EAST LANSING, Mich. — Marco Díaz-Muñoz’s final Cuban literature class this semester made him emotional. These were the students who had watched in horror as a gunman entered their Berkey Hall classroom Feb. 13 and shot several of them, killing two. They were the only ones who knew what it was like there that night, as Michigan State University was added to the somber list of American sites defiled by a gunman.
“I got teary,” he told The Washington Post. “I needed them, my class. And I believe they needed me. And together, to reclaim our lives. It wasn’t just reclaiming a space, that academic space, but also a process of learning to reclaim your life, in spite of adversity.”
“That tragic event did not take away from them — the joy of graduating, the joy of also associating MSU with great experiences, not just this tragedy, and being able to move forward.”
But the university’s graduations, which concluded Saturday, were tempered by the tragedy, as the rest of the spring term had been.
There were overt signs of February’s losses at graduations spread over recent days, some held as school flags flew at half-staff to honor the dead in a Texas shooting. Honorary posthumous degrees were awarded to Arielle Anderson and Alexandria Verner, the two students killed in Díaz-Muñoz’s classroom, and to Brian Fraser, who was later killed outside the campus Union.
The MSU Rock, a boulder on campus that serves as a perpetually painted-over billboard for campus groups and activists, displays the names of the dead: Brian, Arielle, Alexandria. Friends of the victims were seen touching the names and taking graduation photos — in the same place where, months ago, thousands had gathered for a candlelight vigil in their honor. Above the names: “Always a Spartan.”
At the spring convocation on May 5, university president Teresa Woodruff alluded to the circumstances. “On this joyful occasion, let us also briefly acknowledge our pain,” she said. “Those scholars and leaders are forever a part of our Spartan family.”
Over a terrifying 236 minutes at Michigan State, the three students were killed and another five grievously wounded. Thousands hid in classrooms and dorm rooms, monitoring what turned out to be misleading police scanner reports amid delayed communications from the university. The gunman, Anthony Dwayne McCrae, 43, who left campus after targeting students, killed himself as police drew close to him in a nearby neighborhood.
In the weeks after the shooting, the university acknowledged the 13-minute delay between when shots were first reported, at 8:18 p.m. on Feb. 13, and when the first campus alert arrived at 8:31 p.m. Police, who later blamed a civilian employee waiting for confirmation from a shift supervisor, are months away from completing an investigation into the shooting.
Despite an announced plan to add 1,300 locks, install more cameras on campus and require an ID card to enter most buildings after 6 p.m., students say that they are still reeling from the attack and feeling that the university failed them.
Olivia Gilcher, 18, a first-year student who jumped down a flight of stairs at the Union to escape the gunman, said her recovery has been rocky. She said she got good grades this semester — a 4.0 GPA — but had to file a grief absence for three weeks to accommodate increased anxiety and depression after the shooting.
Now, when she sees school shootings on the news, what she saw at the Union “plays in my head like, ‘Now I know what’s going on inside those classrooms,’” Gilcher said. “Now I know.”
Gilcher feels grateful toward the community that supported victims of the shooting.
“Knowing that people all around the country know about it,” she said in an interview with The Post. “It’s almost like a comforting feeling.”
A week before graduation, she stopped at the Union. She thought of entering the building through the doors she and other students sprinted from that night. “I just couldn’t do it,” she said, “and I just went to the back. It felt really eerie.”
Three months ago, Jyotiraditya Chavan, a graduating engineering major, decided to take a nap and skip class. It proved to be a potentially fateful decision.
“That’s how I got saved; the shooter took the same route I used to come back home from class,” he said outside the Breslin Center, where seniors in their green caps and gowns poured out on May 6, taking photos and embracing family.
Like Chavan, each of the newly minted graduates has a story of where they were when the gunman disrupted their lives. Akansha Singh, a biomedical graduate who spent the shooting with Chavan at their house near campus, noticed her attendance slipping in the wake of the tragedy.
Chavan, Singh’s boyfriend, said he “wasn’t going to classes unless it was necessary for me to show up to classes.” The young couple is now hoping to pursue master’s degrees in Canada, which they deem safer.
At Singh’s graduation, posthumous honorary degrees were awarded to two of the victims.
“The degree was great but the degree is not going to help anybody at this point,” Chavan said. “Right now it’s more about the security measures.”
Madeleine Tocco, an environmental science and management graduate who served on the student government Council of Students with Disabilities, spent the weeks after the shooting advocating for a safer environment. During the manhunt that followed the attack, she hid with a friend who has a connective tissue disorder.
Now that she has graduated, she’s worried she’s leaving behind a university indifferent to the plight of the disabled.
“There will be active shooter training,” she said. “But I doubt they would include how to take care of a disabled person in the event of an active shooter, because the disabled population on campus is so small.”
Campus police said they never received requests for training from the disability group. Active threat trainings were available upon request before the shooting and will become mandatory for all students in the fall.
Tocco said she feels anxious, “when nowhere is truly safe to be without the fear of violence.”
Asked whether graduation season was overshadowed by the shooting, she noted that she wore a “Spartan Strong” pin on her graduation robe, reflecting the slogan used after the shooting. “So I would say so,” she said.
“I don’t know if I’ll be altered for life, but I do know it’s going to take some time for me to process what’s happened,” she said, adding that she has applied for jobs at MSU. “I’m not going to turn my back on the university even though I’m disappointed.”
In the wake of the shooting, an outpouring of financial support arrived for the victims. $1 million has been donated to a “Spartan Strong” fund, for which a spending committee will decide how to disburse the funds.
Dan Olsen, a spokesperson for the university, would not confirm if it planned to pay for the victims’ continued medical care as it did funeral costs and initial hospital bills.
“The university is still paying for some medical accommodations,” he said in an email. (One student was paralyzed in the attack, with an expectation of millions in costs over his lifetime.)
In a phone call with The Post, Olsen said the committee of school administrators and legal counsel “is still finalizing its recommendations.”
Many are eager for the school to financially assist the victims as much as possible.
“That’s the least they could do,” Chavan said.
Díaz-Muñoz feels similarly, saying “the most noble and appropriate thing to do is use the funding to help the people that suffered the tragedy.”
In the aftermath have come some grace notes. Fraternity brothers of Fraser approached Díaz-Muñoz before the term ended. “That really moved me. Here you have three students who … didn’t want to leave campus without checking on me,” he said.
Díaz-Muñoz said he and his wife, Claudia Díaz, who during the shooting was in a hallway near his classroom and watched as stretchers rushed by, now receive therapy through MSU’s Counseling and Psychiatric Services. To get there, he has to walk past Berkey Hall, the site of his former classroom.
“And when I walk by, I look the other way,” Díaz-Muñoz said.
Berkey Hall remains closed through next fall. School tours, which had traditionally begun at the Union, have been modified to leave out the shooting site.