ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Just an hour southeast of East Lansing, student leaders at the University of Michigan invited the entire campus for a vigil to remember the three lives lost and more wounded after the mass shooting at Michigan State University Monday night.
Hundreds of UM students, faculty and staff gathered together in solidarity in The Diag, a large grassy area on the Ann Arbor college's campus.
Attendees stood in silence for four minutes to mark the four hours the MSU campus was frozen in fear as the 43-year-old gunman wreaked havoc, shooting and killing students Brian Fraser, Alexandria Verner and Arielle Anderson before shooting himself during a confrontation with police miles away from campus.
Vigil attendees held each other close as stifled sobs and tears could be heard while they listened to students like Mika Rectorbrooks who spoke of the importance of showing support for the MSU community and East Lansing as a whole.
Rectorbrooks, a sophomore at UM, said she is a gun violence prevention activist, and told the crowd their feelings of pain, anger and more were valid.
"We have to come together we have to mourn this loss," she said.
UM student Alyssa Donovan also spoke at the vigil, saying it was her second time being a part of a community that experience a mass shooting. She is a graduate of Oxford High School where four people were killed in a 2021 shooting just an hour away from both Ann Arbor and East Lansing.
Donovan is not the only college student forced to cope with the trauma of a second mass shooting affecting them.
"For our community as a whole, that would prove to be forever changed by that senseless act of violence," Donovan said.
Andrea Marquez, a master's student at UM, said it was important her school hosted the vigil. It's important to honor the lives lost to yet another mass shooting in the U.S., but it's also important to address how some may have become numb to seemingly regular headlines of mass shootings.
"Students, faculty, staff, they all have relationships, affiliations with Michigan State," Marquez said. "More than anything, it's important to hold space for that rather than just got back to normal as we're so accustomed and used to doing."
Natasha Zake, also a UM master's student, has a consistent fear in the back of her mind not only due to the prevalence of mass shootings in the U.S. but because of how many have happened in 2023 alone.
Notably, 11 people were killed and nine were injured during a shooting at a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, California, on Jan. 21. Two days later, in Half Moon Bay, California, seven people were killed and one was injured in back-to-back shootings at two farms.
"This is the perfect opportunity for someone who is, for lack of a better word, inspired by previous events to use this ground as an optimal spot for creating the same thing," Zake said.
After the vigil ended, some attendees stayed behind alongside the flowers, candles and tears to look to a hopeful future where the fear of being shot and killed is not something Americans have to face.
"We must find within ourselves the love strength and grace to inspire and demand change," Donovan said.