A college professor who taught two of the three students killed in the mass shooting at Michigan State University on Monday night – and came face-to-face with their murderer – is pleading with lawmakers to tighten controls on access to guns in the US.
In an interview with the Detroit Free Press newspaper published Friday, 64-year-old Marco Díaz-Muñoz said no one should need more than one pistol to defend themselves and pleaded with legislators – who often are supported by pro-gun lobbyists – to not act in “self-interest” as the country continues registering more than one mass shooting daily this year.
“If those senators that sit … comfortable in their seat, making decisions on statistics, had seen what I saw, they would be shamed or their humanity be touched,” he told the Free Press from his home in Lansing, which is near Michigan State’s campus.
Díaz-Muñoz reportedly spent Thursday speaking with news reporters in hopes that they would boost his plea. He recalled that, three days earlier, he was teaching students in his Cuban culture identity class about Caribbean piracy and treasure routes when he thought he heard explosions.
Then, he saw a man officials identified as 43-year-old Anthony McRae barge in through the back of his first-floor classroom in Michigan State’s Berkey Hall and start firing a pistol.
Two of Díaz-Muñoz’s students – 19-year-old Arielle Anderson and Alexandria Verner, 20 – were mortally wounded. McRae, who had no affiliation to Michigan State, also shot a third student to death – 20-year-old Brian Fraser – at another campus building nearby while critically wounding five more before killing himself as police closed in, according to authorities.
Díaz-Muñoz told the Free Press that the moments after the intruder left moved both fast and slow. At one point, he said he held a door at the front of his classroom closed, leaning back and pressing one of his feet against it with all his weight. He let go when he saw police arrive, rushed up to Verner and began pulling her out of a row of chairs, but he stopped when he feared he might hurt her more.
The professor described seeing the lips of both Anderson and Verner move while one of their classmates exclaimed: “I don’t want to die.” Díaz-Muñoz took off his belt and button-down shirt so that first responders could use them for wound care.
Some students escaped through windows and tried to kick out others, and some stayed back, desperate to help however they could.
Díaz-Muñoz remembered saying to the first responders in his classroom, “They need help,” referring to his students who were shot. Eventually, Díaz-Muñoz said he met his wife, Claudia, outside Berkey Hall still in a daze and told her the same thing: “They need to help them.”
Days later, he continued saying that his students need help – but now he meant from elected officeholders who can craft meaningful gun control policies.
Federal investigators have said McRae used two guns that he had legally bought but not registered in Monday’s mass shooting at Michigan State. He also reportedly had eight loaded magazines, two more empty ones and 50 rounds of loose ammunition.
McRae could legally possess a gun after being discharged from probation after a guilty plea to a misdemeanor weapons charge, according to court records cited by the local television station WWMT. He pleaded guilty in November 2020 and was sentenced to a year of probation before that was extended to 18 months.
However, McRae was discharged from his probation in May 2021.
The police chief of Lansing, Eller Sosebee, reportedly reacted to word of McRae’s early probation release by saying: “We would all hope that a prosecutor would uphold the law as it’s written – there’s always room for discretion, however that one will be scrutinized for a long time.”
Joining Díaz-Muñoz in calling for increased gun control after the killings at Michigan State was Joe Biden. In issuing a statement expressing condolences to the slain students’ families as well as the injured, the president renewed his call for an assault weapons ban.
It doesn’t seem that such a ban would have much of a chance in Congress. The Democratic party which Biden leads holds a slim numerical advantage in the Senate while the Republicans have a small majority in the House of Representatives.
There had been at least 72 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of Friday, the 48th day of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four people are wounded or killed, not counting any attackers.
Monday’s mass shooting at Michigan State was the day before the fifth anniversary of the attack that left 17 shot dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida.