MSU students who graduated from nearby Oxford High have experienced two shootings in under two years
Images of a student’s “Oxford Strong” sweatshirt went viral as MSU students evacuated the school.
As the news of a shooting on Michigan State University’s campus unfolded late Monday night, images of an unidentified student evacuating and wearing an “Oxford Strong” sweatshirt garnered extra attention. For MSU students who also attended Oxford High School — about a 90-minute drive from East Lansing’s main campus — this would mark their second school shooting in less than two years.
By Tuesday morning, both “Oxford High School” and “MSUStrong” were trending on Twitter and other social media platforms.
“[I] can’t stop thinking about the student in an Oxford Strong sweatshirt on the MSU campus,” MSNBC producer Lauren Peikoff tweeted around 3 a.m., following two news conferences hosted by MSU Police that reported three people were killed and five others hospitalized. “The fact there are multiple people who’ve survived more than one mass shooting is beyond words. How can we just live like this?”
Others also took notice of the student’s Oxford Strong crew neck, which was sold as part of a community fund-raiser with proceeds going to survivors as well as the families of the victims. It’s unclear if the MSU student wearing the sweatshirt attended Oxford. Four Oxford High School students — Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Hana St. Juliana, 14; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17 — died in the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting. Six students and one teacher were also injured.
Myre, a football star at Oxford, was honored by MSU as an honorary member of the team’s 2022 recruiting class.
Gen-Z for Change, a collective of young activists outspoken on issues including gun control, tweeted, “it’s extremely heartbreaking to see one of [the students] wearing an Oxford Strong T-shirt.”
Jennifer Mancini, whose daughter graduated from Oxford and now is a freshman at MSU, said Monday night’s incident was retraumatizing for students.
Mancini, who spoke with the Detroit Free Press, said she spent the last year helping her daughter grieve and cope with the loss of two of her closest friends.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” the mother said. “[My daughter] said that she had PTSD … She just wants to come home … she said, ‘Get me out of here.’”
Mancini said her daughter was not on school grounds during the shooting but lives close to campus and was not able to get out of East Lansing. Her daughter’s father drove to East Lansing to bring her home Tuesday. Mancini added she worries about the long-term effects the latest shooting will have on her daughter.
“I hope she doesn’t backpedal,” Mancini said. “These kids will never be the same. They’re not the same kids.”
Jackie Matthews, an MSU senior, filmed a TikTok at 1 a.m. across the street from where the shooting occurred. Matthews explained that this was also her second school shooting — she attended Sandy Hook Elementary School 10 years ago. In her video — which has been viewed over a million times, she describes suffering from a “full-blown PTSD fracture,” causing pain in her lower back that flares up when she’s stressed. She said the injury is tied to being hunched over in hiding for so long during the elementary school shooting.
“The fact that this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible,” she said. “We can no longer just provide love and prayers. It needs to be legislation, it needs to be action, it’s not OK. We can no longer be complacent.“
@jmattttt Enough is Enough. #spartanstrong #sandyhookstrong ♬ original sound - Jmattttt
According to the Washington Post, more than 338,000 students have experienced gun violence at school and 336 school shootings have taken place since the Columbine shooting in 1999.
Tuesday also marks the fifth anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla. where 17 people died. The victims were Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Scott Beigel, 35; Martin Duque, 14; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Chris Hixon, 49; Luke Hoyer, 15; Cara Loughran, 14; Gina Montalto, 14; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Helena Ramsay, 17; Alex Schachter, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16, and Peter Wang, 15.
Since the year of the Parkland shooting, the number of gun violence incidents at schools has climbed rapidly, data show.
On social media, Parkland survivors and family members of some of the victims have spoken out about the shooting at MSU.
“Every single shooting could be one of the last,” said David Hogg, who with his Stoneman Douglas peers founded March For Our Lives — a student-led demonstration in support of gun control legislation — in response to the 2018 shooting. “Instead we continue the endless debate that drives the inaction which brought us here. Until we start making our response to these shootings finding common ground and acting like we did after Parkland — this won’t end.”
Fred Guttenberg — who has dedicated his life to antigun violence advocacy after his daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Parkland shooting — wrote on Twitter in response to the MSU shooting that America needs to wake up.
“As I sit here crying for my family & our loss of Jaime 5 years ago in Parkland, I’m watching the news conference in Michigan where [the] treating physician is crying,” Guttenberg wrote. “Gun violence breaks families & breaks communities. BEFORE IT IS YOUR LOVED ONE, DEMAND WE FIX THIS ONCE & FOR ALL.”