MSU shooter Anthony McRae was ‘totally lost’ after mom’s death: dad

February 15, 2023

Michigan State University killer Anthony Dwayne McRae was “totally lost” and had started looking like a toothless “wolf man” — but refused to get help, according to his family.

The 43-year-old mass shooter — who killed three students late Monday and left five others fighting for their lives — had always been a “good kid” until his mom, Linda, died of a stroke in 2020, his dad told CNN.

After that, he “began to change” and “was lost. Totally lost,” dad Michael McRae told the network.

“He was getting more and more bitter. Angry and bitter. So angry. Evil angry,” he said, calling his son “a mama’s boy” who locked himself in his room for hours playing violent video games.

“He began to really let himself go. His teeth were falling out. He stopped cutting his hair. He looked like a wolf man,” he said of his son, who killed himself after the MSU bloodbath.

MSU shooter Anthony McRae in earlier mugshot. — “He began to really let himself go. … He looked like a wolf man,” McRae’s dad told CNN.

“He didn’t care about anything no more.”

However, the killer’s sister, Melinda McRae, told CNN that the problems started before their mother’s death, saying that her brother often clashed with the matriarch and often fled “to different cities and just live in a shelter.”

“He’s always been like the oddball of the family,” she said of the brother who struggled to find work.

“My mom said that Anthony is going to be the death of her.”

He would often lash out at his church-going mom while she was alive — but expressed deep sorrow after she died, his sister said, noting how he would say, “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry …”

His sister said she last saw McRae at their mother’s 2020 funeral.

His dad, however, still let McRae live with him in his small home in Lansing even though his son “wouldn’t talk to me or anyone.”

Exterior of Lansing home where McRae lived with his dad. — The killer would lock himself in his room for hours playing violent video games, his dad said.

Instead, his son would lock himself in his room for hours playing games. “He only came out to go to the kitchen or go to the bathroom, then he’d go right back in,” the dad said.

“He’d treat me like I was invisible. I’d ask — ‘Why are you treating me this way? What did I do?’” the elder McRae said.

Michael McRae suggested that his son go see a doctor, but he refused.

“I told him, ‘You need help,’” but he said the suggestion just made his son “mad.”

McRae said his son “had demons inside him,” but would never join him in going to church each week. The dad told CNN that “sometimes evil can jump in you. You have to pray.”

Still from McRae during Monday night's mass shooting at MSU. — The mass shooter’s dad said his son was “totally lost” and had “demons inside him.”

In a separate interview with the Independent, McRae blamed many of the “crazy things” in society on video games.

“All the games you got are shooting and killing, shooting and killing,” he said.

The dad maintained that he did not believe his son still had weapons after he served probation following a 2019 bust for possessing a semi-automatic pistol and a magazine without a permit.

Police at the scene of the shooting — The shooting killed three people Monday and left five others fighting for their lives.

“I don’t allow guns in my house,” he told the Independent. “I don’t believe in that. I got my Bible. I didn’t know what he was going on doing and what was in his mind to do.”

The dad said it never crossed his mind that his son might be responsible for the mass shooting that he heard about on a radio news bulletin while listening to music at home.

At the time, he thought, “‘Oh no, not another one. Oh my God, not another one,’” he told the UK paper.

Then, “My neighbor called me and said, ‘Michael? … Your son was killed,’” he recalled, with a swarm of cops descending on the house and ordering him to come out with his hands up.

“I’m shocked that this happened … I feel like I’m dreaming. It don’t seem real to me,” he said of the shooting for which police have yet to establish a motive.