Police believe the gunman - the son of a Leon County sheriff's deputy - acted alone and a motive was not known. The suspect had access to his mother's handgun, which was once her service weapon. She bought it from the department and it is now a personal firearm, they said.
"Unfortunately, her son had access to one of her weapons that was found at the scene," Leon County Sheriff Walter McNeil said at the press conference.
The shooting started about 11.50am on Thursday near the student union building on the FSU campus. Students and faculty were told to shelter in place as police responded. More than 42,000 students attend classes at the main campus.
The 20-year-old suspect - identified as Phoenix Ikner - was believed to be a student at FSU in the state capital of Tallahassee, said Jason Trumbower, chief of the university's police force. The two people who were killed were not students. Trumbower did not provide details on the four others who were shot and wounded.
Responding police officers shot the gunman when he failed to obey orders to surrender and took him into custody, authorities said. The four wounded victims, plus the gunman, were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds.
Mass shootings on US school campuses have become recurring tragedies in recent years. The incident was the second shooting on the FSU campus in 11 years. In 2014, a graduate opened fire early at the school's main library, wounding two students and an employee as hundreds were studying for exams.
Student Max Jenkins described the shooter leaving the student union building and firing four or five shots outside.
"He saw the maintenance guy who was waving everybody and I guess heard him probably and turned and shot that way," Jenkins said in a video on the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper website. "There's a golf cart over here with a bullet hole in it."
Chris Pento was on a tour of the university with his children and eating lunch at the student union building when shots started ringing out.
"It was surreal, people started running. She just got trampled over," Pento told local TV station WCTV, referring to his daughter.
In addition to the handgun, authorities believe the suspect brought a shotgun onto campus but said it was uncertain if that weapon was used in the shooting.
Notable mass shootings at colleges or universities in recent years include the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in Blacksburg, Virginia, where 32 people were killed and 23 injured.
In 2023, there were two college mass shootings, one at Michigan State University, where three students were killed and at least five others injured. The other incident unfolded at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where three faculty members were killed before a suspect died in a shootout with the police.
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