Mark Davis, a Haines High School graduate, is a second year music student at Michigan State. Earlier this week he spent four hours hiding from an active shooter on campus. He spoke with KHNS  about the experience.

On Monday night Mark Davis was practicing the trumpet with his classmates at Michigan State University. Around 8.30 they heard sirens. One of his classmates had a police scanner, and they turned it on. They learned that a gunman had opened fire in a nearby building, but the information was confusing. 

Davis: “As we listened to the police scanner we heard a lot of different reports of things people were saying about what was happening, and not all of them were accurate. Because I think a lot of people were scared, so if they heard a loud noise, they might think that it was a gun, and call the police. So there were a lot of different things being said on social media and on the police scanner, we weren’t really sure what was happening but we were just trying to be quiet and stay as safe as we could, and try to figure out what was going on.”

Davis and his friends moved to a room that had a locking door. They turned the lights off. They knew to do those things because of lock down trainings that are commonly offered in high school–even in Haines.

Davis: “We all had lock down drills pretty regularly. So we knew we had to lock the door, turn off the lights, get near a wall or something like that and just be quiet. And close the blinds. And so we did all that and put some pianos up by the door to kind of block it too.”

The kind of training Davis and his friends received became common in the late nineties, when the public really started paying attention to school shootings . Haines school district superintendent Roy Getchell remembers when the trainings started. 

Getchell: “The day after Columbine. That’s when that started. Schools had to think very differently about what our safety plans looked like and what we needed to do.”

Getchell describes the training Davis would have received in Haines.

Getchell: “Usually a conversation with the classroom teacher saying OK, if there is a crisis, we would do one of these three things. We are going to practice the hide portion of this. But if we were in an emergency we would try to leave the building, or if it’s an absolute crisis we need to fight. It depends on the grade level, it depends on the teacher and how they communicate with their students. But we leave a lot of that up to teacher discretion.”

Getchell says it is a fine line the teacher has to thread.

Getchell: “We don’t want to create a traumatic situation for our students, but at the same time we want to make sure they are prepared in an emergency. And the best way that we found to do that is to make sure the adults are thoroughly prepared.”

Huddled in a dark room at Michigan State school of music, Davis and his friends considered their situation. They knew the shooter was not in their building and felt relatively safe. So they decided to stay in that room until the emergency was over.  

Davis: “We were just sitting in that dark room quietly, and we really didn’t have anything to do, except look on our phones, listen to the police scanner, and we could text people or do stuff like that. And one of the things that really stood out to me was how much love and support I got from so many friends and family who were texting, asking if I was OK and they were praying for me and MSU and everyone’s safety.”

Hours passed. The students were checking on their friends, getting updates through their phones. None of Davis’s friends were hurt. The students were getting antsy.

Davis: “We decided to wait for the next press conference. When we found out that it was over we were glad to be able to get out of there, and get back to whatever we wanted to do, and go to the bathroom and mostly go to sleep because it was already 1am at that point.”

The shooter killed three students, and five others were still hospitalized in critical condition at the time of this story. The killer then took his own life.

Davis says the campus now feels empty, as many students have gone home. Classes have been put on hold till Monday. He says he will spend time with friends, and attend a vigil in remembrance of the victims. Some friends who live nearby have invited him to come home with them, if he wants to spend time away from campus. He says it all reminds him of the landslide that happened in Haines two years ago, the lives lost, the chaos, the community grieving. 

Davis says he wants things to go back to normal. He wants to resume trumpet practice.

As of the time of this story, there have been 72 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the gun violence archive.