People sit in front of a makeshift memorial outside the student union at Florida State University in Tallahassee on April 17, 2025, after a campus shooting. | Kate Payne, AP
Published on May 16, 2025 at 9:36 am
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After a mass shooting last month at Florida State University that killed two people, officials will look at building security on campuses across the state and hold a “safety summit” in October, university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said Thursday.
Rodrigues told the system’s Board of Governors that campus leaders will assess the security of buildings and the ability to carry out what he called a “lockdown drill.” He said the goal is to be done by the end of the summer, which would provide time to make budget requests for the 2026 legislative session.
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“Specifically, we want to know if the doors can be locked from the inside, and if there are windows in the doors, can those be covered or protected?” Rodrigues said.
He said the October event will allow universities to share information about “best practices” and discuss the results of the assessments of campus safety.
“The goal there would be to identify what we can do to improve across each of our university campuses, as well as identify common concerns so that we will know if we want to make any policy requests of the Legislature for the 2026 session,” Rodrigues said.
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Phoenix Ikner, an FSU student, faces first-degree murder and attempted murder charges in the mid-day shooting April 17 that killed FSU dining coordinator Robert Morales and Aramark Collegiate Hospitality employee Tiru Chabba and wounded five students. IIkner also was shot by police and was released Monday from Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. He is being held in the Wakulla County Jail.
Rodrigues on Thursday praised FSU police officers who rushed to the scene of the shooting. He said the five wounded students have been released from the hospital.
“I feel confident in saying the response of the FSU campus police in this situation was nothing short of amazing, and this could have been a much, much worse tragedy than it was,” Rodrigues said. “Obviously, tragic to have students shot and to have any loss of life. But the quick response of the FSU campus police prevented this from being much, much, much worse.”
While it is too early to know what the campus security assessments will find, the state has taken numerous steps to try to bolster security at elementary, middle and high schools since the 2017 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people and injured 17 others.
Lawmakers and then-Gov. Rick Scott quickly passed a package of school safety measures after the shooting, and lawmakers have repeatedly revisited the issue in the following years.
Also, the state created the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to study school safety and make recommendations.
