• Phoenix Ikner, a former Tallahassee State College and FSU student, is accused of a mass shooting at FSU that left two dead and six injured.
• Classmates described Ikner as isolated, expressing white supremacist views and alarming political opinions.
• Ikner’s parents engaged in a protracted custody battle, and he was reportedly traumatized by the abduction incident.

Before he allegedly gunned down eight people at Florida State University, leaving two employees dead in cold blood, Phoenix Ikner lived an extraordinarily troubled childhood.

By the time he entered adulthood, Ikner, who enrolled at FSU for the spring semester after attending Tallahassee State College, was openly pushing neo-Nazi sentiments, according to classmates.

His birth parents, Christopher Ikner of Tallahassee and Anne-Mari Eriksen of Miami, who never married and split a few years after he was born, battled over Ikner for a decade in family court.

During one Spring Break when Ikner was still in elementary school, Eriksen, whose father was a Norwegian ship captain, took off with him to Norway, violating numerous court orders and touching off international child abduction proceedings, according to court records.

“This matter has a tortured history, even in comparison to other high conflict family law disputes,” Leon Circuit Judge Jonathan Sjostrom wrote in a 2017 order granting full custody of Ikner to his father.

The kidnapping incident left a 10-year-old Ikner “truly traumatized,” his therapist later testified. It prompted Ikner, who was born Christian Gunnar Eriksen, to change his name when he was 15 in hopes of rising from the “ashes” of his childhood.

He would remain with his dad and step-mother, Jessica Ikner, a resource deputy at Raa Middle School who practiced target shooting with him and whose old service handgun would end up the murder weapon in her son’s killing spree.

He was “steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family, engaged in a number of training programs that we have” according to Sheriff Walt McNeil, and “it’s not a surprise to us he had access to weapons.”

Ikner tried to project a law-and-order image, serving both in the Junior ROTC and the Sheriff’s Office’s youth advisory council while he was a student at Lincoln High.

But that persona was evolving. By the time he enrolled at TSC last year and joined its Political Discourse Club, he was expressing extreme political opinions that alarmed fellow students.

Riley Pusins, a TSC student and president of the club, said Ikner came around nearly every Thursday, when the group met. He said Ikner was a passionate backer of Donald Trump, who hadn’t yet won election to a second term.

The 20-year-Ikner also reportedly espoused neo-Nazi views, including a White power structure for the U.S., put down immigrants and women and voiced enthusiasm for the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

“He was a staunch supporter of the AfD,” Pusins said. “He would often give white supremacist talking points. In one instance, he called Palestinian protesters and George Floyd protesters ‘dirty rats.’ He just had a lot of vitriolic sentiments.”

He also had a troubling fascination with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, according to screenshots of his online history captured by the Anti-Defamation League and shared with USA TODAY on Friday.

He used a drawing of Hitler with the word “Nein” in a thought bubble next to the infamous dictator as a profile photo for an online gaming account, analysts at the anti-hate group found. For another account, he used “Schutzstaffel,” the name of the ruthless “SS” paramilitary group that started as Hitler’s personal bodyguards, grew into death squads and ran the concentration camps where millions of Jews were murdered.

‘Extremely isolated,’ with ‘racist, sexist’ views

Andrea Miranda, a TSC student and vice president of the Political Discourse Club, met Ikner early in the fall semester. In addition to his involvement in the club, she knew him from her political science class.

She described him as “kind of weird” with a “creepy” vibe. She never saw him walk to class or club meetings with anyone.

“I know he was lonely, he didn’t have many friends,” she said. “He was extremely isolated.”

Miranda, who’s Hispanic, said he made derogatory comments about women and in particular women of color. He asked her whether she’d gotten her green card and suggested getting rid of the entire Middle East.

“He was racist, sexist and awful,” she said. “I always tried to keep a distance from him.”

In class, he participated heavily, though he didn’t interact much with fellow students.

“He was always trying to get validation from our professor,” she said. “He always sat in the front row, right in the center, and always stared up at our professor, just talking to him most of the time.”

There were multiple conversations about kicking him out of the club. But after the general election in November, he never showed up again. He came to class the day after the election wearing a giant-sized MAGA hat but seemed to withdraw even further over time, she said.

“I saw him a little, but he didn’t come to the club,” Miranda said. “He rarely spoke to anybody after the election. I found that strange at the time. But I figured maybe he just wanted to sit and gloat with like-minded peers.”

