Two people were killed an six more were injured during the mass shooting that took place Thursday at Florida State University. As I described here, the shooter was stopped in the act and sent to the hospital by police. It sounds like he’s going to survive. He was later identified as Phoenix Ikner, a 20-year-old student at FSU. His mother was also identified as a local sheriff’s deputy. Ikner used one of her handguns in the attack.
However, today we’ve got a lot more information about Ikner and his history and what it shows is a lot of family problems, including more than a decade of court battles between his parents, his mother fleeing the country with him and Ikner changing his name. Plus there’s also a mention of his right-wing politics which we’ll get to in a moment.
His birth name was Christian Gunnar Eriksen. His birth mother Anne-Mari Eriksen is originally from Norway and is not a deputy in Florida . The day her son was identified as the shooter, she wrote an angry post on Facebook.
‘Horrible when your alienating son’s dad is as mentally unstable as he is, along with his LCSO cop wife, that they can’t respond when you write to ask if everything is alright with my son, who studies ar [sic] FSU,’ she wrote in a now-deleted post.
‘That whole familly [sic] is nuts. He should write a book on how to parent badly, but he can’t communicate.’
Then, she added: ‘Feel sorry for everyone at FSU and their kids.’
She and the shooter’s father had long ago separated and their custody battle went on for more than a decade, from the time he was a young child until he turned 18-years-old.
By the time the suspect, Phoenix Ikner, was 6 years old, court records showed that he had to repeat kindergarten. His parents fought bitterly over every aspect of his care while accusing each other of manipulation and abuse. Judges were forced to intervene again and again as the parents traded allegations of domestic violence and stalking. The legal battle consumed nearly his entire childhood and ended only when he became an adult and most of the family court matters became moot.
The fighting culminated in 2015 when Christian Eriksen was 10-years-old. His mother said she was taking him to south Florida for a vacation but in fact she fled the country to Norway.
His biological mother, Anne-Mari Eriksen, took him in March 2015 to Norway, in violation of the custody agreement with his father, per a probable cause affidavit reviewed by PEOPLE.
During their time in Norway, Phoenix’s father told police, Anne-Mari repeatedly skirted his questions about when the child would be back in the United States.
While away in Norway, Phoenix, who at the time was named Christian Gunnar Eriksen, missed his school tests, doctor’s appointments and medications he was taking for a diagnosed growth hormone disorder and ADHD, per the affidavit.
A judge in Norway eventually ordered his return to the US and when they returned his mother was charged and given 200 days in jail plus 2 years probation. A few years later he changed his name, taking his father’s name instead of his mother’s.
Court records listed the suspect’s name as Christian Gunnar Eriksen until 2019, when he was 15 and his father petitioned the court on his behalf to change his name to Phoenix Ikner.
Christian spoke to a judge and said the change was in part motivated by the 2015 incident with his mother. At the time the judge said he seemed well-spoken and intelligent.
But he made a different impression later on with a political discussion group he joined at a community college he attended before transferring to FSU.
Reid Seybold, 22, a senior at Florida State, said the suspect joined a political discourse club that Mr. Seybold ran at Tallahassee State. The suspect’s time in the club was short-lived.
“He repeatedly espoused white supremacist, alt-right views to the point where people were uncomfortable, and we had to ask him to leave,” Mr. Seybold said, adding that the discussions often became “Phoenix against just about everyone else,” with the suspect escalating arguments and seeming to thrive on the opposition.
“He said Rosa Parks was in the wrong,” said Lucas Luzietti, 20, who was in a national government class with the suspect at Tallahassee State in the spring of 2023. “He strongly implied that Black people were ruining his neighborhood. He also said Joe Biden was an illegitimate president.”
So there you have it. He seems to have been looking to shock people with his political opinions and he succeeded. We’ll have to wait and see if he says anything about his specific motivation for this attack. Was the motive political or is he just a troubled kid with a mess of a family life?
His maternal grandmother, is out today blaming this on Eriksen/Ikner growing up with his father and his stepmother, the one who is a sheriff’s deputy.
The grandmother of alleged Florida State University gunman Phoenix Ikner reportedly accused his parents of influencing the campus shooting that left two dead and several others injured — ripping the couple as “rotten bastard people.”
Susan Eriksen blamed her grandson’s father and stepmother, Sheriff’s Deputy Jessica Ikner, for turning the “sweetest kid” into an alleged ruthless killer, who claimed the lives of two and wounded five others when he used his stepmom’s former service pistol to open fire on the Tallahassee campus Thursday afternoon.
“They taught him how to hunt, they’re bigoted people, they hated a lot of people,” the 79-year-old grandma told the DailyMail.com at her condo in the Florida capital Friday.
This appears to be a situations where there are two sides to the story but both sides are so angry that neither one is a reliable narrator.
