‘This is America’: Parkland school massacre survivors caught in Florida uni shooting

She didn’t see the gunman or hear the shots, but knew what was happening.

As a young man carried out a deadly shooting at Florida State University this week, Stephanie Horowitz looked out at the sprawling campus and saw a dreadful reminder that brought her back to when she was a teenager at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the Parkland massacre seven years ago.

People sit in front of a makeshift memorial outside the student union after the campus shooting at Florida State University on Thursday.Credit: AP/Kate Payne

“You could almost see the silence. There was not a soul in sight and belongings left behind like open laptops and bags,” Horowitz said in an interview.

“I knew what that meant, because I’ve done this before. I know what the aftermath of a school shooting looks like.”

Horowitz, a graduate student at Florida State University, is among a small group who were in the traumatising midst of both the massacre in Parkland and the shooting at the college in Tallahassee, inexplicably forced to endure a second school shooting in the early stages of their adult lives.

“You never think it’s going to happen to you the first time, you certainly never think it’s going to happen to you twice,” Horowitz, 22, said. “This is America.”

Two people were killed and six others injured when a 20-year-old man – identified by police as Phoenix Ikner – opened fire about lunchtime Thursday, Florida time, near a student union building on the Florida State University campus. The suspect, a student at the university and the stepson of a sheriff’s deputy, was hospitalised with injuries not considered life-threatening, police said.

The 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was one of the deadliest school shootings in US history, with 17 people killed and 17 others wounded on Valentine’s Day .

Florida State student Logan Rubenstein was in eighth grade when he was forced to shelter in place at his middle school during the Parkland massacre nearby.

“What we went through, we made it our mission to ensure this could never happen again,” Rubenstein, 21, said.

“And I’m sorry that we weren’t good enough because now this is the second shooting that I’ve had to go through.”

Senior Ilana Badiner, 21, told The Washington Post she was at the middle school when she and her classmates were locked down and escorted out by a SWAT team in 2018. When gunfire erupted near the student union on Thursday, Badiner hid in the basement with dozens of other students from her bowling class.

“The whole scene after was the same: People calling their parents, texting, police officers,” she said, adding that having multiple gun violence experiences had become “kind of the new normal”.

Josh Gallagher, a law student at Florida State University, wrote in a post on X that he lived through the Parkland shooting and “never thought it would hit close to home again”.

“Then I’m in the FSU Law Library and hear [an] alarm: active shooter on campus. No matter your politics, we need to meet – and something has to change,” he said.

In 2018, Robbie Alhadeff was also at the Parkland middle school next to Stoneman Douglas . His 14-year-old sister Alyssa was killed in the massarce.

He told The Washington Post he was just walking out of a cafeteria next to the student union on Thursday, when his phone started blowing up with messages about a shooter on campus.

“It was really bad having to relive the moment like I did seven years ago,” he said. “It’s very scary. It could happen again at any moment.”

Robbie Alhadeff (right) with his sister Alyssa, who was killed in the 2018 Parkland school massacre.Credit: AP

His mother Lori said she felt a wave of panic wash over her when Robbie texted her that there was an active shooter at the campus.

“Your brain just really starts to spin, and it’s traumatising and obviously very triggering to me and my husband and my son,” she said.

“I pray for the families that lost somebody yesterday, but this should not be normal. This should have not been my son’s second experience with a school shooting. We need to do better.”

Lori Alhadeff in 2019.Credit: AP

Jaclyn Schildkraut, who leads a gun violence research group at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York, said that experiencing multiple school shootings could prolong a person’s emotional healing process.

“It’s like all of that progress that you’ve made seemingly goes away and you’re right back at the starting line,” she said.

AP