LANSING, Mich. — Michigan State University Prof. Marco Díaz-Muñoz is exhausted from doing interviews. He's done more than a dozen of them in the last year, all about a day his mind tries to forget: Feb. 13, 2023.
But Díaz-Muñoz is on a mission.
That Monday, during a cold February evening, a shooter opened fire in Díaz-Muñoz's classroom. Two of his students were killed. Others were injured.
Marco remembers exactly the moment of his lecture when the gunman opened fire.
But it's Díaz-Muñoz's demands for systemic change that keep him in front of cameras and speaking with reporters, talking about that horrific day — even one year later.
“I feel that that tragedy wasn’t just an isolated incident. We know how often this is happening. We know it’s increasing. We also know that several decades ago, this was not happening,” Professor Díaz-Muñoz said.
He says it might take millions of people descending on Washington D.C. to get people in power to listen. For Díaz-Muñoz, it's up to every American touched by tragedies like this one to take action.
“The increasing inequalities between people in this country. The increasing number of people that fall in the margins of society.”
“So you have an increased number of people who need help and at the same time ... a tendency to decrease funding for those people,” Díaz-Muñoz said.
Díaz-Muñoz says he believes decreasing mental health funding is a contributing factor for when people, like the Michigan State shooter, "blow up."
“That person who did the shooting is just symptomatic of the things that are increasingly getting worse in our society,” Díaz-Muñoz said. “If anybody listens to what I’m saying, it affects us all."
He recounts the day as one that started like any other, passing around a sign-up sheet to start the class. He would normally pass a second sign-in sheet later on in the two-hour-long class.
Díaz-Muñoz was in the middle of showing Spanish fortresses on the projection screen when he heard the first blast.
"We obviously didn't get to the second sign-in sheet," Díaz-Muñoz said.
Díaz-Muñoz says the man who entered his classroom had lost all humanity.
“We see this person. Right there. In the threshold of the door frame. Not quite out, not quite in. Just right there. This person is all masked. You couldn’t tell who it was,” he said.
After hearing what Díaz-Muñoz thought was an explosion, seconds went by that felt much longer. A student screams "a shooter" and the panic begins, as shots are fired every few seconds.
“You can imagine. Then the panic. Everybody starts running. They are stumbling one over the other, because the seats in my classroom are fixed. So it’s not like you can throw them and run. The kids were trapped," Díaz-Muñoz said.
The shooter retreats. Díaz-Muñoz braces himself at one of the classroom doors, with his hands on the doorknob, pushing his body weight into the door. He instructs students to start going out the windows. But the bottom windows wouldn't break. Luckily, the top windows, sitting at about shoulder height, did. Students managed to scramble out of the room to safety.
But Díaz-Muñoz remained, holding the door, until the police officers arrived about 10 minutes later. Then he got a look around.
“Just see what was happening in my classroom. It was just heart wrenching. It was terrible to see the state in which some of my students were. Then some students, had about four of them stayed, helping the wounded,” Díaz-Muñoz said.
Díaz-Muñoz wants the tragedy he and so many Spartans went through to be something that inspires change at a national level.
“I believe if every community in this country agrees, if what I say makes sense to them, and we all went in buses to D.C. and you get 5 million people there asking for changes, then people in high places, important places, would be taking steps towards changing this," Díaz-Muñoz said.
READ MORE: MSU school shooting survivors can now be reimbursed for mental health services
