Jack Ward was uncertain how many of his peers gathered on Sept. 27, 2021. Students were in and out of the room where the clandestine meeting was ongoing, crafting and ultimately dispatching a crucial email.
By the time Ward arrived, some of the freshman’s hallmates and other acquaintances he made in his first month on campus had already begun drafting the email. Huddling cautiously in a room in Claude Bryan Hall, the Michigan State University students put together an email alerting housing staff and university officials about a danger in the dorm. Attached to the email was this list:
• Multiple knives (large sizes)
• Illegal car parking sticker
• Boxes of bullet casing in room
• Boxes of ammunition in car
• Blank-fire handgun (in car?)
• Actual-loaded handgun
• Both blank and loaded handguns were seen by other students
• Used N-word and F-slur
• Threaten to tase other students while sleeping
• Climbed up the side of building into a window
• Made a working taser out of a battery, wires, and screws
• All conversations are related to weapons
• Hand-built a gun in dorm room
• Said that rape victims are liars to a group of girls
• Made very transphobic comments
• Multiple students are concerned about their safety
• Shops on the black market
• Told girl who has depression that she just shouldn’t be depressed
One of the residents, a young man who declined to be interviewed, told the others that “he had seen the gun in their room and was like, ‘I don’t like that he has a gun.’ And that’s when we wrote the email,” Sarah said. Sarah is a fake name. City Pulse offered her confidentiality because she is concerned about her safety. The students were writing about “Mason,” a pseudonym for the 18-year-old student. The email was addressed to their resident assistant, Reginald Allen.
The students had already warned Allen they were putting together an email identifying how Mason was a “danger to our safety.” When it arrived in his inbox Allen, and the students, knew he was going to have to call law enforcement. Attached to that email was a video of Mason scaling the outside of one of the dorm buildings on campus and crawling through a third-floor window.
Allen sent the email up his chain of command and waited for direction.
After waiting two days, Allen made an emergency call to MSU police. At 12:03 a.m., on Oct. 1, MSU police officers arrived and conducted a search of Mason’s room and car. Allen said the emergency call had been made right after Mason’s roommate confirmed with Allen that Mason had not yet left for his Lake Orion home that weekend. The roommate declined to speak with City Pulse on the record.
Allen, who saw the police enter Mason’s room, said the officers tossed it, “searching through boxes, opening up containers” and even “moving around the bed frame.” Another resident, who had been hanging out with his friends in Sarah’s room, was on his way to his own when he saw the officers talking to Mason just a couple of doors down.
Some residents went to Mason’s floor, walking past his room to steal a glance.
Mason left in handcuffs.
The search yielded what MSU’s police spokesperson, Inspector Chris Rozman, said included a “non-serialized 9mm handgun,” a “homemade stun gun” in his room and a catalog of sharp edges in his car: two knives — one “fixed,” the other “automatic,” and “three throwing stars.”
When an MSU student is involved in an event that poses a danger to the student and others, the university calls an emergency meeting of the Behavioral Threat Assessment Team. The team reviews the incident and makes recommendations to the dean of students on what, if any actions, should be taken in regard to the student.
If the dean determines the student should be suspended pending the outcome of an investigation, the student is given 24 hours to rebut the allegations with evidence he or she was not involved in the alleged misconduct.
The morning after the arrest, Allen awoke to what he believed to be a safer dorm — only to find Mason greeting him with a hearty, “Hi, Reggie!” while “skipping down the hall and eating beef jerky.”
“I just kind of shut down. My body went into fight or flight mode,” Allen said.
But soon thereafter, Mason disappeared, presumably having been arrested.
Prelude to …
The night of the arrest had not been the first time the police had searched Mason’s room.
Residential hall officials called for a non-emergency police interaction little more than a week into the semester, on Sept. 9, when Mason was deemed not a threat, Allen said.
This call was made after two residents approached Allen after seeing Mason “making shivs out of chopsticks” in the Brody Cafeteria and talking about how “more damage could be dealt with a hammer than with a knife.”
A separate MSU housing employee confirmed that an initial report was written and submitted to Advocate. That’s a computer system MSU uses to track incidents from the initial report until closure for cases ranging from stolen property to sexual assault.
Allen said three police officers showed up at Bryan Hall to investigate. “Two were talking to him, one was searching his room.”
After a search of Mason’s room and an interrogation, one of the officers allegedly told Allen that Mason had exhibited signs of “special needs or autism” and he did not pose a safety concern. The officer “assured us that there was nothing to worry about. I remember those were his exact words,” Allen said.
