Incredulous witnesses to the Florida State University shooting said the gunman first fired a rifle before returning to his orange Hummer to grab and pistol and shoot a woman
“I was leaving the union with my food. There’s a road next to it and I was walking and this guy pulls up in an orange Hummer, and he gets out with a rifle and shoots in my direction. There were a couple other kids near me,” FSU junior McKenzie Heeter told NBC News after the Thursday shooting.
“I think he was shooting and he missed. So he goes back into his car and grabs a pistol, then he turns and shoots the lady in front of him. That’s when I just started running.”
“When he turned back around with the pistol, I saw him shoot the lady like right in front of him. She was probably like 5 feet in front of him with the pistol,” Heeter said.
Heeter first thought the gunman had a BB gun with him – but said there was no mistaking what was happening once he opened fire.
She said the suspect looked like a “normal college dude,” describing him as a white man with light hair, wearing an orange t-shirt and khaki shorts.
“It was just me and like three other people that noticed at first, but we were walking in the opposite direction away from the union, so we started running. I just told everybody that I could see, stay away from campus,” she told NBC.
“I ran back to my apartment as fast as I could.”
Other students described the chaos of the shooting as first responders scrambled to help the wounded lying about campus – with some improvising stretchers from classroom equipment in the rush to get them to safety.
“I did see them carry out one student in what looked like on a stretcher and kept them in the road until an ambulance was able to pick them up,” student Daniella Streety said.
“There was a student injured there as well and they had to transport them in a desk chair to the road to then be transported via ambulance,” she said.
At least one person is dead from the shooting, while six are wounded with one in critical condition.
The gunman – who was caught carrying a pistol, while one shotgun was found in his car and another in the student union where the carnage was concentrated, according to CNN – is in custody.