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Michigan State University Shooting: Three Students Killed, Suspect Dead
A man with no known connections to Michigan State University went on campus and shot eight people, killing three, before fatally shooting himself during a confrontation with police, officials said.
Last Updated:
Feb. 14, 2023 at 6:39 PM EST
What to Know
Police were searching for a motive the day after a gunman opened fire on the Michigan State University campus Monday evening, killing three students.
The suspect: Police said the suspect, 43-year-old Anthony Dwayne McRae, had no affiliation with the university. He killed himself after being confronted by police a few hours after the shooting. Mr. McRae had pleaded guilty to a misdemanor firearm charge in 2019, according to court records, and neighbors said they had called police last summer to report gunfire at the house where he lived.
The victims: The three students who were killed were identified on Tuesday as Brian Fraser, a sophomore from Grosse Pointe, Mich., Arielle Anderson, a junior also from Grosse Pointe, and Alexandria Verner, a junior from Clawson, Mich. Five students were injured, and remained hospitalized Tuesday in critical condition.
Correction: Anthony Dwayne McRae pleaded guilty in 2019 to a misdemeanor gun charge. An earlier version of this post incorrectly said he pleaded guilty to a felony gun charge.
The Wall Street Journal’s live coverage of the MSU shooting has concluded. Please visit wsj.com for the latest developments.
Latest Updates
Updated Feb. 14, 2023 at 11:37 PM
(Al Goldis/Associated Press)
EAST LANSING, Mich.—Michigan State University police, students and staff all tried to grapple with the same question after Monday night’s mass shooting on campus: Why would a man who never attended or worked at the school attack students there, killing three and injuring five?
Michigan State University officials on Tuesday morning identified the gunman as Anthony Dwayne McRae, saying he was a 43-year-old with no known connection to the school.
Officials said they didn’t know Mr. McRae’s motive. The five injured students, who haven’t been identified, remained in critical condition on Tuesday, officials said.
The MSU police identified the dead students as Brian Fraser, a sophomore from Grosse Pointe, Mich., Arielle Anderson, a junior also from Grosse Pointe, and Alexandria Verner, a junior from Clawson, Mich.
Mr. McRae opened fire in Berkey Hall, an academic building, shortly before 8:30 p.m., according to MSU Deputy Police Chief Chris Rozman. Mr. McRae killed two students there, he said. Then Mr. McRae walked less than a block to the MSU Union building, a student gathering place, where he fatally shot one other student. Police didn’t specify the locations for the students who were wounded. Mr. McRae fled after carrying out the shootings.
Students on the East Lansing campus and people in the area sheltered in place for around four hours as hundreds of law-enforcement officers searched for the gunman. Police cars and helicopters swarmed the area and the sprawling 5,200-acre campus in East Lansing, a city about 75 miles northwest of Detroit.
Updated Feb. 14, 2023 at 11:02 PM
Graffiti was spray painted on a rock on MSU's campus asking, 'How many more?' (Kristen Norman for The Wall Street Journal)
Michigan State University identified the three students who were killed in the Monday night shooting as two juniors and a sophomore, all from Michigan.
The campus police said Tuesday afternoon one of the students was Brian Fraser, a sophomore from Grosse Pointe. The other was Alexandria Verner, a junior from Clawson. The third student was identified later Tuesday as Arielle Anderson, a junior also from Gross Pointe.
The school didn’t identify the five injured victims, who all remain hospitalized in critical condition.
The gunman carried out the shooting in two campus buildings on Monday night.
M. Jon Dean, superintendent of the Grosse Pointe Public School System, said in a letter to the community on Tuesday that two recent graduates of the school system had died from their injuries at MSU on Monday night.
“I can’t even process what I just wrote,” Dr. Dean wrote. “How can we have our community impacted in this personal way?”
Feb. 14, 2023 at 9:55 PM
Flowers at a memorial on the Michigan State campus. (Kristen Norman for The Wall Street Journal)
Monday night Isabella Martin was inside the off-campus duplex she shares with 11 other classmates about a 10-minute drive from the student union when one of her roommates heard there was a campus shooting.
Initially, they heard there were multiple gunmen, which turned out to be false.
“I looked out my window and saw a few guys run toward their house. I yelled out the window ‘Is everything OK?’ and one of them said ‘He has a gun!’” said Ms. Martin, a 22-year-old senior majoring in journalism.
“We were all just like, ‘This is not a drill. This is not a hoax,'” she said.
She and her roommates turned off the lights and sat on the floor in the dark below the level of the windows. They tuned into the police scanner on an iPhone and listened to the crackling chaos.
An hour later, another roommate reached them through social media. She had been in the student union when the gunman entered and fled without her books, bag or phone.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” she said Tuesday.
Feb. 14, 2023 at 9:17 PM
Michigan State used surveillance footage to help track down the alleged shooter. (Kristen Norman for The Wall Street Journal)
Colleges nationwide are tapping increasingly high-tech tools to try to prevent or respond to violent attacks, but their open gates can complicate efforts to bolster campus security, school officials and safety experts said in the wake of Monday’s shooting.
Michigan State University used surveillance footage to help track down the alleged shooter, and images that police shared publicly ultimately led to a tip about the suspect.
University safety officials and police leaders say the multitude of surveillance and security initiatives do help, but there is a limit to how much they can control access to or within campuses.
“We aren’t going to erect fortresses around our campuses,” said Kristen Roman, chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s about finding that balance, what tools do we see as necessary, what tools do we see as reasonable, and what are the resources that campuses have to procure those and implement them.”
Feb. 14, 2023 at 8:40 PM
People gathered Tuesday to mourn and pray at Michigan State's Spartan statue. (Kristen Norman for The Wall Street Journal)
EAST LANSING, Mich.—Students on Tuesday quietly placed flowers and bowed their heads at the feet of Sparty, a bronze statue of a Spartan, that is a focal point of Michigan State University, where a gunman killed three and wounded five in a night of terror at the sprawling campus.
Many reflected on coming of age with both the reality of mass shootings—having been born in the shadow of the Sandy Hook massacre and experienced media coverage of the Parkland, Fla., attack in high school—and the unreality of it actually happening to them.
“Just growing up with these incidents is something not many generations have had to deal with,” said Libby Wagner, a 22-year-old senior from suburban Chicago.
She and her roommates spent Monday evening in a whirl of social media posts and terse dispatches on the police scanner, trying to sort fact from fiction.
“My little brother is a freshman, and he was in his dorm and there was a lot of speculation—he thought there was somebody in his dorm the whole time, so he sheltered in place by himself. It was really scary for all of us,” she said.
“We were listening to the scanner like the whole time I would say,” said her roommate, Abby Swantko, also 22, from the Detroit suburbs. “The amount of tips coming in from literally all over campus was crazy. That's what contributed to a lot of the chaos was you know, everyone was freaked out. You hear police banging down doors and you think that's a gunshot you call it in.”
Multiple pictures circulated of groups of men walking around the campus with long guns, but most of them were just police from all over the area arriving to help, she said.
Both young women said they had felt safe on campus before, possibly too safe.
“I probably do way too many things like walk around by myself when I shouldn't, Ms. Swantko said. “You never think that it would happen five minutes from your house, to your classmates, and people you see every day. It’s so sad.”