In the weeks leading up to Mason’s eventual arrest, Allen and his residents feared for their lives.
First signs
“The first thing I heard out of this guy’s mouth? He asked me, ‘Have you ever been stabbed?’” Ward said. Ward looked at him in disbelief, “gave him a little head shake and said, ‘No.’ I was questioning what I had just heard. I was so appalled.”
Minutes before this, Ward’s roommate had urgently interrupted his post-schoolwork gaming. “He’s like, ‘Do not go outside the room. There’s a kid who made a homemade taser.’ I’m laughing it off and like, ‘There’s no shot someone made a homemade taser,” Ward recalled, using the slang for no chance. “You could hear it from down the hall.”
“I go a little further down the hall,” Ward said, “and I see this kid holding batteries wrapped in something. It was a really weird design.” Ward told City Pulse that he and two other residents had seen electrical sparks generated from the electrodes of the homemade taser.
Ward decided to “take the other stairs down” to avoid Mason’s room.
“People tried to get away from (Mason’s room) when they were in the vicinity,” Ward said. “It was more of a silent pact.”
Anna Barnes, a journalism major at MSU and then-Bryan Hall dweller, recalled another experience.
She and others in the circle of Bryan Hall friends were at Five Guys on Michigan Avenue the day when Mason sprung a question.
“He asked every single one of us, ‘Would you ever own a gun?’ Barnes said. “Everyone was giving him joke answers. A couple people said, ‘Yeah, maybe’ and I said ‘no.”
Mason seemed agitated if someone replied in the negative.
“And if you said ‘no,’ he would get real … .” She paused “He’d ask you, ‘Why, like, why not? Why wouldn’t you want to? Guns are great.’”
“I wouldn’t own a gun,” Barnes replied, making a self-aware quip about her struggles with depression. “‘Because what if something bad happened in my life? That was really inconvenient for me and every now and then I would look at my gun and be like, ‘I can just use it on myself.’”
Mason volleyed back at the notion of Barnes having depression with incredulousness and disbelief. “He would tell me, ‘It’s not real,’ that it was ‘all in my head,’ I was ‘making it up,’” she said.
The group marinated in silence. “That was a super awkward conversation, everyone was just kind of sitting there, listening,” Barnes recalled. Mason paid for everyone’s meal that day.
Mason often had trouble meshing with the group; he had almost been a friend-in-law. Barnes said the seeds of the group’s inception had been sowed right before Labor Day weekend when Mason became part of it seemingly by proximity to the others. Mason would “show up and hang out.” The group didn’t initially mind Mason’s presence given his initial friendly demeanor.
Though that perception changed rapidly, Barnes said Mason “was generally on edge.” She was not alone in noticing his hyperfixation of firearms. 
“If Mason was involved in a conversation, it would always come back to something about guns,” Barnes said. Ward similarly recalled most interactions with Mason revolved around guns.
Sarah said Mason avoided the usual trappings of the American college experience, eschewing parties in favor of going to the gun range.
“We’re all kind of partiers and we would do that on the weekend. He didn’t really like that. None of us liked going to the shooting range, and that’s what he would do during the week,” she said. “Mason was always sober.”
Mason offered to buy Sarah breakfast if she went to the shooting range with him; she declined Mason’s proposal. Going to the shooting range was something Mason begged others to do with him regularly.
As these interactions became increasingly routine, some residents believed they were hurtling towards violence. When asked if he had thought Mason was going to hurt someone, Ward told us: “I began to think of it more as an inevitability.”
Other concerns
It wasn’t just Mason’s overt enthusiasm for firearms that were causing concern. Sarah recounted that Mason made a jagged First Amendment argument declaring he could use the N-word, and did. It made Barnes increasingly wary of him.
Fellow residents heard him parrot right-wing talking points.
“Anything revolving around an amendment was one of (Mason’s) core beliefs,” Ward said. “Like the right to bear arms? ‘I’m allowed to have guns.’ “The right to free speech? ‘I can say whatever I want.'' We all knew his core beliefs. And he would be bragging about his AR-15 to us. That’s kind of where we were a little more submissive to the idea of being nice.” Ward said.
Ward recalled watching the first professional football game of the season four days after police had searched Mason’s room the first time. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were playing the Dallas Cowboys.
The matchup had been widely anticipated, and students across campus found their eyes glued to the screen, but Ward found himself dividing his attention between the game and another screen.
“Mason comes up to me, and says, ‘Let me show you what I made.’ He showed me videos of a walkie-talkie,” Ward said. The video showed a device with a “ton of wires with a walkie-talkie around a canister.”
