At least two students caught up in the deadly mass shooting at Michigan State University (MSU) on Monday night were living through their second such nightmare in a little over a year, having endured a shooting that killed four at their high school in November 2021.
Jennifer Mancini said that her daughter had lost two of her closest friends during the shooting at Oxford high school near Detroit in 2021 and, now a freshman at Michigan State, found herself hiding from a gunman on Monday night and calling home in terror saying: “Mom, get me out of here.”
Mancini asked to shield the identity of her daughter for now and said the undergraduate heard gunshots at the MSU campus in East Lansing on Monday night before calling her mother as she saw fellow students fleeing for their lives.
“She said, ‘Mom, I hear gunshots, what’s going on?’ She said she had [post-traumatic stress disorder and] she can’t believe this is happening again,” Mancini told the Detroit Free Press early on Tuesday.
Mancini told her daughter to hide in a room with the lights off, to lock the door, turn her phone’s ringer off and wait out the horror, which she did, as a gunman killed three students and wounded another five before killing himself. Mancini’s daughter begged to come home, and her father had gone to pick her up, Mancini said.
She added that her daughter had other friends and fellow students at MSU who had also been at Oxford high school, 80 miles to the east, when the massacre occurred there at the hands of a 15-year-old student at the school. The 15-year-old was arrested.
“She’s in the heart of it and can’t get out,” Mancini told the Detroit Free Press. “She said, ‘Mom I just want to come home, I want to hold you,’” she added.
Mancini said that her daughter was not at her high school on the day of the shooting there. But friends called her on FaceTime as the tragedy unfolded, and she learned that friends and classmates had been killed and injured.
Meanwhile, Andrea Ferguson found herself in similar mode on Monday. Her daughter is also now a student at Michigan State and was also at Oxford high school during the shooting less than 15 months before.
Ferguson’s daughter was taking a bus after class on Monday and was on the phone to her mother when she began receiving texts about a shooting and that everyone was to shelter in place.
“It was like reliving Oxford all over again,” Ferguson told WDIV Local 4, an NBC affiliate, while also withholding her daughter’s name.
“I never expected in my lifetime to have to experience two school shootings,” Ferguson added. “There’s several kids there that our daughter’s friends with that are going through the same thing.”
Ferguson said her daughter had only just begun attending Michigan State and had also marked 10 years of being cancer-free this week.
“So it was supposed to be a celebratory time,” she said.
