A student who witnessed the gunman approach campus and begin opening fire said the shooter pulled up to campus in an orange Hummer and got out holding a rifle and shooting in her direction.
“I think he was shooting and he missed. So he goes back into his car and grabs a pistol, then he turns and shoots the lady in front of him. That’s when I just started running," McKenzie Heeter, a junior at FSU, told NBC News.
Heeter described the shooter as a “normal college dude.”
Reid Seybold, a senior at FSU who was around the corner from the shooting when it unfolded, said he knew Ikner from a political discussion group at Tallahassee State College, where he spent the first two years of his education before he transferred to FSU.
Seybold, the group's president, said Ikner was asked not to return to the group because of views that Seybold said aligned with white supremacy.
“He espoused so much white supremacist rhetoric and far-right rhetoric, as well,” Seybold said.
Since then, Seybold said, he has seen Ikner only a couple of times in passing.
The current president of the same club, Riley Pusins, said that at meetings, the suspect advocated for President Donald Trump’s agenda and often promoted white supremacist values, even though the club was nonpartisan and was about debate and political discourse.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fsu-shooter-suspect-phoenix-ikner-orange-hummer-what-know-edited-rcna201811
A review of court records show Phoenix Ikner had a tumultuous childhood, with another woman — identified in the documents as his biological mother — accused of removing him from the US in violation of a custody agreement when he was 10 years old.
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Ikner is a registered Republican, according to Florida voter registration records. He was quoted in January in an FSU student newspaper article about anti-Trump protests in advance of the president’s inauguration.
“These people are usually pretty entertaining, usually not for good reasons,” Ikner, who was described as a political science major, was quoted as saying. “I think it’s a little too late, he’s [Trump] already going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 and there’s not really much you can do unless you outright revolt, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”
The shooting suspect later changed his name from Christian Eriksen to Phoenix Ikner, a law enforcement source confirmed to CNN.
According to an affidavit from a sheriff’s detective, the child’s biological mother told his father that she would take him to South Florida for spring break in March 2015. Instead, she “fled the country with him in violation of their custody agreement,” taking him to Norway, the affidavit said.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/florida-state-university-shooting-phoenix-ikner-invs/index.html