A student at Michigan State University who survived the deadly Monday night mass shooting that killed three and left five others seriously wounded is also a survivor of the devastating Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in December 2012.
Jackie Matthews, now 21, posted an emotional video on the popular social media platform TikTok talking about the trauma she experienced when she thought for the second time that she was going to die. The mass shooting at the Michigan State University on Monday, February 13, was the second shooting she had lived through.
More than a decade ago, in 2012, Matthews, a student at the Sandy Hook Elementary School at the time, hid in the corner of her classroom for hours as a gunman went through the school, killing children and teachers.
Matthews said she was hunched in that corner for so many hours that she now suffers a post-traumatic stress injury on her back that flares up whenever she is caught in stressful situations.
On December 14, 2012, a 20-year-old gunman opened fire at Matthews’ elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing over 20 first-grade students and six adults.
Now a student at Michigan State University, Matthews recorded the TikTok clip from a room across the road from where part of the mass shooting occurred on the East Lansing campus.
Matthews said it was incomprehensible that it was the second mass shooting she had lived through at her age and that nothing has been done to stop the violence.
Police found the Michigan gunman, who was not a Michigan State University student and had no known connection to the school, about three hours later in Lansing, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police identified the victims who died as Brian Fraser, a sophomore, Arielle Anderson, a junior, and Alexandria Verner, a junior. The other five wounded victims are still hospitalized and in critical condition.
In her video, Matthew said she believes that the government needs to do something to prevent such massacres and shootings and prevent another tragedy from happening.
She made a call to action, saying that love and prayers no longer cut it and that legislation is the only way to curb mass shootings.
Matthews was not the only survivor who also survived a previous mass shooting. A Michigan State University freshman, whose identity has not been released, also survived the November 30, 2021 Oxford High School shooting near Detroit, Michigan, where Ethan Crumbley, 15, murdered four students and injured seven people, including a teacher, with a 9mm semi-automatic weapon.
The Michigan State University shooting is the 67th mass shooting in the country in one and a half months.
