by Mary Spiller
April 18, 2025
Phoenix Ikner reportedly used a police service weapon registered to Sheriff Deputy Jessica Ikner.
New details have emerged about the Florida State University student who stands accused of killing two people and injuring five others in a deadly mass shooting on campus on April 17. Phoenix Ikner is reportedly the son of a local sheriff’s deputy. He has spent a significant amount of time training with law enforcement and serving on a sheriff’s advisory council in the years leading up to the attack he allegedly committed.
The connections between Ikner’s past rose to the surface when he was arrested after being shot by FSU police. The 20-year-old was in possession of Sheriff Deputy Jessica Ikner’s service weapon.
According to police records, Ikner had a rough childhood. Sheriff Walter McNeil told reporters on the scene that he was “steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family and engaged in a number of training programs that we have, so it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”
Jessica Ikner, Phoenix’s stepmother, has served at the sheriff’s department for over 18 years, and “her service to this community has been exceptional.”
Ikner himself has been a longstanding member of the sheriff’s Youth Advisory Council. The group is designed to “provide an open line of communication between the youth of Leon County and local law enforcement.”
Other aspects of Ikner’s life have also been revealed, as an Instagram account linked to him included a biblical quote in the tagline, reading: “You are my war club, my weapon for battle; with you, I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms.”
Florida state voter registration records show that Ikner is a registered Republican and recently spoke in the FSU student newspaper about anti-Trump protests around the president’s inauguration.
Ikner, a political science major, stated, “These people are usually pretty entertaining, not for good reasons. I think it’s a little too late. He’s (Trump) already going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20, and there’s not really much you can do unless you outright revolt, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”
Ikner, a current FSU junior, reportedly also was asked to leave an extracurricular political club, according to a fellow FSU student, Reid Seybold. Seybold said Ikner “had continually made enough people uncomfortable, where certain people had stopped coming. That’s kind of when we reached the breaking point with Phoenix, and we asked him to leave.”
Seybold told CNN that Ikner’s comments and behavior went “beyond conservatism. It’s been a couple of years now. I can’t give exact quotes. He talked about the ravages of multiculturalism and communism and how it’s ruining America.”
Despite some people pointing out several red flags in Ikner, other members of the FSU community struggle to see how Ikner could have committed such an act with such extensive ties to the police force.
A member of the sheriff’s youth council, Kenniyah Houston, told CNN that she was shocked to know that the suspected shooter served in the same organization as her. She described the advisory council as being focused on improving the community through enhanced law enforcement.
“For something like this to happen from someone in a group like that is scary … it’s devastating.”
Ikner is currently hospitalized after being shot by university police for “not [complying] with commands.”
He is described as having “serious but non-life-threatening injuries.”
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