With birds chirping and the wind blowing it would be hard to conceive such an intense and surreal tragic scene if there weren't students panicking and police officers holding assault rifles everywhere you looked.
The incident happened around 11:30 and it was hard to distinguish between this experience and the many active shooter drills that the campus police, headed by Joe Santos, have performed over the years.
Kathleen Stockmier and I were in the Newsroom located in the A Building when the chaos broke out after a shooter opened fire on a female student and then eventually turned the gun on himself. We followed the active shooter protocol that the North Lake Police had drilled us on many times before.