EAST LANSING – The Beaumont Tower, an iconic Michigan State University landmark, lit up green while hundreds of people gathered at its base on Friday night. Some held green candles, flowers, and other people’s hands during the vigil.
“I almost lost one of my best friends, so it’s not easy for me to just forget and act as if Feb. 13 is a normal day each year it comes around,” said Rosa Cruz, 23, a senior Interdisciplinary Studies student.
“I wanted to take today to remind everyone and myself that Arielle, Brian, Alexandria, and our Spartans who were injured that night are still with us and to keep their memory alive even after those who were students during that time are gone from campus.”
February 13 marked three years since the mass shooting at MSU, where three students were killed, Brian Fraser, Arielle Anderson, and Alexandria Verner, and five others were injured.
During that chaotic and cold night, the gunman shot 18 times at a classroom in Berkey Hall and inside the MSU union building. Hours later, he died after shooting himself when confronted by police, four miles away from campus.
For about an hour, no speeches were held during the vigil. The emotive music that came from the tower for almost 10 minutes unleashed sobs, tears, and crying, in that order, that joined the sound of the trees caressed by the wind.
During that moment, the tower bells rang three times, corresponding to the time of the victims’ deaths: twice at 8:18 pm, honoring Anderson and Verner, and once more at 8:25 p.m for Fraser.
Other important places on campus were also illuminated in green and received flowers, such as the Spartan statue, the MSU Union building, and the Rock.
Among the crowd, some concerns were raised about maintaining remembrance of the shooting and the victims, or how it would change after the last four-year undergraduates who ran, hid, barricaded, and locked down during the shooting on campus graduate after this semester.
For Eva Miranda, a 21-year-old psychology senior, the campus violence alert mistakenly sent by the university on Tuesday felt like a reminder.
Before MSU sent another message notifying her of the error, hiding in the same spot where she hid three years ago, she called her sister, just like she did three years ago, and a question from her brought it all back to her. “Don’t you remember the shooting was in February?”
“I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ Again. And that was a reminder; maybe we all needed that reminder of what happened. I mean, yeah, we have a lot of things going on day to day, but with this alert, it was a reminder that, yeah, it’s true — I could be the next victim,” Miranda mentioned.
Miranda points out that in the three years following the shooting, the question “Where were you when the shooting happened?” was a common way for students to socialize and connect.
But now it’s not seen as much because, for her, students who experienced it are now in other schools, other cities; “their worlds have changed.”
Handing out flowers to passersby for almost three hours, just a few feet from the statue, John Woolfolk, a 20-year-old sophomore, shares that even though those who experienced the shooting eventually left the university, “everybody should still remember.”
“I just came out here to make sure that people don’t forget. Even those who aren’t seniors — like freshmen, sophomores, and juniors — everybody we see walk by, we try to give them flowers so the memories aren’t forgotten,” Woolfolk said.
This article originally appeared on Michigan Advance and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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