Ward alleged Mason then scrolled through videos of “him recording himself with the device in his hand” and “walking away, hitting a button on the walkie-talkie and then a boom,” Ward said. “I just remember hearing a big bang and that he had a smile on his face.”
Ward was “pretty terrified” by what he had witnessed but offered up a paltry, “That’s pretty cool, man,”
Mason sat next to him, “appreciative” of Ward’s apparent approval. “‘Thanks, man. It didn’t take me that long,” he told Ward.
In the background and under the disquieting fluorescent hum of lights, the Cowboys raged on.
Gunsmoke & mirrors
Every semester, MSU freshmen and sophomores pour into residential buildings to find their RAs and ICAs — intercultural aides — already unpacked and settled into an empty hall after two weeks’ worth of training. For many residents, these student-employees are the first people they meet during their time at State. An RA can influence a student’s college and residential experience.
The fall of 2021 was a semester unlike any other, housing staff told City Pulse. The incoming class was the first of the COVID lockdown generation.
Sophia Kalakailo, an RA on the women’s wing of Mason’s floor, heard parents ask whether Bryan Hall was a “chill” or “OK” place. Answers were peppered in with the occasional “Oh, you won’t have many problems with her'' or “better keep an eye on her.” The general impression is that RAs are “figures of authority,” but interviews with multiple students employed by Student Life and Engagement, a department on campus that employs student employees. reveal a different, darker reality. Kalakailo remembered traversing entire floors of Bryan Hall to track down a group of men who allegedly shouted “I hope you get raped!” in the hallways. The screaming went on for minutes, with the sound of a female resident crying, but Kalakailo was unable to identify its source. Kalakailo said she has also written up a plethora of incident reports related to bigotry: transphobic terms scrawled on door decorations and bearing witnessing to physical altercations where homophobic slurs were used.
All went unheeded, Kalakailo said. She felt the complaints disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole because she never heard anything about them after they were filed.
Kalakailo feels she shared a deep, rewarding kinship with her co-workers; but housing staff ends up assuming the role of “customer service workers.”
“Roger,” who did not wish to be identified for fear of reprisals for speaking out as an active student and employee at the school, said Mason slammed his door on him when he delivered a package.
“I just wanted to come and drop it off. But the way that he looked at me, I had never seen anyone looking at me like that. He looked at me with such hatred,” Roger said. “It just felt like it went very dark.
“He reached for my arms, took the box, which was a cardboard package,” Roger continued, “slammed the door and locked it.”
Allen, Mason’s RA, had seen Mason’s family arrive on campus and assist him in a move-in process best described as “quickly and quietly.” In fact, the entire family “seemed quiet,” and “Mom waved from the front seat.”
During “rez-chats,” a tedious process where an RA is tasked to speak to every single resident in a wing, which houses around 60 students, Allen spoke to the “really reserved” and “calm” Mason, who didn’t stand out among the swarm of other students.
When the veneer of calm wore off after Mason’s first police interaction, closed-door meetings occurred among Roger, Allen and their community director.
Roger had fiercely advocated for more transparency between the administration and students who were affected by Mason’s words and actions.
Roger was worried that those living in the building had the right to know about Mason’s behavior and weaponry despite what privacy policies applied.
“This is information that I cannot hide from my residents. If he was to continue living here, all of my RAs need to know who is living in this building,” Roger told his boss.
Despite this advocacy, and numerous complaints sent into the Advocate system about Mason’s escalating behavior, housing staff were not provided with updates on the case.
Some sources believed Mason had not been expelled and was still on campus.
Police Inspector Rozman explained that typically police maintain a “relationship and openly share information with any victims of any crimes against a person.” But since “there wasn't an allegation, specifically, of a crime against a person, it was just the mere possession of weapons,” there was no police follow-up “because they weren't victims in the case.”
Rozman said the release of information did not entirely hinge on the Police Department. He said he deferred to the residential operations side of MSU on what information should be shared with students and staff.
Allen, who spent two days awaiting his housing higher-ups to approve the emergency call to the police about Mason, said the rigidity of the chain of command prevented him from reporting it to the police immediately. Within Residence Education and Housing Services, “they tell us to always talk up the duty chain and not out,” Allen said. Housing staff “wanted to initially just call the police, but they weren't sure if that was the right course of action.”
Residents were perplexed at the delay in Mason’s removal and some remember the two-day wait to be especially harrowing.
“We were terrified,” Barnes said. “We were almost positive that (Mason) knew that we had reported him because of his suspicion of the girls not liking his guns.”
