Two students from Florida State University reported the horror of Thursday’s mortal campus shooting, and a survivor said the gunman told the students: “Keep running.”
On Friday, the two people killed in the attack were identified by family members and their representatives such as Robert Morales, a Gastronomic Coordinator of the FSU and former assistant coach of the Leon High School soccer team; and Tiru Chabba, 45, a regional vice president of Aramark Collegiate Hospitality, a campus provider that provides university food services.
Several others were injured, authorities said, when a student opened fire just before noon on Thursday at the Tallahassee institution. In a vigil on Friday, the president of the FSU, Richard McCullough, said: “This type of tragedy that should not happen, not here, not anywhere. We are disconsolate.”
Madison Askins, a Postgraduate student of Urban and Regional Planning of FSU, was going to the school’s union with a friend for lunch when they heard shots. The building contains a food center in a shopping center, meeting rooms and offices for groups of students.
She ran, stumbled and fell to the ground, said Askins. Her friend helped her get up, but she was quickly beaten on the buttocks, fell and decided “to play dead,” he said.
Askins reflected to call his parents “in case he died,” he said. “I started spiral a little.”
He thought the best when he realized that the gunman was stopped on her.
“I remember said: ‘Yes, he still runs,'” said Askins.
“I heard the shooter appear by my side and heard him recharge,” he said. “There was a clip at my feet when everything was said and done.”
The authorities said that the suspicious Phoenix Ikner, 20, who also believes he was a student, opened fire outside the union of students with the old weapon of the application of the law of his stepmother, a gun that had bought for personal use. She was identified as current deputy of the Leon County Sheriff’s office.
Askins stayed down until an officer came to his side. “She packed my wound, stood over me and kept an eye around,” Askins said.
She said her emotions, including the thoughts of never seeing the family again, dominated the physical pain of receiving a shot.
“He hadn’t cried once for the wound,” Askins said. “This gunshot wound is nothing for me in the great scheme of things.”
The doctors told him that it would be better to leave the bullet and let it heal and then return to the task of eliminating it.
“I think it’s 100% guilt of your mother?” Askins said. “No. He is an adult adult. He is 20 years old. I hope it is something he will live forever.”
Sage Toussaint, a 20 -year -old psychology and a junior award -winning who spoke on the phone, was within the union of students with a friend, headed towards a Starbucks counter, when they heard shots on Thursday morning.
“I was 15 feet away from him and I didn’t think it was real,” he said. “I thought it was a MOB flash or a student production or something.”
Toussaint said he ran, but his friend “was stopped there in shock.”
Once outside the union, Toussaint looked for her friend and called her.
The friend replied: they had shot her.
“All I heard was his cry and crying, so I ran,” Toussaint said.
It ended inside the center of Leach Center, a Campus Recreation Center, where a group that participated in a yoga session was also hidden inside a bathroom. They remained in the blockade for almost two hours, until the members of the Swat team cleared the area and took them out, Toussaint said.
Her friend is recovering and could be released in the next few days, she said.
Toussaint said he went home, three hours by car, after being released from the leaching center. But she said she hopes to return to the campus on Monday.
“If we still have class.”
