While most students were either asleep or studying for finals early yesterday morning, a sophomore Student Apartments resident known as “Trevor” was studying the description of Wednesday’s alleged on-campus shooter, whom he’d just met moments earlier at the party being thrown in the Student Apartments.
“He had on baggy jeans, his boxers were showing, and he was wearing an oversized shirt,” Trevor later told the University Press in an exclusive interview. (The UP is also honoring a request to protect Trevor’s identity.)
Following his finals on Tuesday night, Trevor and his roommate were unwinding by hanging out with friends. At 1:05 a.m., the pair decided to accept an invitation from a fellow resident in the Student Apartments who was throwing a small get-together at her place.
“There was a bag of Doritos on the counter,” Trevor recalls of the casual party with roughly 15 people in attendance. Except for one light in the kitchen above the stove, the only lighting came from a strobe light inside the living room where loud dance music played in the background. Trevor says he didn’t know anyone at the party except for the hostess and his roommate, so he hung out in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs inside the two-story apartment, standing between the kitchen and the common area where the party was taking place.
At around 1:10 a.m., Trevor observed two fellow guests arguing over a red hat. “There was a guy in a brown shirt, and a guy wearing a red [shirt],” he says. “They were probably friends, [because] they seemed to know each other.”
But then Trevor’s roommate noticed something specific about the guy in the red shirt standing eight feet away from them. “At first I didn’t know what the guy in the red shirt was doing. I just saw him waving his right hand up and down in front of another kid, but my roommate realized it was a gun.”
“Holy shit, Trevor, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Trevor remembers his friend saying.
When other partygoers also realized it was a gun, many took to hiding in the apartment. Some people fled upstairs to the bathroom, while others ducked behind furniture and the kitchen counter. Trevor and his roommate opted to flee the apartment.
“We had just made it onto the catwalk outside when I heard the two gunshots fired in the apartment,” Trevor says. “The gunshots were about five seconds apart from each other, and I thought somebody got hit [by the bullets]. I heard screams.” At about 1:11 a.m., Trevor says he made the first phone call to 911 on his way to safety inside his own apartment. “We turned the lights off in our place and locked the door, but we stood in the kitchen to see what was going on.”
Seconds after he’d made it to his apartment, Trevor says he saw the man he remembers holding the gun at the party casually exiting. “He walked out, and I saw him tuck the gun back into his pants.” Trevor added that the alleged shooter was heading south toward the parking lot before a girl in a striped shirt left the party to join him. “But you know, the news stations got it all wrong,” Trevor says. “He was more like 5’8 than 6’1.”
Within five minutes of his call, Trevor says that FAU police were on the scene, and thirty minutes later they were using megaphones to keep students in their apartments. Another five minutes after that, Trevor had gotten word from the police officers taking his roommate’s statement that police had barricaded every road into and out of the campus. It was at that point Trevor says he felt safe.
“I knew they were going to catch him,” he said. “I felt really safe, even during everything.” Part of the reason he felt so safe was because the Boca Raton Police Department later arrived with a Crime Scene Unit to work in conjunction with FAU police. Many of the officers used Trevor’s apartment as a makeshift operations center. “They used my bathroom, and I even offered them coffee,” he says.
According to Trevor, the police stayed until 7:30 a.m., but twelve hours later at the time of his interview with the University Press, things were back to normal at the Student Apartments, with the police tape being removed from the apartment where the party was held. In fact, it turned out to be a usual day for Trevor.
“Well, I took an hour nap, made some coffee, and changed a computer desk into an entertainment center,” he concludes. For now, he adds, it’s back to studying.
