Professor who confronted gunman in MSU shooting recalls chilling moment

Marco Díaz-Muñoz kept saying the same thing when he caught up with his wife.

“They have to help them,” he told Claudia Díaz, when he met her outside the school building after the chaos.

“They have to help them.”

Normally dressed professionally and with a purpose, the assistant professor’s navy blue button-up shirt was open, tossed haphazardly, and his belt was missing – both removed to treat wounds, although, as he recalls, only his belt was worn. been used.

Díaz-Muñoz, 64, had just experienced the worst yet all-too-common reality of American education — that a person can walk into a place of learning and decide to end the lives of those inside. , apparently on a whim.

Monday evening, in room 114 of Michigan State University’s Berkey Hall, where Díaz-Muñoz had reviewed a lesson on treasure routes and piracy in the Caribbean as part of his course on Cuban cultural identity, he s came face to face with the masked gunman behind the latest Michigan school shooting. The assistant professor and his wife told it all in interviews Thursday at their Lansing home.

If they had seen what I saw…

Paramedics swarmed the building — the help Díaz-Muñoz had pleaded for, his wife said.

But by then two of his injured students, 19-year-old Arielle Anderson from Harper Woods and 20-year-old Alexandria Verner from Clawson, the ones he feared most needed that help, were ‘gone’ , he was told.

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At 19 and 20, they became two of three students shot and killed that night. Brian Fraser, 20, of Grosse Pointe, was also killed. His death is believed to have occurred as the shooting continued towards the nearby student union. Several other Díaz-Muñoz students were hospitalized.

On Thursday, Díaz-Muñoz demanded action.

“If these senators who sit…. comfortable in their seat, making decisions about statistics, had seen what I saw, they would be ashamed or their humanity would be affected,” he said.

Frozen in the moment

Several members of the media filtered into the couple’s home three days after the violence, and he spoke in the hope that they could share this message. In the hope that lawmakers may not be acting “in their own best interests,” as he described it, but act quickly, knowing he’s certain he doesn’t want a gun, appreciating his belief that no one needs more than a gun to defend himself, and understanding the senseless carnage inflicted on young people like Anderson and Verner, who had sat near the back row of his class while they lived their days.

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On Monday evening, while teaching, he had first heard what he thought were explosions; he had never heard the sound of gunshots coming from anything other than television or movies.

He had frozen as the shooter – believed to be 43-year-old Anthony McRae, who police say shot and killed himself in a later encounter – entered through a door at the back of the classroom and started shooting with a silver object. apparently bigger than a pistol, Díaz-Muñoz said.

After the shooter exited, Díaz-Muñoz held the door at the front of the classroom closed, leaning back and pressing his foot against it with all his weight, he said. He was afraid the shooter would walk through that door next.

“I do not want to die”

When the assistant professor finally saw the police, he left the door open. Somewhere in the next few moments, he called his wife. Somewhere around that time, which was both fast and slow, he ran and started pulling Verner from a row of chairs, before thinking better, lest he cause more trauma to him.

He remembers seeing the lips of the two girls move.

He remembers a nearby student exclaiming “I don’t want to die”.

He remembers children trying to break down windows and escape through others.

He remembers the students who stayed to help.

And he also remembers saying it in class: “They need help”.

And speaking on Thursday, he hoped those in power would take heed.

Contact Darcie Moran: [email protected].