Exclusive: FSU suspect cracked jokes night before shooting in chat for Christian athletes

The night before police say Phoenix Ikner killed two people and wounded five others on Florida State University’s Tallahassee campus with his stepmother’s handgun, he was cracking jokes and sharing emojis in a chat for Christian college athletes.

He quipped about taking something to help him “sleep like a champ” and, responding to another student, laughed about taking hits to the head.

“Twice the head trauma, twice the power,” he wrote in messages obtained by the Miami Herald. “I’m evolving.”

Less than 24 hours later, police say Ikner, a 20-year-old FSU student, drove to campus and parked in a parking garage. They say he got in and out of his car for about an hour before finally leaving the garage, heading toward the student union and then opening fire just before noon.

“I think the craziest thing is, like, seeing that he texted me in the group chat literally last night at like 6 p.m. talking about, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna have a good night’s rest,’” said a student included on the chat, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

Some former classmates told the Herald they had little indication Ikner was capable of carrying out a mass shooting. Others weren’t entirely shocked.

Former classmates and friends told The Herald that, while Ikner was “intelligent,” he was “off” and disruptive, scribbled “weird” drawings in his notebooks in middle school and reacted poorly to women leaders in his Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Several said he was bullied. Three former high school classmates claimed students made jokes about the possibility that Ikner had it in him to be a school shooter.

“He definitely wasn’t that quiet kid that was sitting in the back of the class,” said Andrew Jernigan, a 20 year-old former Lincoln High School student who was part of JROTC with Ikner. “He was friendly to an extent of course. He would just make some comments … being either sexist because he did not like taking orders from a female — being told what to do.”

Jernigan added that “you just had a feeling that something was off with him.”

Jernigan recalled Ikner leaving high school early because he had completed all his credits. He said Ikner was “very, very intelligent, which is even more surprising that he was stupid enough to go do this.”

‘A LITTLE OFF’

Police say Ikner, who court documents show was born Christian Gunnar Eriksen and changed his name in 2020, was a member of a youth council with the Leon County Sheriff’s Office. His stepmother is a sheriff’s deputy and school resource officer. They said he used her former service weapon in Thursday’s shooting, and also brought a shotgun with him, though they had no evidence he’d shot anyone with it.

Police say officers shot and subdued Ikner and took him into custody about five minutes after he first began shooting. His condition was not known on Friday; Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare declined to discuss his health, but said patients treated at the hospital for their wounds were expected to survive.

Documents filed in a years-long custody case between his birth mother and father suggest he had a tumultuous childhood. One document states that Ikner was receiving treatment for ADHD.

Taylor Allen, 20, a former Tallahassee State College student, was a classmate in Ikner’s seventh-grade language arts class at Swift Creek Middle School. She sat a row ahead of him. She said Ikner was somewhat eccentric at the time, and could be socially unaware.

“I would speak to him every now and again and he was just very, like, quiet, and I know a few kids picked on him in school just cause he was a little off … He would always sit in the back of the class kind of laugh to himself every now and again; just be kind of annoying to others and not really care if he was too loud or obnoxious,” Allen said.

“And most of the classmates would be like, can you stop? And he wouldn’t,” she said.

She said he tended to socially isolate himself and enjoyed drawing “weird” and “pretty dark things” in his notebook in class, “not like normal drawings.” She added that he was very intelligent and took advanced classes.

David Pichard, a 19 year-old former friend of Ikner’s, remembers Ikner as racist, homophobic, and “awful” in high school. But he said when he last saw him in the fall at Tallahassee State College before Ikner transferred to FSU, he had turned a corner.

“He seemed to chill out a lot more when I saw him,” he said.

Ikner didn’t have very many friends when Pichard knew him in middle school and high school. He said Ikner inserted himself into his friend group and hung around them at lunch most days.

“Not a lot of people talked to him or really liked him,” he said.

Pichard was busy with homework on Thursday afternoon when his mother came in with the news, said he was very surprised by the shooting. “I was really shocked.”

Arinze Abanah, a 20-year-old computer science major at Tallahassee State College, said in a text message that he didn’t know Ikner well but they shared a Spanish class. He said Ikner was active in class, asking questions and participating. He thought he was “normal.”

“I was surprised,” he said, “not only because he did something that I thought was out of character for him but because I was in a class with someone who was capable of doing something like that.”

On Thursday, when news of the shooting spread, someone in the chat for students in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at FSU and Tallahassee State College wrote that there had been a shooting. At the time, 12:11 p.m., no one knew the man accused of pulling the trigger was in the thread.

In a statement to the Herald, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes said it “deeply grieves the shootings that have taken place at Florida State University. All affected by this situation remain in our heartfelt prayers.” Through Jeff Tolson, a public relations professional, the organization declined to discuss Ikner, citing the ongoing investigation.

This story was originally published April 18, 2025 at 6:09 PM.