‘Emotional problems’ after a custody battle becomes an international incident

Meanwhile, more details emerged about Ikner’s childhood — and the kidnapping incident that scarred him — in family court documents.

After his parents split when he was around 3, they shared “50/50” custody of him for a while. But the elder Ikner always worried that Eriksen would run off with the boy to Norway, where she’d gone to school as a child.

She finally did so in 2015, when he was a 10-year-old elementary school student and on Spring Break. Her flight from the U.S. with her son, which violated numerous court orders, touched off an international incident that ended with her arrest.

During a 2017 family court hearing, the father’s attorney, Tony Bajoczky of Tallahassee, recounted how it took the involvement of the U.S. State Department, which sent a local court order to return the boy to the Hague Convention.

“The Hague Convention sent it to Norway, where Norway respected it,” Bajoczky said during a 2017 hearing. “There were two hearings in Norway at the time by the judge. In one of the hearings, the judge actually talked to the boy. The Norwegian authorities took … possession of the boy at one time.”

When she returned with Ikner, the boy had “substantial emotional problems,” Bajoczky said.

“He didn’t know what had happened to him,” he said. “He was way behind in school now because he had missed a lot of school, he was struggling to catch up, and the mother continued to stay for quite a while in Norway.”

Eriksen finally returned to the U.S. and was charged with domestic kidnapping. She pleaded no contest in 2016 and spent about five months behind bars.

‘Panic reactions’ and ‘nightmares’: Custody battle left scars

After Ikner got back to Tallahassee, he struggled for a time in school but eventually got back on the A/B honor roll. He got into therapy and was put on medication.

Bajoczky said Ikner was “very frightened” of his mother. He thought she acted erratically, pulling him out of school and not bringing him back, and that he had been “truly traumatized” as a result.

“He would hear her make promises that they’re going to come back and then do the opposite thing,” Bajoczky said, “and so I think he has lost all confidence in her stability and is quite frightful.”

During the 2017 family court hearing, Leslie Norcoss Miller, a mental health counselor who treated Ikner, said she first met with him in July 2015, not long after his return from Norway.

“He was displaying high anxiety at that time with panic reactions, difficulty sleeping, nightmares, difficulty with relationships, troubles in school, a lot of agitation, depressed mood,” she testified. “He was very fearful … that his mother had taken him to Norway prior to that. Very fearful about his living conditions, if he wasn’t going to see his dad again, if she was going to come and take him.”

The counselor added that Ikner, who was 13 at the time of the hearing, was “very adamant” about never seeing his mother again.

Erikson’s lawyer, Thomas Duggar of Tallahassee, asked the judge for “therapeutic reconciliation” for the boy and his mom, who had gotten a job at Macy’s. But Ikner’s therapist testified that she didn’t think that would be in his “best interest.”

Judge Sjostrom sided with Ikner’s father after the hearing, giving him sole custody of his son and ordering Eriksen to have no contact whatsoever with him.

‘Clearly a very unwell young man’

Police say Ikner had no known association with any of the victims, though it’s not yet clear whether he chose his victims at random or for other reasons.

Robert Morales, an FSU employee and high school football coach from Tallahassee, and Tiru Chabba, a vice president with Aramark from Greenville, South Carolina, were killed in the gunfire. Six others were injured, five from gunshots. All are expected to recover.

Ikner, who was seriously wounded by law enforcement, is being treated at a local hospital. He faces a long list of charges, including first-degree murder, when he gets out of the hospital and is transferred to the county jail.

Investigators have indicated they don’t yet have a motive for the mass shooting, which happened in and around the Student Union building around lunchtime.

But some of his former classmates see a clear motive. They said he showed signs of incel-like thinking and the same kind of hatred that fueled past mass shooters, including Scott Beierle, who shot six people, killing two women, in 2018 at a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee.

“I want to make it clear that there is a motive here, that there is an ideology behind this,” Pusins said. “I heard … that Trump said that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But there’s a specific type of people that keep doing this. And people should be aware of that, that the type of person that does these mass shootings is more likely than not a Nazi, a fascist or an incel.”

Miranda believes the shooting may have been politically motivated.

“I don’t think even Phoenix knows his own motive,” she said. “He was clearly a very unwell young man.”

USA TODAY contributed to this report. Contact Jeff Burlew at [email protected] or 850-599-2180.