FEAR AT FSU: SHOTS PIERCE THE CALM OF MIDNIGHT STUDY SESSIONS

Student Jason Derfuss walked with books in his backpack out the front of Florida State University's Strozier Library just before 12:30 early Thursday morning and heard a shot behind him. He turned and watched a man with a gun five feet away fire twice more, straight and close into the torso of another person, who collapsed. Derfuss ran.

Inside, on the first floor of the crowded building, a group of Delta Alpha Chi sorority sisters were sitting together and working on papers for classes about religion when they heard shots, too.

They and hundreds of other students scattered, flipping chairs, diving under desks, cowering under tables, hiding in rows of shelves, sprinting down stairs, up stairs, toward far walls and dark corners, screaming about a shooter, leaving behind computers, keys and shoes, barricading room doors with carrels and chairs.

The first call to the FSU police came at 12:25. Back by the entrance of the library, just outside, a handful of campus officers and city police yelled at Myron May, depressed and devout, to drop his gun. He fired at them. They fired at him. Thirty shots in all. He was facedown on the ground, his gray cap next to his head, dead, at 12:27.

Those frantic few minutes in the middle of the night at FSU, down the street from the Capitol, led to the rest of the day - prayer vigils and press conferences, a reckoning with the 40th shooting on a U.S. college campus since 1990, a dribble of facts about this latest "incident." He used a .38-caliber semiautomatic handgun. He had more ammunition in his pockets. About 400 students were in the library. One victim was grazed, Two victims were hit. One of them, Nathan Scott, 30, an FSU grad working the front desk, was in good condition after being shot in the leg. The other still unidentified victim was in critical condition. Classes were canceled on Thursday. Classes will resume today. The football game will be played on Saturday.

"I pray, God, that you will make the students on this campus brave," junior Tori Reiman from Jacksonville said at a vigil in the morning on the lawn by the library.

"We pray that your spirit of love will radiate across our campus," said Mike Toluba, a pastor.

"Pray for FSU today," Gov. Rick Scott, who had flown back from a national meeting of governors in Boca Raton, told the cameras and the microphones. "Pray for our state."

New FSU president John Thrasher, who had flown back from a fundraising trip in New York, urged the school's 40,000 students and faculty and staff to "reach out to grab hold of each other."

"We are a Seminole family," he said.

And Myron May was a member.

Born in 1983 in Ohio, he went to high school in the tiny Panhandle town of Wewahitchka and graduated from FSU in 2005, with a degree in economics, cum laude. He graduated from Texas Tech's law school in 2009, then worked as an attorney in Texas and New Mexico before moving this fall, back to Wewahitchka. He was studying for the Florida Bar exam. He was having money troubles. He thought people were out to get him.

The Tallahassee police chief would say his "sense of being and place in our community was not what most people would refer to as normal," that he was in "crisis" and "searching for something."

He spent the fall posting scripture on Facebook.

On Nov. 4, from Genesis, he wrote: "Where are you?"

On Nov. 11, from Jeremiah, he wrote: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"

A week later, from Matthew, he wrote: "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Two days and four hours after that, he parked his car a few blocks away and walked toward Strozier with his gun and his pockets filled with bullets and started shooting, at Derfuss, with the backpack with the books, at the person at the entrance, at the employee staffing the front desk.

A siren sounded around campus, a deep, eerie foghorn.

Inside the library, students huddled in their hiding spots, standing, sitting, crouching, crying, whispering, tweeting, texting their parents. "There's a man with a gun in the library. I love you."

Senior Nate Francis from Tallahassee, who served eight years in the Marines, kept quiet and thought about his military training. Stay calm. Stay low. Don't try to be a hero.

"Please say a prayer for us," he tweeted.

At 12:39, their phones pinged with a message: "FSU ALERT! Dangerous Situation!"

The loud voice of a man came over the intercom: "There has been a shooting in the library. Stay where you are. We will be coming to each floor clearing and taking care of anybody."

He continued: "If anybody has a victim, if anybody has been shot, call 911 with your cell phone."

Finally, police and other authorities slowly herded the students, including the sorority sisters who had been writing the papers for classes about religion, out of the library, searching their bags, patting them down, and into classrooms in a nearby building, where they were asked to write their names. Somebody in one of the rooms wrote on the board on the wall some scripture about God being the protector of men.

Home safe at his house, Derfuss, 21, of Orlando, a humanities major scheduled to graduate next month, saw on the back of his backpack what looked like a bullet hole. He pulled out the books for his class on Christian tradition and stared at the punctured cover of a book about a 14th century English philosopher and theologian. His roommate sifted through his backpack and found a gold slug. It had gone through the first book before getting lodged in another.

"The shot I heard behind me I did not feel ... but he hit my books," Derfuss posted on Facebook. "Books one minute earlier I had checked out of the library, books that should not have stopped the bullet. But they did."

He told the Tallahassee Democrat it was "a direct intervention by God."

At 4:33, FSU's emergency management staff issued an update. "There are no other identified threats on campus," it said. "ALL CLEAR."

Less than 20 minutes later, more than two hours yet till sunrise, the body of Myron May, 31, was slipped into a white body bag and driven away in a white van.

News researchers Caryn Baird, John Martin, Times staff writers Lisa Gartner, Rich Shopes and Zachary T. Sampson and Times/Herald staff writers Mary Ellen Klas, Steve Bousquet, Michael Van Sickler, Rochelle Koff and Kat McGrory contributed to this report, which used information from CNN, the Associated Press and the Tallahassee Democrat. Contact Michael Kruse at mkruse@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8751. Follow @michaelkruse.

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Scenes from the shooting

Watch video from inside Strozier Library as students learn of the dangerous situation and then as law enforcement officials explain the events. It's at tampabay.com/video.