Two students were killed and nine were injured in a mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday. The university’s president Christina H. Paxson described the incident as “a tragedy that no university community is ever ready for.”
“The past 24 hours really have been unimaginable,” she said in a letter to the Ivy League university’s greater community Sunday morning, adding that most of the injured students remain hospitalized in stable condition.
The shooting began just after 4 p.m. at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building. The Providence, Rhode Island, campus was locked down until Sunday morning when local law enforcement officials ended the order, sharing that they had identified and detained a male in his 20s as a person of interest.
Officials later said the person of interest was a 24-year-old originally from Wisconsin, but haven’t released further information on the shooter or the hospitalized students. State police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation remain on campus.
Brown University President Christina Paxson leaving a press conference Sunday.
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
According to The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, many of the students affected were in a review session for a Principles of Economics exam. One freshman, Spencer Yang, told The Herald that he was shot in the leg but others near him were “seriously injured.” He said he tried to help them and keep them conscious.
“While we always prepare for major crises, we also pray such a day never comes,” Paxson said in her letter. “We know there is a long road ahead as students and families deal with the after effects of the events of the past day and the emergency that is still unfolding.”
Joseph Oduro, a senior from New Jersey and teaching assistant for the economics class, told The Boston Globe that the review session had just wrapped up when the shooter entered carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life.” Oduro crouched behind the podium at the front of the auditorium and huddled with a first-year student who had been shot twice in the leg. He stayed with her until she reached the hospital, The Globe reported.
Oduro didn’t want to describe what he saw as first responders evacuated the classroom, but said it hurt to see his students “all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”
University Provost Francis J. Doyle III announced Sunday morning, that “out of profound concern for all students, faculty and staff,” all undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams and final projects for the semester would not take place as scheduled. Students are free to leave campus if they are able, but if not, access to on-campus services will remain available, Doyle said. More guidance about the status of unfinished courses will be released in the days ahead, he added.
Saturday’s events sparked anger and frustration among gun control advocates and affected students as the number of mass school shootings on record continues to climb. One student, Zoe Weissman, a college sophomore, survived the Brown shooting Saturday nearly eight years after she had been affected by a similar event in her hometown—Parkland, Florida.
Weissman, now 20, was a student at Parkland Middle School when 17 people were killed and 18 injured at the nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“Mentally, I feel like I’m 12 again. This just feels exactly how I felt in 2018. But honestly, I’m really angry,” Weissman said in an interview with MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. “This isn’t a new phenomenon, and we’re going to get to a point where there’s [more] people like myself who survived two of these.”
Another Brown student, Mia Tretta, was shot in a 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita that left two people dead, the New York Times reported.
“People always think, well, it’ll never be me,” Tretta told the Times. “And until I was shot in my school, I also thought the same thing.”
President Donald Trump addressed the shooting during a holiday reception at the White House Sunday, but did not speak directly to public concerns about gun control or the number of incidents on college or K-12 campuses.
“Things can happen,” he said. “So to the nine injured, get well fast and the families of those two who are no longer with us, I pay my deepest regards and respects.”
The campus shooting also gained attention from fans of the reality TV show Survivor. Season 48 runner-up, Eva Erickson, is a Brown doctoral candidate, and she shared on social media how she had left the engineering building minutes before the shooting began.
“I am so, so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today,” she said in a video eight hours after the lockdown began. “I was in my office in Barus and Holley in that area until 4 p.m. and I was like, man I’m just not getting nothing done on my code and randomly decided I would go to the gym … I left and about 20 minutes later, we get the warning.”
Erickson added that while she appreciated all the thoughts and prayers she had received, it wasn’t enough.
“We need more than thoughts and prayers,” she said. “This is ridiculous that as college students in America we have to worry about someone shooting up our classrooms.”
