CNN
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Dominik Molotky was sitting in a classroom at Michigan State University Monday night when he heard the sound of a gunshot right outside the room.
He was in a seat closest to the door and immediately ran to the other side of the room, he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“About two seconds later, (a gunman) came in our class and let off three to four more rounds. I was ducking and covering and same with the rest of the students,” Molotky said.
The calm of an ordinary class had been shattered by a gunman who police later said killed three students and wounded five others at two locations on the sprawling campus.
After Molotky’s classroom fell silent for a brief time, students began scrambling to escape, he told ABC. “We broke open the window and climbed out of there and I booked it back to my apartment.”
He thinks one person in the room may have been shot.
Claire Papoulias, 19, was also inside that room – a history class on Cuba – she told CNN, when she heard gunshots directly behind her.
“That’s when the shooter opened the back classroom door and started firing at my classmates in the back, wounding them. I smelled and saw the gunpowder,” the sophomore said. Everyone dropped to the floor, she added, and someone yelled, “Shooter! Everybody get down!”
“I thought I was going to die,” Papoulias said.
The shooter fired three or four times before exiting the classroom, leaving the door wide open, she said. Someone closed the door and the students began barricading themselves inside. Others tried to break open a window to escape, while some tried to help the wounded.
Once the window was opened, Papoulias ran straight to her dorm.
“My feet hit the ground running. I forgot everything I owned because that didn’t matter,” she said. “I was focused on making it out alive. I jumped out the window and I ran as fast as I could.”
Another MSU student, Chris Trush, was watching TV in his apartment when he saw police cars and ambulances rush toward campus.
A short time later he watched from his window as a surge of panicked students poured out of the student union building, a popular gathering place on campus, Trush said.
“That’s when I knew something’s really up,” he told CNN.
Hours later, police would confirm the suspect was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Before that update came, there were hours of fear and uncertainty in the campus community as a manhunt for the shooter ensued.
The university, around 8:30 p.m., sent mass texts and emails to students alerting them to a shooting on campus and telling them to shelter in place.
For about four hours after that warning, flustered students didn’t know what was happening. Some hunkered down in their rooms and others ran for safety – a scenario repeated time and again as gun violence unfolds in communities across the US nearly every day.
The tragedy in Michigan unfolded on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, and was at least the 67th mass shooting in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are injured or killed not including the shooter.
Desperate for information on the violence erupting on his campus, freshman Gabe Treutel told CNN he and his roommates started listening to scanners online and barricaded their door to protect themselves. After his dorm was deemed safe by authorities, he saw students rush out the entrance.
The uncertainty surrounding the shooting subsided when police lifted a shelter-in-place order early Tuesday morning.
Police have not identified a possible motive for the shooting. They said the suspect was a 43-year-old man who wasn’t affiliated with the university.
The shooting happened in two buildings on the more than 5,000-acre campus.
Gunfire was initially reported at 8:18 p.m. in Berkey Hall, an academic building on the northern end of campus. Authorities found several gunshot victims there, including two who died, police said.
Then came a report of a shooting in the union building, about a five-minute walk from the first shooting scene. The third person who died was found there, police said.
The response to the shooting was a “monumental task,” according to the university’s Vice President for Public Safety and Chief of Police Marlon Lynch.
“Part of the process of the response that we had is that we were able to divide and organize to be methodical in the search process,” Lynch said.
University officials spoke to the importance of allowing students and staff to grieve and canceled campus activities – including classes and athletic events – for two days.
“This is a day of shock and heartbreak here across our campus. In our region. It’s something that’s quite unimaginable. … We are devastated at the loss of life,” MSU interim President Teresa Woodruff said during an overnight news conference.
“We cannot allow this to … happen again,” Woodruff said.
