EAST LANSING, Mich. — Law enforcement announced key details Thursday about the investigation into Anthony McRae, the man police say was responsible for Monday’s deadly mass shooting at Michigan State University.
Local, state and federal officials responded to the shooting, but McRae seemed to walk off campus after the attack.
Chris Rozman, Deputy Chief of MSU Police and Public Safety, said Thursday that there are thousands of security cameras at the university, so it took awhile to figure out the exact path McRae took, which buildings he entered and which doors he left through.
“Due to the number of reports that we were receiving on campus, we actually, at the time, thought that he was still on campus. I mean, we had no indication at the time that he left campus. We were receiving and responding to so many calls about potential shots fired or sightings of this person on campus. Although we deployed resources off campus, we didn’t receive any calls,” Deputy Chief Rozman added.
The first reports of shots fired came in at 8:18 p.m. Monday. Three hours later, police released two photos of the suspect from surveillance footage.
17 minutes later, they got a call from someone who helped them find McRae off campus.
Two officers with the Lansing Police Department found McRae at Lake Lansing Road and Larch Street, which is nearly four miles off campus and right around the corner from where he lived with his father on East Howe Avenue.
Police said Thursday it looked like the suspect simply was walking home.
The officers say they got out of their vehicle and told the suspect to show his hands; however, that’s when investigators say McRae took out a gun and took his own life without saying a word to the officers.
The officers then searched McRae and found two 9mm handguns, the one he used on himself and another in his backpack.
They also found a fully loaded magazine in McRae’s jacket pocket, eight more loaded magazines in his backpack, a pouch filled with 50 rounds of loose ammo and two empty magazines.
Police also found two pages of notes in McRae’s wallet. They say this gives an indication for a possible motive, but nothing investigators can confirm yet.
They say the notes listed local businesses, a church and a school district in New Jersey.
“Through our investigation, we found that he had had contact with some of those places. I believe he was an employee of the Meijer warehouse at one time and a couple of other businesses, it appears that he’d had some issues with the employees there, where he was asked to leave,” Lt. Rene Gonzales with Michigan State Police explained. “So it looks like possibly a motive for that was he just felt slighted and that’s kind of what the note indicated.”
Investigators say, in the note, McRae also claimed to be the leader of a group of 20 killers, but they invalidated that claim quickly after talking with the suspect’s father.
“Our interviews with the shooter’s father, we brought that up to him, and he had mentioned that his son does not have any friends. He pretty much sat in his room. Most of the time, he ate, went to the bathroom in there, so he pretty much never left his room, and his father didn’t believe that he had any friends, let alone 20 of them that would help him put this out, so we kind of determined that he was the lone shooter,” Lt. Gonzales said.
