They spent hours sheltering in place. One year later, how have MSU students changed?
Hannah MackayEast Lansing — Carson Perz has a heightened awareness he didn't have before.
An awareness of his surroundings. An awareness of where he's at. It's been there since the 20-year-old Michigan State University student from Coldwater spent hours sheltering in place in his dorm as an active shooter was on campus a year ago. He said most people don't think about gun violence being an issue on their college campus until it is.
It's been "a very large wake-up call," said Perz, an international relations and information science sophomore. "It didn't kick in until like the lockdown started and then once that started, everything became real."
Perz is one of thousands of MSU students still making sense of the collective trauma they faced a year ago. Some say it's spurred them into more activism, specifically on gun issues. Others say taking advantage of mental health counseling or other services has helped process their fear and anxiety after the shooting.
Many say they still struggle with feeling safe on campus or going to class in Berkey Hall, where the gunman first opened fire in a classroom.
"Our healing processes, they come when we're ready to deal with them, not when someone else feels that we're ready to face them," said Maya Manuel, an MSU senior studying psychology.
Manuel wasn’t involved in any student clubs or gun violence prevention organizations on campus prior to the shooting.
"I was just a student at the time," Manuel, 21, said. "I was sitting in my room, it was the night of the shooting and I posted on Snapchat a photo that was like, 'If you truly care about these issues come to the Capitol on Wednesday.'"
At the time, she wanted a space for students to get together and be able to talk about their experiences. On that Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, hundreds of students convened in front of Michigan’s state Capitol building, lined up in the positions they had practiced in countless lockdown drills throughout their education.
"We sat there, face to face and made sure that they (legislators) felt the urgency of our lives," said Manuel, who is now an organizer with Students Demand Action at MSU and End Gun Violence Now. "I had no clue the policy changes and the laws that were going to come forward."
Manuel said her generation has become desensitized to gun violence, with most having grown up seeing it all over the news and mass media.
"To sit back and do nothing was not going to be my agenda," Manuel said. "I never want to feel the way that I did on February 13 again."
Struggle to feel safe
Three students — Alexandria Verner, 20, of Clawson, Arielle Anderson, 19, of Harper Woods and Brian Fraser, 20, of Grosse Pointe Park — were killed in the Feb. 13, 2023, shooting. Five more were critically injured: Nate Statly, John Hao, Guadalupe Huapilla-Perez, Hanyang Tao and Troy Forbush.
Following the shooting, it was hard for some students, such as Perz and his friend, Jasmyn Miller, also a sophomore, to feel safe on campus at times.
“I'm not sure how safe I felt on campus before, but now I am like, sort of, on edge with some things,” said Miller, 20.
Perz said he still finds it strange to be in the Student Union, where one student was killed during the shooting.
"Even now I’m still kind of a little off on campus sometimes," he said.
Several students said coming together as a community directly after the shooting helped. There was a candlelight vigil attended by thousands at the Rock and the Spartan Sunday event at which hundreds of community volunteers helped comfort students before classes resumed.
"The community has been so vital in the process of trying to move forward for a lot of the students," Perz said.
The main thing MSU senior Jesse Mae Rayer appreciated was having understanding professors for the rest of the semester.
"They were very understanding with remote work, and with deadlines and things like that, but also with continuing classes for those of us who just wanted to, you know, get back to routine," Rayer said.
Scott Boehm, an assistant professor of Spanish and Global Studies, was teaching a course on genocide, justice and documentary film to around 40 students at the time. After the shooting, a core group of roughly 12 students continued to come to class every week, but it was not required.
"I was quite flexible, and pretty much worked with students. ... I met them where they were at, and so I didn't require attendance, cut some material, I did not have class the week after the shooting," Boehm said. "That kind of course, that just wasn't possible for other people to continue it and I respected that."
Importance of mental health
For some, access to mental health services to talk about fears and anxieties in the shooting's aftermath has really helped.
Carey, 24, a junior at MSU, was at a Buffalo Wild Wings in East Lansing, just a few blocks away from both Berkey Hall and the Union when the shooting happened. He was celebrating his 23rd birthday, which falls on Feb. 13, and remembers everyone in the restaurant going into a back room with the lights off and doors locked for at least two and a half hours.
