TALLAHASSEE—When a gunman opened fire outside of Florida State University's busiest building, nearby students desperately used chairs and desks to barricade themselves inside classrooms with a near-fatal flaw: the doors have no locks.
Two students hope to change that.
Seniors Meghan Bannister and Sarah Walker started an online petition demanding FSU install internal locks on all of its doors, mere hours after a 20-year-old shooter killed two and wounded multiple others outside of the Student Union—a building away from the women’s classroom.
As of Monday morning, they’ve gathered nearly 30,000 signatures.
In interviews with The Floridian, the women described the terror of hiding inside a second-floor classroom facing the Union. It was supposed to be their last class as FSU undergraduates in Professor Bob Garner’s Managing New Venture Growth lecture.
Garner, who started the lesson by introducing a guest speaker, would end it using his body to seal their classroom door shut.
Why? Because it only locked from the outside.
Gripping the handle tight for what the women said felt like hours, Garner calmly promised, “I will hold this as long as I need to for you guys,” and asked students to stack desks around him.
“This was a nightmare come to life,” Bannister said. “I’ve never accepted death the way that I did then.”
‘The Doors Don’t Lock!’
Bannister, from Boston, and Walker, from Jupiter, were in HCB, one of the biggest classroom buildings on campus and just a three-minute walk from where a murderer opened fire. The 22-year-olds, friends who both studied in FSU’s College of Entrepreneurship, said a student who’d been texted about the shooting showed Garner.
Almost immediately after, active shooter alerts blew up their phones and flashed on the projector, prompting desks and chairs to be shoved against the room’s two doors amid a flurry of chaos.
“Lock the doors!” someone yelled, though neither Bannister nor Walker could remember who.
“The doors don’t lock!” a boy replied, panicked.
Walker describes this as the moment that the thinly veiled fear behind the 20-odd students’ faces erupted into terror. The reactions were different: some prayed, some called and texted their parents—saying what they believed could be their final goodbyes—others piled up any debris against the doors.
“When I heard that, my heart was in my stomach. That’s when I really felt like I could face death,” she said.
The women said that their strength came in the form of Garner and another male student, stationed at either door. A strength that they say should never have had to be shown.
“No one should ever have to put themselves in that position when we’re at school,” Walker said. “We’re on a campus—we should have access to basic locks, like, it’s a basic safety procedure.”
What they, and the rest of the town, didn’t know was that law enforcement had already neutralized the assailant, FSU student Phoenix Ikner, two minutes before the first FSU alert went out.
The stepson of a local sheriff's deputy, Ikner used his stepmother’s handgun to open fire outside of the Union. He killed two and wounded 5 others before law enforcement returned fire, injuring Ikner, then took him to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.
The two killed were 57-year-old Robert Morales, the university’s dining coordinator and son of a Cuban-American CIA informant, and 45-year-old Tiru Chabba, a dad of two from South Carolina who came to campus for a work meeting.
All six wounded, including Ikner, are expected to make a full recovery.
‘Nowhere to Hide’
Just hours after the shooting, as Walker began her drive back to Jupiter, she messaged a group chat with Bannister insisting that something needs to be done about the locks; maybe a petition.
Bannister—who already had a Change.org account—immediately created the petition demanding internal locks on all classroom doors.
Days later, hundreds of comments from terrified students populate the page, with more appearing upon every refresh. They depict harrowing experiences in at least three different campus buildings with no locks, exposing a terrible irony at FSU:
Lockdowns don’t exist in buildings that can’t lock.
One poster identified as Lara recalls hiding with her sorority sisters in the Student Services Building behind HCB. She says one of its many doors couldn’t lock from the inside, prompting a “kitchen boy” to bravely stand watch while the college girls tied the hinges with their school lanyards.
A user named Mackenzie retold her time in the Bellamy building’s auditorium, located next door to HCB. Not only did the doors not lock, but all desks and chairs were bolted to the floor.
“We had nowhere to hide in the room,” she said.
What’s Next?
After graduating, Bannister and Walker will come back to FSU for their Master’s, highlighting their love of being Seminoles and praising the university for its “phenomenal” response to the tragedy.
But that doesn’t mean the return will be easy.
“I will never feel comfortable again sitting in a classroom if there’s no lock on the door,” Walker said. Bannister agreed, noting that she “can’t imagine” going back to the building she saw crawling with SWAT teams and sobbing students.
The duo hope their petition will bring awareness to these safety protocols and inspire other universities to double-check their own door-locks, because, the women worry, this won’t be the last school shooting.
“The likelihood of a shooting happening again at a university is unfortunately not slim. It’s just a matter of when and where,” Walker said.
When approached at a hospital press conference on Friday, a spokesperson for President Richard McCullough told The Floridian that the administration hasn’t set its focus yet on the locks, instead concentrating on meeting with the wounded.
A spokesperson for the school has not responded to an email seeking comment.
Thursday presented a moment for quiet heroes to emerge, heroes who put themselves between students and an armed madman. A moment where Seminoles replaced door locks with their bodies.
A "kitchen boy" standing guard as Sorority girls tied door hinges. A professor using his body as a barricade, sticking out like a sore thumb among desks and chairs.
“We’ll never be the same, but we’ll come out of this stronger, we’ll come out of this safer, we’ll come out of this more together and more united,” Bannister said.
