Since 1999, the United States of America has experienced roughly 300 mass school shootings. Children all over the U.S. are fearful of going to school and learn at the risk of being put in danger, many schools even regularly perform ‘lockdown drills’ to teach students what to do in an active shooter situation. Despite that, no real precautions have been taken by the law to put an end to this issue, and once again, families are left grieving.
On April 17, 2025, Students at Florida State University prepared for a regular day of classes and their normal social activities. At around 11:50 AM, a 20-year-old student by the name of Phoenix Ikner arrived on campus, where he parked his car near Florida State’s Moore Auditorium, and at 11:56 AM, Ikner exited his vehicle and opened fire at any person he could see. He then proceeded to walk throughout the campus in and out of buildings while opening fire at students and staff. Students all over were running for any shelter they could while trying their best to barricade doors due to Florida State University classrooms not having locks on many of their doors. Finally, at 12 PM, Phoenix Ikner was shot and taken into custody by police. Students remained on lockdown until roughly 3 PM that day. During his attack on Florida State University, Phoenix Ikner took the lives of two people, 57-year-old Robert Morales and 45-year-old Tiru Chabba, as well as injuring 6 people. Robert Morales was the University’s dining coordinator and a founder of Gordos Cuban Cuisine located in Tallahassee, and Tiru Chabba was visiting from South Carolina, and he was the regional vice president of Aramark Collegiate Hospitality.
At some point during the shooting, a female FSU student was walking by when she saw 23-year-old grad student Madison Askins lying on the ground, clearly wounded and fearing for her life. And instead of helping her get to safety, she starts recording her on her phone and walks away. The video was later posted to social media, but the identity of the girl who took the video remains unknown. Many people are very upset that the student recording did nothing to help when she saw a fellow student had been shot, and some are even wondering if Madison or the school will take any legal action against that. Askins says she was walking on campus with a friend when she heard popping sounds, and when they looked back and saw the chaos, they started running. She tripped while trying to get away, and she was shot in the back. She stayed very still for a long time, taking quiet breaths and essentially ‘playing dead’ just to avoid being shot again. She says, “Then I heard the shooter come up, he reloaded next to me.” Askins says she recalls hearing Ikner say, “Yeah, keep running,” and she knew she had to continue playing dead to stay alive, that if she got up and ran, he would shoot again. She then lay there completely still until police arrived on the scene. Askins was taken to the hospital, where she was admitted to the ICU. Today, she is slowly but surely recovering and has a second surgery coming up to attempt to remove the lodged bullet from her vertebrae.
Many people are now starting to wonder, was there a motive behind this act? Ikner had a troubled home life growing up and dealt with an extremely tough custody battle between his parents. Ultimately, in 2015, when Ikner was 10 years old, his mother violated her visitation rights by taking him out of the country with no permission or desire to return him home, which led to Ikner’s father getting full custody and his mother facing charges. A few years later, in 2019, Ikner requested to legally change his name from ‘Christian Eriksen’ to ‘Phoenix Ikner’. ‘Phoenix’ represented ‘new beginnings’ for him, and he took his father’s last name. Those new beginnings were the start of something terrible. In the years following, Ikner was a student at Tallahassee State College, many students who knew him would describe him as very open and vocal about his “white supremacist and right-leaning” political views, and would often get into arguments with classmates because of this. Some also said he would openly talk about his easy accessibility to guns and would joke about mass violence. When he later transferred to FSU, his aggressive comments and views stayed the same. In the end, Ikner changed people’s lives for the worse in a matter of four minutes. For years, many American citizens have dealt with extreme gun violence and little to no control over it. Once again, American citizens have lost their lives for just existing.
