For 9 hours, students at Brown University crouched beneath desks and behind locked door, making panicked cellphone calls and sending “I love you” texts that felt dangerously near goodbyes.
An active shooter was on campus — and police have been nonetheless trying to find a suspect.
Late Saturday night into Sunday morning, they listened for footsteps, for sirens, for something which may sign the tip of another American nightmare.
It is a kind of story Americans know too nicely, and one which repeats with numbing regularity — repeatedly and once more.
By the time Brown’s campus lockdown lifted at 5:40 a.m., two students have been useless and 9 others had been injured, based on the college. One sufferer stays in essential situation, another is listed as steady and one particular person was handled and launched.
So far in 2025, there have been at the least 391 mass shootings and 13,929 shooting deaths in the United States, based on the Gun Violence Archive. Each quantity represents a shattered household, a traumatized neighborhood, another era studying too early find out how to survive gunfire.
At the non-public college in Providence, Rhode Island, the nightmare started on a winter afternoon simply two weeks earlier than Christmas. Students have been finding out for finals on the library or taking exams. Others have been attending evaluate classes, and a few have been hanging out with buddies visiting the Ivy League campus when the primary alert reached their telephones at 4:22 p.m.
“Urgent: There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering,” the alert learn.
Students ought to lock the doorways, silence telephones and conceal till additional discover, it mentioned, including to run and evacuate safely in the event you may.
“FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself,” the alert mentioned.
Ten extra alerts would observe, reminding the neighborhood to remain sheltered in place and hold doorways locked, letting students know the place police have been and which buildings have been being evacuated, and, lastly, telling them the shelter-in-place order had ended.
Saturday’s shooting got here on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sandy Hook school massacre, which claimed the lives of 26 people, together with 20 elementary students.
At least two students at Brown had survived earlier faculty shootings.
Zoe Weissman was in center faculty when she witnessed the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 individuals useless.
The sophomore mentioned she is overwhelmed not simply by grief however by anger.
“I think the sadness will set in when we get all the victims identified and find out who we lost as a community,” Weissman informed NCS.
“But right now, I’m just angry that there are kids like me in this country who have had to go through this not once but twice.”
Students have been hustling round campus, coming and occurring the penultimate Saturday of the semester. Many have been coming into the engineering constructing at Barus and Holley the place closing exams and evaluate classes have been underway. The exterior doorways have been unlocked.
In room 166, one of the biggest school rooms in the constructing, Joseph Oduro, a 21-year-old educating assistant, was holding his final review session of the yr. The session ended simply after 4 p.m., a little later than deliberate.
‘I locked eyes with him’: Teaching assistant recollects second Brown University shooter entered his classroom
Oduro, who helps educate economics to undergraduates, was delivering closing remarks to his class and watching his students stand as much as go away when the sound of gunfire lower by means of the room.
Then got here the screams.
Moments later, Oduro mentioned, the gunman entered the auditorium from the again of the room and locked eyes with him.
“He came in, pointed the gun, and then screamed something,” Oduro recalled. “Then he just started shooting right after that.”
The first pictures ripped into the chalkboard, precisely the place Oduro had been standing seconds earlier. One of his students was shot in the legs.
Oduro and about 20 students ducked and huddled behind a desk in entrance of the auditorium, the one refuge accessible, and referred to as 911. There wasn’t a lot area behind the desk, Oduro mentioned. He estimated it to be about 10 toes lengthy.
“We made do,” Oduro mentioned. “Because at the end of the day, we just all wanted to survive.”
It “felt like an eternity” earlier than the gunfire stopped, Oduro mentioned. He didn’t elevate his head till campus public security officers entered the room and informed them it was protected to depart.
Sophia Holman was searching for a classroom to review in on the engineering constructing when she heard gunshots.
At first, she thought it was sound from the college’s woodshop, or an “experiment gone wrong,” she informed NCS.
But then she noticed somebody run previous her — so she began working, too. She ran one block east after which referred to as police.
Police searched the engineering constructing however couldn’t discover any suspect. Over 400 native, state and federal law enforcement officials fanned out throughout the Brown campus, trying to find the gunman they believed exited the constructing on Hope Street.
Law enforcement later mentioned the suspect was dressed in darkish clothes and believed to be in his 30s. The determine’s face, officers mentioned, was obscured, and witnesses informed police he might have been carrying a grey camouflage masks.
An early alert from the college initially mentioned police had a particular person in custody. But the particular person was later decided to not be the shooting suspect, the college mentioned, and students have been urged to stay vigilant.
Ethan Schenker, who was finding out in the basement of a campus library when the lockdown started, described the hours as startling. Everyone in the library, he mentioned, was “very on edge” as legislation enforcement cleared each classroom and patrolled the constructing.