Allen said housing staff was hesitant to immediately report it to the police directly, anticipating a rehash of the first police interaction. Additionally, Allen said he feared the process of reporting the email directly to the police would violate data policies and could potentially cost him his employment, which did not pay him, but guaranteed room and board.
Those fears were not unfounded. Months after the October arrest, which Allen said impacted his mental health and made him “unable to sleep properly,” he was put on probation for breaking up a “fight that could have” endangered the lives of residents instead of calling it in and following procedure.”
Allen provided his probation documents. They alleged he failed to “utilize the proper duty protocol.”
Though what exactly came of Mason remains shrouded in secrecy, he won’t be on campus this year. And he wasn’t on campus for the winter semester of 2022, either. What, if any, punishment doled out by the university is confidential under a federal law called the Family Educational Rights Protection Act, or FERPA. It is likely Mason was expelled by the university for possessing the weapons.
City Pulse has confirmed with Rozman that criminal charges were referred to the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office. But what charges were requested and what actions the courts took are hidden behind from public view. Prosecutor Carol Siemon said her office has “no public files” related to Mason.
It’s possible that Mason struck a deal with the Prosecutor’s Office under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act. HYTA is a state law that allows a young person, 18 to 26, to enter a guilty plea on a criminal charge.
The judge then assigns specific requirements for the student to complete in order for them to successfully complete a youthful trainee program. The requirements can include jail or prison time, and probation of up to three years. When the youth completes the court-ordered programming, the judge vacates the conviction and it is no longer available to the public to review.
A judge can strike a HYTA deal without the input of the prosecutor when the offender is between 18 and 21. Any youth 21 to 26 charged with a crime and seeking HYTA status must obtain the approval of the prosecutor.
“HYTA is not exactly a ‘program,’ but more of an approach to help young offenders avoid having a criminal record that could hinder them from moving forward in life,” the House Fiscal Agency explained in a legislative analysis for an update of the law in 2015.
While HYTA requires the “proceedings” of the court to be kept from public view — including prohibiting any court official from publicly acknowledging the case falls under HYTA — City Pulse ran into a wrinkle in Mason’s case. A Freedom of Information Act request for the police report related to Mason’s arrest was denied by MSU lawyers. The denial cited a provision under FOIA that allows exemption under other laws. Traditionally, the public body is required to disclose which law it is citing to deny the request.
But not with the police report and evidence photos for this case.
City Pulse appealed this denial, noting that HYTA only applies to court proceedings. The appeal was filed with MSU President Samuel Stanley on Aug. 9. It was denied on Aug. 24.
“The release of police records related to an individual’s status as youthful trainee under HYTA, or any acknowledgement that such records exist, would thwart HYTA’s purpose and eliminate its intended protections,” Stanley wrote in his denial.
In an attempt to get Mason’s story, two City Pulse reporters drove to his home in Lake Orion on Aug. 13. We were met by his father, Aaron – also a pseudonym – who said he was asleep.
In response to questions about Mason’s gun possession, Aaron said the university “dealt with it.”
When Aaron was confronted with the perceptions of his peers, including their fear of Mason, he said, “Did they know him, though? Did they know his background and his history?”
Aaron said the students were making “assumptions” about his son.
“They don't know that since he's a little kid, he's been dealing with Asperger's and all kinds of other stuff,” he said.
Asperger's syndrome was retired in 2013 as an official diagnosis with the publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and is now part of a broader category called autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.
Sally Burton-Hoyle, an expert on College Support and Family Experience for Individuals with ASD at Eastern Michigan University, said that there exists no link between people with ASD and a propensity for violence and linking the two was not based in fact.
“People don’t really know what autism is, they kind of know what they’re told,” she said. “When a person hears a newscaster say that there was a mass shooting by a person with autism, they hear that and that’s all it takes.”
Individuals living with ASD are statistically much more likely to be victims of crime and violence than those who do not live with ASD.
Though it is currently unclear if Mason did indeed receive a diagnosis of ADHD and ASD, using those conditions to cloak his behaviors, would adhere to what Burton-Hoyle calls a “pity model,” which implies someone living with ASD “cannot help themselves,” as opposed to “self-determination,” which provides integrative support to individuals living with ASD.
For Barnes and others, they’re gearing up for a new year of adventures on campus. Not necessarily any worse for the wear.
Over a picture of last year’s dorm room on her Snapchat story, she wrote “Here we go again.”
Wali Khan, a Hong Kong citizen and Singapore resident, is a 21-year-old sophomore majoring in journalism at Michigan State University. He spent much of this summer researching and writing this story under the guidance of City Pulse staff writer Todd Heywood, who also contributed reporting to it.
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