Emory community mourns CDC shooting from near and far

A DeKalb County police office was killed when a man shot up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the CVS near Emory Point, a popular apartment complex within walking distance to campus. There are bullet holes still in the CVS door.

“Emory and the CDC have long worked side by side to pursue and promote public health for citizens across our state, country, and world. Our collaboration does not end at the laboratory door — we are here to support them as friends, peers, and neighbors,” interim President-Elect Leah Ward Sears and President and Chancellor-Elect Gregory L. Fenves wrote in a statement Saturday, adding that they have been and will continue to increase campus safety measures.

Lola McGuire, a rising senior at Emory, was driving around Nashville, Tennessee, when she got the alert. At first, she ignored it, figuring it was a minor incident like earlier in the year when no one was hurt.

Then, she got a text from a high school friend. And a call from her grandmother. People started calling her mom asking if McGuire was on campus.

Emory had made national headlines.

McGuire will be back on campus Tuesday to train orientation leaders before first-years step onto campus. She isn’t nervous to go back to Emory, but she does worry about the CDC just a stone’s throw away.

“It just makes me concerned for the livelihood of everybody around me, and the CDC employees and the children that they have at the day care there — all those people. I’m concerned for them, but less so for myself and my safety,” she said.

Orientation has always included basic safety training, but this year she’s adding a new focus: how to stay safe during an active shooter incident.

Anushka Basu, rising senior at Emory, got the alert while eating lunch in California. Like McGuire, she speculated it was something like an armed robbery. Now, she said, she feels numb.

“I am scared something might happen during the school year as well,” she said.

For Hailey Greenstone, a fourth-year medical student in Massachusetts who graduated from Emory with her bachelor’s in 2022, hearing about Friday’s incident while working at a hospital felt like a wave of deja vu.

Greenstone was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, where in 2017 the city’s reputation suddenly changed from the home of the University of Virginia to the site of a white supremacist rally that turned violent when a man deliberately drove his car into a crowd, killing one person and injuring 35.

“It feels like that again, where somewhere that I feel very tied to is getting all this negative attention,” she said.

Greenstone was in her junior year during the pandemic, down the street from the CDC, when the country counted on them to find a vaccine for COVID-19.

“I don’t want Emory to end up framed as this dangerous or problematic place just because we have a relationship with science,” Greenstone said on the phone while on a rotation at a hospital. “That was like home, and now people don’t feel safe there because of the lifesaving research and efforts that are happening on campus and right down the street.”

Emory had raised her to work in health care. Now, that work is under attack.

“As someone who is trying to build my career around saving lives, I know the people who are working at a CDC — that’s why they did it too. To have to know our lives are on the line while we’re doing it,” she said, “I think it’s just psychologically really disruptive for me.”

Saanya Kapasi, who graduated from Emory in 2024 and is going into her second year at the UC Berkeley School of Law, saw the news on Instagram from California. An Atlanta native, she had lived at Emory Point while in college and went to the CVS regularly.

“The biggest takeaway I’ve had from this is just, like, it really could have been any one of us, like any Emory student at any time — like, we could have been in the crossfires of that,” she said. “Every Emory student just knows that whole area like the back of their hand.”

Seeing Emory and Atlanta in the news from afar was painful.

“I really thought after law school, later on in my life, I want to move back to Atlanta,” she said. “I always kind of had the vision of maybe my kids will go to the same high school that I went to, and maybe a kid of mine will go to Emory, because we’ll have that family connection there and I just don’t think it’s, like, a safe city to live in anymore.”

Normally, she feels excited to see Georgia in the news. But this time, she felt her heart sink.

“It’s so frustrating because I want people to have a good impression of where I come from,” she said.