
Ikner was asked to leave political club due to unsettling behavior
Reid Seybold, an FSU student, told CNN he knew Ikner, whom he encountered in an extracurricular political club a few years ago. Seybold said Ikner was asked to leave the group, which discussed current events, due to behavior that unsettled others.
“He had continually made enough people uncomfortable where certain people had stopped coming. That’s kind of when we reached the breaking point with Phoenix, and we asked him to leave,” Seybold told CNN’s Omar Jimenez Thursday.
Seybold said Ikner’s comments went “beyond conservatism.”
“It’s been a couple of years now. I can’t give exact quotes,” he said. “He talked about the ravages of multiculturalism and communism and how it’s ruining America.”
CNN has not independently verified claims about the suspect’s beliefs. Authorities have not yet disclosed any potential motive behind the shooting.
Leon County court records show that Ikner’s biological mother was accused of taking him to Norway when he was 10 years old, in violation of a custody agreement. The court documents refer to the child as Christian Eriksen, and say that he and his biological mother are both dual US-Norwegian citizens.
The shooting suspect later changed his name from Christian Eriksen to Phoenix Ikner, a law enforcement source confirmed to CNN.
According to an affidavit from a sheriff’s detective, the child’s biological mother told his father that she would take him to South Florida for spring break in March 2015. Instead, she “fled the country with him in violation of their custody agreement,” taking him to Norway, the affidavit said.
The suspect’s biological mother pleaded no contest to removing a minor from the state against a court order. She was sentenced to 200 days in jail, 170 of which she had already served, followed by two years of “community control” and then two years of probation, according to court records. She was ordered to have no contact during her sentence with her son or any of his teachers, doctors or counselors, unless allowed by a court.
She later moved to vacate her plea, saying she had made it under duress, and was denied.
It’s unclear whether the suspect’s biological mother has had contact with him over the last decade, and she did not respond to requests for comment. But just after the shooting, she posted on Facebook complaining that her son’s dad hadn’t responded when she wrote “to ask if everything is alright with my son, who studies at FSU.”
Community members said they were still struggling to reconcile Phoenix Ikner’s ties to the police force with his alleged attack.
Kenniyah Houston, a member of the sheriff’s youth council, told CNN she was shocked to learn that the suspected shooter had served alongside her. She did not personally remember Ikner but said the advisory council was focused on making the community better and improving law enforcement, so his actions were especially shocking.
“That’s what it was all about – making better decisions,” she said. “For something like this to happen from someone in a group like that is scary … it’s devastating.”
CNN’s Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Blake Ellis, Majlie de Puy Kamp and Hanna Park contributed to this report.
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