At least three people were shot dead and five were injured in an on-campus shooting at Michigan State University in East Lansing on Monday night, campus police confirmed. The suspect in the shooting has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said in a news conference early Tuesday morning.
The suspect, who police identified as a 43-year-old-male, was found off-campus and reported dead about four hours after first reports of shots fired were made. Authorities said he was not affiliated with the university and that a motive is not yet known. It is also unclear how long he was on campus before the shooting and it has not been announced what type of weapon was used in the shooting, though he is said to have been carrying two firearms and multiple rounds of ammunition. According to a spokesperson for the Michigan State Police, at the request of the Michigan State University Police, a search warrant was executed at the Lansing home of the suspect. As of 7:20 a.m., teams including the bomb squad, canine team, and emergency support team had cleared the scene. His name has not yet been released.
“This truly has been a nightmare that we are living tonight,” said Chris Rozman, the university Police Department’s interim deputy police chief. The shooting started around 8:18 p.m. at Berkey Hall, the school’s college of arts and sciences building, where the bodies of two victims were located. The third fatality was found at the Student Union building, a student space about a half mile away. It is unclear where the five wounded victims were shot, Rozman said. He later added in a separate news conference early Tuesday morning that all five victims were transported to nearby Sparrow Hospital and remain in critical condition.
Rozman described the suspect as a Black man “shorter in stature, and wearing red shoes, a jean jacket, and a ball cap.” Images released by authorities appear to show the suspect wearing a mask. Berkey Hall, where two of the fatalities occurred, is an entirely academic building with no residence facilities, according to Rozman, and therefore unlocked during business hours. The shooting occurred before the building was secured for the night.
An initial shots-fired alert went out around 8:30 p.m., and the university issued an active-shooter text alert at 10:05 p.m. urging students to “run, hide, fight,” and to secure-in-place or to evacuate safely. The message warned students about a situation involving “active violence.”
Shortly after, police stated that there were “multiple reported injuries” and that they were “receiving multiple calls of an active shooter on campus.” A shelter-in-place order was lifted shortly after 12:30, when the suspect was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
After the initial calls went out, authorities said that there were several erroneous reports of active shooters on other parts of campus; Rozman said that he couldn’t say how many false reports came in, but that there were “more than five” calls of shots that were not fired. He said that part of the investigation would be who made those calls, and where they came from.
Rozman previously said that all campus activities will be canceled for the next 48 hours, but after the suspect’s death was announced by authorities, the shelter-in place order was lifted for university students and the surrounding community. The university has more than 50,000 students, according to its website.
“We are devastated at the loss of life,” Michigan State University Interim President Teresa Woodruff said on Tuesday. Woodruff added that students and faculty would be given two days to “think and grieve and come together.”
Representatives for Michigan State University did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
“I’ve been briefed on the shooting at Michigan State University,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wrote on Twitter Monday night. “The Michigan State Police along with @msupolice, local law enforcement and first responders are on the ground. Let’s wrap our arms around the Spartan community tonight.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson described the tragedy at Michigan State University as “unfathomable.” Benson tweeted on Monday that the “repetitive terror cannot continue. We must come together and do whatever it takes to protect our kids & communities from gun violence.”
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootingsin the United States, this is the 67th mass shooting of 2023. It happened on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Parkland shooting, in which 17 students were killed at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
This story is developing…