Cnn
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It was an ordinary afternoon for Jayden of Onofrio, who spent time with a friend in their apartments complex when they received a text that caused blood.
An active shooter was on campus and their friend was hiding in the library.
Without a second thought, they ran towards her.
A perfect day of spring in Florida in Florida suddenly fell into horror when a shooter began to shoot the victims near the building of the Student Union of Florida State University, marking the next chapter of the epidemic of American armed violence.
“This is one of the most eviscerated feelings possible, not to know if your friends are going well … and if they will spend this moment,” said onofrio to CNN.
“There are no words to describe this feeling and experience.”
Another university campus – and thousands of students – are now marked by the lasting trauma of armed violence, transforming former idyllic lawns, where students generally meet with books and coffee, in a terrible recall from the place where innocent lives have been taken.
Two weeks before the end of the semester, just as the elderly prepared for graduation, two people were killed and five others injured when the suspect, a university student and the son of an assistant in the local sheriff, police said, opened fire.
De Onofrio is no stranger to the reality of the way in which armed violence can tear a community. Thursday’s shooting comes seven years after the bloodbath in Parkland, Florida, when a mass shoot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas secondary school killed 17 people and injured 17 others, tearing the community.
He was in his 7th year English class when he obtained the telephone notification that there was a shooting 15 minutes from his school. After the massacre, D’Onofrio had school shooting exercises every month, he says: “And it is only another chapter of that.”
While the university was blocked, students and staff received emergency alerts urging them to take shelter. Inside the buildings, students squat under offices, sending SMS to dear beings in fear. In a classroom, they stacked offices against the door to try to barricade themselves.
“I saw this policeman with an assault rifle, and I said to myself:” Oh my God, it’s real “,” said Holden Mamula to CNN. He was in his calculation class when he heard sirens in the distance and an active shooting alert resounds on the campus.
The major in political sciences and statistics sent an SMS to his parents and sat on his knees, preparing to run, while the classmates were hiding behind offices and turned off the lights.
“It’s crazy for me how we continue to have these incidents, after incidents, after incidents, simple mass shots,” said Mamula, describing experience as traumatic. “I don’t think you feel the emotion until you have gone through this.”
A video taken by a student who hid behind a bush during the attack captured someone’s body lying in the grass while others rushed frantically to dodge bullets, their cries filling the air while shots sounded, one after the other.
McKenzie Heeter left the student union when she saw an orange hummer parked near a service road. She then saw a man next to the car holding “a larger pistol”, when he “dropped a shot” in his general direction, where other people were also walking.
She saw the man turn around and take out a handgun from the car, turn to the student union and shoot a woman wearing purple scrubs on the back.
“When he turned to the woman and shot him, that’s when I made, there was no target. And that he was someone he could see,” said Heeter. “And I took off.”
She started running until she returned to her apartment, about a mile distance. During the first 20 seconds, she heard continuous shots. “It was simply turned after a shot,” she said.
Meanwhile, ambulances and a swarm of police vehicles accelerated towards the campus, their mermaids swallowing the calm that existed a few moments before. Students lounging on the lush lawns of the vast university Tallahassee campus were sent to flee for their lives, abandoning their shoes and backpacks in the grass.
Many of those who were fleeing ran to the co-cathedral of St. Thomas More, a church in front of the Florida State University, where the priest helped terrified people to find a shelter.
Father Luke Farabaugh attended a staff birthday party when he heard pops, which gave him a bad feeling, he said. People started to flock to the cathedral with “a fear that I had never seen before,” said Farabaugh. “It was surreal to be pushed into a life and death situation.”
Once the little clear was published a few hours after the shooting, rivers, some with their hands in the air, were evacuated from campus buildings and brought to safe places, where many were seen collapsing into cuddles and decomposing in tears.
“You go to school to get your diploma, make friends, make memories, don’t go to school to live things like that,” said FSU student, Garrett Harvey, in CNN in a building where he had been evacuated with hundreds of other students.
De Onofrio shared the feeling, saying that he had succeeded in making his friend – who was in shock – safe.
“It’s not normal. It continues to happen, again and again,” he said. “It’s depressing, and there is no real action taken to change it, especially here in Florida.”
In the United States, armed violence has turned into an incessant crisis, claiming lives daily and leaving the broken communities to collect the parts each time. So far, there have been 81 mass shots in the United States this year, according to the archives of armed violence.
While the students returned to recover the personal effects they had left shots on fire, the evidence markers sprinkled the lawn near the Student Union building, where the shell envelopes were dispersed in the grass.
The night of the shooting, a mass took place at the church where people fled for security. What was supposed to be a joyful moment for the community as Easter approaches, said Farabaugh, turned into a tragedy.
“We are going to enter this holy week in a different way this year,” added Farabaugh. “I have no spiritual conclusions. I only say that when we enter this service, many of us have been put into service today. ”
Sara Smart de CNN, Nick Valence, Dalia Faheid, Elise Hammond and Asya McDonald contributed to this report.
