'Can you hear gunshots?' Student texts reveal horrors from inside an active shooter lockdown

An "active shooter" situation is a hell of a way to start a school year and I do mean hell.

- Clarence Page

That's what it was like for students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after associate professor Zijie Yan was fatally shot in a science building on the campus.

Police said they arrested graduate student Tailei Qi, 34, of Chapel Hill, without force less than two hours after the shooting. Qi was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder and a weapons count and jailed without bond. Yan was Qi's faculty adviser, and Qi worked with Yan's research group.

But the elapsed time felt a lot longer, judging by student accounts that flowed from inside the lockdown zone at the campus. Barely a week after students started the fall semester, they were barricading themselves in classrooms or, in some cases, caught by news cameras jumping out of windows.

To the student journalists at The Daily Tar Heel, the tragedy posed a dilemma that is unfortunately familiar to me and countless other daily journalists: How do we convey the unspeakable horrors of gun-related tragedies to which the public has been desensitized by the seemingly endless repetition of it? An idea came late Monday night to Emmy Martin, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, while she was in bed looking through the text messages and social media posts that she and other students had received during the lockdown.