‘I've been through this before': Parkland graduates take shelter during Florida State University Shooting
As Ilana Badiner took shelter in the student union during the Florida State University shooting on Thursday, she remembers thinking 'I kind of knew the drill already.'
Seven years ago, Badiner was an eighth grader at the middle school adjacent to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida.
'I've been through this before. It was a similar situation,' Badiner, 21, told CNN.
Now a senior at FSU, Badiner was attending a bowling class on the ground floor of the student union Thursday when a shooter opened fire near the building, killing two people and injuring six others before he was shot and taken into custody by police.
It marked the sixth mass shooting in Florida and the 81st mass shooting in the United States in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The bowling area has big glass doors and windows that face an open area where students can grab food or study. Through the windows, Badiner started to see students sprinting to the bathrooms and hallways and leaving behind their belongings.
Though Badiner couldn't hear any gunshots over the loud music playing in the bowling alley, she instantly thought students were running from someone with a gun.
'I didn't know why everyone else would be running and they were leaving all their belongings behind and definitely knew there was an emergency,' she said.
She and a friend immediately let her bowling instructor know that something was wrong. That instructor is Stephanie Horowitz, according to Badiner, who also happened to be a Parkland shooting survivor. Horowitz was a freshman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the 2018 mass shooting on Valentine's Day.
'I had a feeling it was an active shooter situation before I even heard,' Horowitz, a graduate student at FSU, said in an interview with CBS. 'We were lucky that some of my students looked out of the glass doors and saw everybody running.'
Fred Guttenberg, the father of 14-year-old Jaime Guttenberg who was killed in the Parkland shooting, posted on X: 'America is broken. My daughter Jaime was murdered in the Parkland school shooting. Many of her friends who were lucky enough to survive that shooting went on to attend FSU. Incredibly, some of them were just a part of their 2nd school shooting and some were in the student union today.'
Josh Gallagher, who said he also survived the 2018 shooting, was in the FSU Law Library during Thursday's shooting.
'After living through the MSD shooting in 2018, I never thought it would hit close to home again,' he posted on social media.
Horowitz led Badiner and about 30 to 40 others to hide in the back office of the bowling alley, according to Badiner. Some students also took shelter in a backroom where people play billiards.
It was at that moment that Badiner started receiving texts from the FSU emergency line while an overhead alarm sounded. Her suspicions of a shooting were right.
She started texting her dad every few minutes. She remembers thinking: was the shooter in the building? Was he outside? What floor was he on?
She also thought of her time as an eighth grader in Parkland – when her class turned off the lights, locked the door, covered the windows and huddled against a classroom wall for about three hours waiting for answers as they could hear nearby police sirens.
'Eventually, they came on the loudspeaker, and we found out that it was at Stoneman Douglas,' she said. 'We're very close to that school. So we don't know who the shooter was or what his motive was, so we didn't know if he would come into our building next.'
For a while after the deadly shooting, she would have to keep the lights on to fall asleep at night.
'I just felt nervous being in the dark,' she said.
She remembered being escorted out of her eighth-grade classroom by a SWAT team while her peers tried to get in touch with their parents. She reunited with her dad and brother at a Publix down the street.
Though the Parkland shooter targeted the high school – not the middle school where Badiner was – she had a moment on Thursday where she realized even though she survived the shooting seven years ago, she might not be able to survive this one too.
As they hid in the bowling alley office, she started to hear rumors about the shooting and victims. She had met some friends on the first day of the bowling class that chatted with throughout the semester. Now, they sat huddled in the corner of the small office together scared for their lives.
There was one desk in the room with a computer, where she could see a warning message informing people to shelter in place.
It felt like a long time of hiding and refreshing social media before police arrived. After checking her texts with her dad, she realized it was actually only 15 minutes.
As police escorted her out of the student union, she saw an injured person on the ground surrounded by police and medics.
'I remember just walking out the doors and I immediately saw her and my heart started beating a little faster. I was like, wow, people are actually injured severely.'
As other students flowed out of the student union and nearby buildings, Badiner began to panic because she didn't know if the shooter had been caught yet.
Eventually, Badiner was able to safely make it home to her off-campus house.
She hasn't cried yet and thinks that might be because she's still in shock. She thinks the tears will come when she learns more about the victims.
She attended a vigil for the victims Friday evening, though she was a little nervous about being in an open space with so many people.
Badiner, who graduates from FSU in May, said she's frustrated she's going through some of these feelings a second time.
'I definitely think there are some things that could be changed. I'm not well-informed enough about the specific (gun) laws that are put into place, but I have a feeling that someone can be doing something to keep us safer,' she said.
Similar to seven years ago, Badiner decided to sleep with a candle warmer Thursday night, almost like a night light, so she wouldn't be sleeping in complete darkness.
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