2025 Florida State University Shooting
On April 17, 2025, at the Tallahassee campus of Florida State University (FSU), Phoenix Ikner killed two and injured six others. The injured victims were reported to be in fair condition on the day of the shooting and all were expected to survive.
The deceased were identified as 57-year-old campus dining director Robert Morales and Tiru Chabba, a 45-year-old regional vice president for campus vendor Aramark Collegiate Hospitality. Morales had worked at the university since 2015, also serving as an assistant football coach.
Some local news stations initially reported that two suspects were involved, and a search was conducted for any additional shooters. The Tallahassee Police Department ultimately announced that the campus had been secured with only Phoenix Ikner in custody.
Ikner, a 20-year-old transfer student, was shot by police before being taken into custody alive. He was reportedly fascinated with Adolf Hitler and Nazism, using a drawing of Hitler as an avatar on one online gaming account and naming another account Schutzstaffel, the full name of the Nazi SS.
Ikner’s motive for the mass shooting is unknown at this time, but he was well known for far-right, conspiratorial, and white supremacist views.
He reportedly argued with people over politics frequently and was asked to leave a school club over statements like “Rosa Parks was in the wrong,” and other statements about how black people were destroying his community. He also reportedly made homophobic remarks.
Ikner was born Christian Gunnar Eriksen, a dual American-Norwegian citizenship, on August 18, 2004. Ikner lived in Tallahassee most of his life, and was a student of FSU, where he had transferred from Tallahassee State College.
His name was changed to Phoenix Ikner in 2020 as a result of conflicts with the maternal side of his family. His parents had a nasty divorce and custody battle which included allegations from both sides including domestic violence and stalking in court.
“He chose the name Phoenix,” a Leon County court document states, “because of its representation of rising from the ashes anew.”
At the time of the name change, Ikner referenced a “tragic event” in 2015. His mother, Anne-Mari Eriksen, was arrested in July of 2015 for kidnapping her then-10-year-old son.
She had taken him out of the country to Oslo, Norway in March 2015 in violation of the custody agreement she had with his father, falsely telling Ikner’s father that they were going to Southern Florida for spring break.
Both parents had been barred from leaving Florida with the child without a court order, and were required to forfeit their passports. Phoenix Ikner's maternal grandmother, Susan Eriksen, reportedly facilitated his kidnapping, driving them to the airport to flee to Norway.
After the father discovered the ruse during a phone call with his son, Eriksen said she would return the son to the United States on March 27, 2015, but failed to do so, according to a Leon County affidavit.
Ikner’s father told authorities at the time that his son suffered from "developmental delays and special needs" which required access to his doctors for treatment. The affidavit from the Leon County Sheriff's Office said that Ikner was "on medication for several health and mental issues, to include a growth hormone disorder and ADHD."
On July 14, 2016, Erikson pled guilty to the charges. She was ordered to have no contact with Ikner's school, teachers, doctors, counselors or summer camp programs, and was told to begin restitution payments totaling $31,000.
She was also sentenced to 200 days in prison, with credit for 170 days time served, followed by two years of community control and two additional years of probation.
Community control is a form of supervision considered a more restrictive version of probation, where an individual is confined to their residence but may be allowed to travel to specific locations like work, school, or treatment.
Christopher Ikner was given primary custody at this time. Previously, he had told the court in Leon County that he believed his son was being neglected by Eriksen.
According to court documents, Ikner said that day care providers had told him that his son often came in with “sour clothes, or often dirty clothes.”
“The child is unkept, and looks as if he has not slept in a considerable period of time,” the father’s attorney said in a court filing.
In July 2015, Phoenix and his father both made allegations of domestic violence against his mother. The court petition describes his mother scratching him on his knee, and punching him in the chest and back.
The document says his paternal grandmother took photos of the scratches, but were not able to find visible marks of the punches. They said that Phoenix “called us on the cell phone and told us he was being abused.”
Eriksen filed a defamation lawsuit against Christopher and Jessica Ikner as a result of these allegations, which she claimed were false and that the couple were harassing her. The lawsuit was dismissed.
Ikner's maternal grandmother, Susan Eriksen, blamed both his father, Christopher, and his stepmother after the shooting, calling them "rotten bastard people.”
She said that she and Ikner's biological mother, Anne-Mari Eriksen, had not seen Ikner since 2015 despite repeated attempts following the messy custody battle that consumed nearly his entire childhood.
Anne-Mari Eriksen posted a rant about this to Facebook just minutes before her son was named publicly as the shooter. According to a post viewed by The Daily Mail, Eriksen accused Christopher of being mentally unstable and claimed that he and his wife were ignoring her attempts to get updates about her son.
“Horrible when your alienating son's dad is as mentally unstable as he is, along with his LCSO cop wife, that they can't respond when you write to ask if everything is alright with my son, who studies ar [sic] FSU,” she wrote.
“That whole familly [sic] is nuts. He should write a book on how to parent badly, but he can't communicate. Feel sorry for everyone at FSU and their kids.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, many were outraged when footage emerged of a student walking calmly across campus, filming themselves sipping a latte as they walked by a victim covered in blood.
The wounded student on the ground was later identified as survivor Madison Askins, 23. Askins told the press that she was running for her life when she fell, and as her friend tried to help her up, she was shot from behind. Askins played dead so the gunman would ignore her.
"At one point I did think he had walked away, so I was going to shift over to grab my phone to share my last 'I love you's' with my family. I heard the gunman come up next to me, and I heard him reload. There was a clip at my feet when everything was said and done."
Video also emerged showing Ikner actively firing at students on the campus. Gunshots were first reported inside the Student Union Building around at 11:56 A.M.; the first active shooter alert was issued just after 12:00 P.M.
A student described seeing the shooter firing a rifle in her direction; she reportedly heard him firing indiscriminately for approximately 20 to 30 seconds, discharging about 15 rounds. She said that the suspect then pulled out a pistol and shot a woman with it.
“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.
Three firearms were ultimately recovered by police: one on the suspect, one in a nearby parked car, and a shotgun that was recovered from inside the building.
Tallahassee Police Chief Lawrence Revell said it appears that there was no connection between the victims and Ikner, who remains hospitalized with serious injuries and is not speaking to law enforcement.
Ikner is a former member of the sheriff's office's Youth Advisory Council and was well known to local law enforcement as a result of his stepmother, Jessica Ikner, who was a Leon County Sheriff's deputy.
One of the firearms recovered was the former service weapon of Jessica Ikner, who worked at the Leon County middle school as a school reserve deputy. She reportedly kept the weapon used in the shooting for personal use when the department upgraded their weapons.
She was named a "Deputy of the Year" in 2011, and reportedly practiced shooting with Phoenix at some point prior to the mass shooting.
Leon County Sheriff Walter A. McNeil said at a press conference on FSU’s campus that the shooting was “tragic in more ways than you people in the audience could ever [fathom.]”
“He has been steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family, engaged in a number of training programs that we have,” McNeil said.
There was a prior shooting that occurred at FSU in November 2014 when Myron May, an alumnus of the school, opened fire in the university library around midnight, wounding three people before being killed in a shootout with law enforcement.