“It didn’t seem real,” Schenker, a former NCS intern, mentioned.
Students sheltering in a library huddled on the bottom as police banged on the door, video exhibits. Officers in tactical gear with lengthy weapons entered and cleared the room and escorted the students out.
About 160 students have been in lockdown in the gymnasium, based on Lydell Dyer, a Brown pupil and former NCS intern.
“We gathered everybody up. Went to the third floor of our building. We locked the doors. We had to turn off the lights, close the blinds, and then we sat there in silence and darkness for hours,” Dyer mentioned. They have been finally moved to the college’s observe facility constructing, he mentioned.
“I was there until 3:30 in the morning until they finally found a way to get us a shuttle and get us back to our dorms,” Dyer mentioned.
By early Sunday morning, about 12 hours after the shooting, the college despatched another alert, saying the shelter-in-place order had ended.
Investigators, in the meantime, had zeroed in on a person of interest — and a Hampton Inn — about 20 miles from Providence.
At a Hampton Inn in Coventry, Rhode Island, unsuspecting guests and vacationers have been jolted awake shortly earlier than daybreak.
Law enforcement banged on one lodge door, ordering the person inside to open up, sources mentioned. At least 20 officers — together with native police, US marshals and FBI brokers — crammed the lodge corridors as they entered the room, NCS witnessed. Once inside, they requested the place he had been that day and night.
In the lodge the entire time, he responded.
“We have a warrant for your apartment,” one officer mentioned. Moments later, the person inside was informed he can be taken “back to the cruiser.”
But late Sunday night, officers launched the person. The proof “points in a different direction,” mentioned Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.
“It’s fair to say that there is no basis to consider him a person of interest,” Neronha mentioned. “So, that’s why he’s being released.”
There are nonetheless a “lot of steps left to take” in the investigation, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee mentioned.
“After 30 years in law enforcement, there were a lot of twists and a lot of roads that I’ve walked down,” McKee mentioned. “I can’t tell you what direction it’s going to take right now, but we’re going to solve (this case).”
‘I just want to make sure everybody else is OK’
By Sunday afternoon, not all victims’ households had been notified, a delay made extra painful by timing and distance, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley mentioned.
For survivors, the horror of what unfolded contained in the constructing remains to be coming into focus.
Mia Tretta is aware of the associated fee of gun violence in methods few individuals ever ought to.
A junior at Brown University, Tretta survived the 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, California. Tretta was shot in the abdomen and lives with lasting bodily issues.
When it got here time to decide on a faculty, Tretta intentionally sought out a campus that felt small, contained and protected, a place she believed may lastly put distance between her and the violence that had already marked her life, she mentioned.
So, when her cellphone first buzzed with an alert warning of a shooter in Brown’s engineering constructing, she initially dismissed it.
“I didn’t really think it was real,” she mentioned.
That disbelief shattered as message after message flooded in.
As authorities looked for the gunman, panic unfold throughout campus, and confusion dominated the night, Tretta mentioned.
“It was just a really confusing time for everyone. I have friends who were stuck in basements of buildings and/or in the hallway of the library,” she mentioned.
The night, Tretta mentioned, carried brutal familiarity and proof that survival presents no immunity.
“Unfortunately,” she mentioned, “gun violence doesn’t care if you’ve already been shot in a school shooting.”
Smiley famous the generational influence of such violence: “We have a generation of kids who have had to do active shooter trainings. That’s not something I had to do when I was a kid,” the mayor mentioned.
For Oduro, the educating assistant, the load of what occurred has barely begun to settle. He is now a survivor and a half of a era all too familiar with mass shootings.
“Unfortunately, that’s just part of the society we live in today,” he mentioned.
His coronary heart goes out to students who didn’t make it out of the room or are in the hospital.
“I haven’t really had the chance to process things myself, but I just want to make sure everybody else is OK,” Oduro mentioned.
For Weissman, the Parkland highschool graduate, the Brown assault reopened wounds from 2018. She instantly referred to as her mom after Saturday’s gunfire, simply as she did years in the past.
“It feels like I’m 12 again,” she mentioned. “It feels like it’s 2018 again for my family as well. We’re going through the exact same emotions.”
Correction:
A previous model of this story misstated the gap between Providence and Coventry, Rhode Island. It is about 20 miles.
NCS’s TuAnh Dam, Danya Gainor, Effie Nidam, Brian Todd, Leigh Waldman, Emma Tucker, Zoe Sottile, John Miller, Evan Perez, Maureen Chowdhury, Sharif Paget, Chris Boyette, Dalia Abdelwahab, Lauren Mascarenhas, Riane Lumer, Taylor Galgano, Curt Devine, Allison Gordon, and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.