It’s bad enough to witness one mass shooting in your life. But for at least one student at Michigan State University (MSU), seeing the situation unfold on campus after an active shooter killed three and injured five was a grim reminder of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary just a little over 10 years ago.
In a TikTok video, Jacqueline Matthews stated that she was watching the response to the active shooter incident at MSU on Monday, February 13, 2023, from across the road. She also revealed that she was at Reed Intermediate School when the massacre occurred at nearby Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012. “The fact that this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible,” she said during the video.
Matthews said that she could remember crouching inside Reed as the Sandy Hook active shooter killed 20 children and six adults at the nearby school, injuring two others. She crouched for so long during that incident that she still contends with a “PTSD fracture” in her lower back.
This Was Also the Second School-Based Mass Shooting for Other MSU Students
Other news interviews indicate that Matthews wasn’t the only MSU student who was experiencing their second school-based mass shooting incident. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, one woman told the paper that her daughter, who was currently a freshman at MSU, had previously been a student at Oxford High School, and she was there during the active shooter incident in November 2021.
Two of the four students killed during the Oxford mass shooting were friends of the woman’s daughter. This left her daughter with PTSD. So, when the event was occurring at her new college, she pleaded with her mother to “Get me out of here,” although she couldn’t leave the campus at the time because she was too close to the scene.
NBC News spoke to another MSU student’s mother whose daughter also attended Oxford High School at the time of the mass shooting. She talked about how this latest event was “like reliving Oxford all over again. …The phone call, the word shooting, shooter, it was surreal.”
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Sources: Fox 44 News, New York Post, NBC News, Detroit Free Press, Britannica: Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting
