‘I’m no hero,’ says campus officer who confronted shooter at HBCU

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — What Lt. Antonio Bailey called a “normal” day on the campus of Edward Waters University on Saturday turned frightening when a car full of students pulled up beside his car. They said they were concerned about a white man they saw in the faculty and staff parking lot at the rear of the historically Black university’s grounds.

The man had put on a bulletproof vest, gloves and a mask. Alarmed, the students found Bailey, a public safety officer who was making his routine rounds canvasing the campus.

Bailey got “right into action,” he said Monday at a news conference at the university. He said he approached the man, and when he saw how the man was dressed, he recalled wondering: “What are you doing here? Something’s wrong.”

When the man, later identified as Ryan Palmeter, 21, saw Bailey in uniform, he sped off, jumping a curb and exiting the campus “at a high rate of speed,” Bailey said.

Getting the man off campus moved the nearly 1,200 students from potential victims to safety.

“Lt. Bailey is our hero,” school president A. Zachery Faison Jr. said at the news conference.

Bailey, soft spoken and appearing uncomfortable in the spotlight, rebuffed that notion. “I’m no hero,” he said. “If anything, it’s the students who alerted me so I could do my job.”

His job did not end with confronting Palmeter, who would later shoot and kill three Black people a few blocks from campus at a Dollar General store. Bailey pursued Palmeter in his car down Kings Road, the major street that leads to the campus, and down a few side streets.

But as a campus officer, policy allows him to follow a suspect only to a certain point.

“We have outstanding protocols,” he said. “But I wish I had more authority to detain and pursue.”

Following campus police practices, Bailey, who has worked at EWU for 18 months, alerted a Jacksonville sheriff and shared the man’s license plate. A short time later, Bailey learned of the shootings.

When he realized the same man he had diverted from campus was the killer, he said he felt “saddened.” After a pause, he repeated: “Just saddened. It was a tragedy.”

The shooter may not have intended to attack the school, Jacksonville Sheriff T. K. Waters said Sunday. “It looks to me that he went there to change into whatever he needed to change into,” he said. “He had the opportunity to do violence at EWU; he did not. There were people very close, in very close proximity. He did not do anything there, he backed out and he left.”

Faison, the university president, however, was careful in trying not to contradict Waters, but did point out that the killer left behind a rant in which “he wrote that we want to kill n------,” Faison said, spelling out the N-word. “He could have gone anywhere in Jacksonville. It wasn’t by happenstance that he chose to come to Florida’s first historically Black college. It wasn’t on a whim. He came to where he thought African Americans would be, and that’s Florida’s first HBCU. This is the heart of the Black community in Jacksonville.”

Many students are “having a hard time” with the notion that a killer was in such close proximity, Faison said, adding, “There’s a high level of apprehension.”

The school has provided round-the-clock access to counseling.

“I don’t even want to think about it if this racist had started shooting on campus. Thinking about it makes me sick,” said Romana Hall, an Edward Waters University graduate who works as an attorney in the area. “When our students aren’t safe on campus, well, we’ve reached a new low. This can’t happen. I’m so sad for the victims and their families. And it’s sobering that those students did the right thing by contacting security and the officers acted immediately and got him away from the school.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state would donate $1 million to the university to ramp up security on campus.

“As I said for the last couple days, we are not going to allow our HBCUs to be targeted by these people, and so we’re going to provide security help with them,” DeSantis said during a briefing on Tropical Storm Idalia.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was on campus Monday, Faison said, to assess where to best spend the resources.

Faison said he was grateful that the school’s safety practices worked, with the students alerting safety officers of suspicious behavior. To Bailey, Faison said: “Your actions are beyond commendable and they will resonate not just for today but for generations to come. . . We have attempted to create a culture of caring among our student body that champions, ‘See something, say something,’ And our students’ acceptance and integration of that culture into their university experience surely saved countless lives.”

Curtis Bunn is an Atlanta-based journalist for NBC BLK who writes about race.