MSU professor describes gunman Anthony McRae as ‘robot’

A professor at Michigan State University whose classroom was targeted by the mass shooter who killed three students and critically wounded five others described the gunman as a “robot” – “something not human standing there” as he sprayed bullets for several minutes.

Marco Díaz-Muñoz, 64, was teaching his Cuban literature class of about 40 students in Berkey Hall on Monday night when Anthony McRae, 43, opened fire outside, the Detroit News reported.

At first, he didn’t know what the noise was, thinking it may have been a blown transformer before he saw the shooter standing in the doorway at the opposite side of the room.

“And then shots and shots and shots,” Díaz-Muñoz told the newspaper, snapping his fingers, as some students froze in terror, others dove under tables and some fled through the windows.

“I could see this figure, and it was so horrible because when you see someone who’s totally masked, you don’t see their face, you don’t see their hands – it was like seeing a robot,” the professor said in an interview on CNN.

“It was like seeing something not human standing there,” he added. “I don’t know how long he stood there. He shot at least 15 shots, one after the other, one after the other. Bang! Bang! Bang!”

After the barrage, McRae went back into the hallway, but Díaz-Muñoz wasn’t sure the threat was over.

“My intuition told me he’s walking down the hall and he’s going to enter through the door I’m closest to,” he told CNN.

“So, I threw myself at that door and I squatted and I held the door like this, so that my weight would keep it and I was putting my foot on the wall,” Díaz-Muñoz said as he held his hands clenched.

“No one knew whether he was going to come in again. All I knew was that I needed to close that door,” he told the Detroit News.

The professor shouted for the students to kick out the windows of the ground-floor room and some scrambled out to safety during the rampge.

But some refused to flee.

“They were trying to cover the wounds (of the injured) with their hands so they didn’t bleed to death,” Díaz-Muñoz told the network. “They were heroic because they could have escaped through the windows. They stayed, helping their classmates.”

Several minutes later, police arrived and Díaz-Muñoz realized the scope of the deadly attack.

“There was a horrendous scene. I’ve never seen so much blood,” he told CNN, adding that he began pulling one of the students out before stopping in case he was hurting more than helping.  

Díaz-Muñoz later found out  that two of his students, Arielle Anderson, 19, and Alexandria Verner, 20, were killed in the bloodbath.

“These two kids that died were just nice kids, serious students, both of them,” he said.

Brian Fraser was gunned down at the student union.    

Five students remained hospitalized Thursday, with one getting upgraded to stable condition. The other four remain in critical condition.

Two of the wounded are Chinese students, according to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, which said they were “out of danger” after surgery.

McRae died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Díaz-Muñoz, a chronic insomniac, said he got home about 3 a.m. Tuesday and took medication to fall asleep after the horror.

“There is a part of me that feels like I want to go under the blankets and take more pills and not wake up for a while,” he told CNN.

“I want to not remember these scenes and not have to go teach that class,” he said. “But there is another part of me that feels a great need, a strong need to see my students again … to see that they are alive, I need to see their faces.”  

Díaz-Muñoz said he was speaking out also to call for gun control to “stop this madness.”

“I think if those senators or lawmakers saw what I saw, not just hear statistics, they would be shamed into action,” he said.