Approaching the one-year mark, Carey feels it's especially important to improve access to mental health resources and remove the stigma around mental illness.
"I just think that it's very, very important to have, you know, like a safe and healthy outlet for mental health," Carey said. "I feel like the gunman and what he was going through is a really clear representation of how not having access to resources to be able to talk about your problems and maybe the stigma around accessing those resources ... can make it really difficult."
Healing through advocacy
For Manuel, getting involved in activism has been healing. It’s been a gateway to meeting others with similar experiences and others who want change, she said.
"I’ve been surrounded by a community of people who care, people who want change, and people who know that we do heal through the work that we do," Manuel said. "I mean it’s heavy work but it’s hopeful work."
Some students such as Saylor Reinders, an MSU junior and president of Students Demand Action, were already involved with the cause.
"Gun violence prevention felt like something personal to me as a member of the mass shooting generation and growing up with Sandy Hook and Parkland and so many other shootings," Reinders said.
Like with Manuel, advocacy has helped Reinders, but it can be a lot sometimes, she added.
"Every day I feel differently, whether one day I might be feeling sad, one day I might be feeling angry, just a lot of grief," Reinders said. "What's really helped is speaking with other people in the advocacy space or just other people in general who want to talk about what happened, or … just sit with our big feelings."
Reinders has found a space for this in Students Demand Action and hopes others have as well.
"I feel like as a society, we don't know how to respond to these types of tragedies and don't know how to talk about them, so even weeks after the shooting it felt like kind of a taboo topic to bring up," Reinders said. "Students Demand Action and March for Our Lives and these other organizations have become kind of a safe place for students to come and speak about their experiences and their emotions."
The March For Our Lives branch at MSU had its first meeting only a week before the shooting, said President Joseph Kesto. The organization quickly grew from 10 original members to 80 within a week and more than 200 a year later.
"For me, the only way I like could take my grief and move forward is through activism and change and I think a lot of people felt the same," said Kesto, who was initially inspired to get involved in activism after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.
Kesto feels like the shooting was unfortunately a wake-up call for Michigan's politicians to pass gun control legislation. A new "red-flag" law and legislation requiring safe storage of firearms and background checks to purchase them go into effect Tuesday.
While many students find advocacy healing, it can also become tiring to protest for the same thing over and over again, Kesto said.
"It takes a toll on your mental health and a lot of the time it gets to a point where a person just can't anymore, like they need to remove themselves," Kesto said. "I always will advocate for gun violence prevention, but sometimes it just gets too much for me and so I understand why people ... tend to engage less with it."
Still work to do
In the long-term, Kesto would like to see MSU increase the capacity of its counseling and psychiatric services so they are better equipped to handle trauma and include students more in decision-making.
"I wish they would work more with students in determining what they decide to do for ... campus safety, and just valuing student opinions and making it a public thing rather than behind closed doors," Kesto said.
Other student activists echoed Kesto's sentiment and emphasized the importance of uplifting survivors' voices and needs, particularly with regard to the controversial reopening of Berkey Hall for classes in January.
"They’re reopening the door for trauma for so many students and staff members," Manuel said.
Despite Michigan's new gun control legislation, student organizers said more is needed. Kesto said he would support a ban on semi-automatic weapons, while Reinders also wants to work on regulating ghost guns, increasing the minimum age to purchase a weapon, and repealing Stand Your Ground laws.
Inspired by MSU students' sit-down protest last year, his colleague professor Marco Díaz-Muñoz, who was in the middle of teaching a course in Berkey Hall when the gunman opened fire in his classroom, and his own experiences as a parent to two young children, Boehm is now making a film about gun violence in America. He is documenting responses to the MSU shooting, including student activists and Díaz-Muñoz's stories.
"A lot of the focus (at MSU) has been ... internal toward the community and healing," Boehm said. "What hasn't been a big part of the picture is, you know, what is our responsibility now as a public institution in a country where the leading cause of death for the population the university serves — young people — is gun violence? I think we can do more."
hmackay@detroitnews.com