Michigan State professor recounts chilling details of mass shooting one year ago
EAST LANSING, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - Michigan State University Professor Marco Diaz-Munoz says the moment a masked shooter entered his classroom on the campus of MSU a year ago, he prepared himself to feel pain.
Although Diaz-Munoz was never hit by a bullet, the image of his students wounded and crying out for help is one he says he'll never forget.
"It was around 8:15," Marco-Diaz said.
On a night that now haunts the Michigan State University assistant professor.
"The classroom is 114 Berkey Hall, and I have taught in that classroom [year] After year," he said.
Except after last year when a masked gunman fired repeatedly into the professor's classroom, killing two of his students while injuring five others. The first shots were fired in the hallway of the academic building.
"One, and then maybe wait two seconds, another one, and then a couple more seconds, and another one," Diaz-Munoz said. "And then my students were looking at each other nervous, and then all of a sudden, we see this person in the backdoor."
READ: Remembering the victims of Michigan State University mass shooting
What happened next is what the professor describes as the source of his nightmares.
"Everything went into chaos. People running, people hiding, [and] people screaming," he said. "At the same time, I'm telling myself, 'Well, this is your day. Just prepare because you're going to feel bullets in your body even though you don't even know how they feel in your body.'"
Bullets never pierced the professor's body.
"If he tried to shoot me, I don't know because it never touched me, and then he stepped out," he said."At that moment, the only thing I could think of was to close this door. [I] threw myself at this door, and then I grabbed the doorknob with my hands, both of them, and I put my feet against the sides of the door to keep it shut. And then my students, some of them already on the floor wounded, severely wounded, others were standing, others crying, others screaming, others looking at me in disbelief as if not knowing what to do because if they left through that backdoor, they were going to run into him. [The front] door, I needed to keep shut, and there was no other door. So, I just thought, escape through the windows, break the windows."
Police eventually arrived, and the professor and surviving students were asked to shelter in place. The shooter killed himself during a confrontation with police. Soon after, students and staff were allowed to go home.
"When I drove home [to] the safety of my home, it was a nightmare because you have to understand, how could I be alive, but some of my students were not," he asked.
A year later, Diaz-Munoz still has questions, but he also has hope.
"This was a very dark experience, violence is, but there's always light in life, there's always hope," he said.
There's also a light within him that keeps him going as he encourages others to do the same.
"I have to trust that it's not on me. I don't have the world on my shoulders, that I'm not going to fix it," he said. "I should, and we all need to do something to make it a better world, but there's something greater that is guiding it."