To hear about a mass shooting in another city is to feel one is at the periphery of ongoing history; but perversely, to live near the site of a shooting is to feel nothing has changed except that unreality has come closer.
This was my experience on Saturday afternoon, in Providence, when an unidentified man in his twenties or thirties, dressed in black, opened fire in a classroom in the Barus and Holley engineering-and-physics building at Brown, the university where I teach. I was at home, just eight blocks away, at 4:22 P.M., when I received an automated call telling me that there was an active shooter in the vicinity. A text followed:
BrownUAlert: 1st, Urgent: There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering. Lock doors, silence phones and stay stay (sic) hidden until further notice. Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself. Stay tuned for further safety information.
There was something video-game-like, I thought, about the capitalized exhortations to RUN and FIGHT, and I took it in with a curious, possibly deranged, calm. Just the day before, the university had sent an e-mail alert informing us that a “Brown University community member” had been “approached by a male who identified themselves as a Federal agent, displayed a firearm, and used handcuffs to detain the reporting party.” Fortunately, the alert went on, “the reporting party was allowed to leave the location without further incident.” (The federal agent was later revealed to have been a legitimate officer with the fugitive task force.) I assumed that this was a similar incident; perhaps a man with a gun had been seen prowling around campus, and that was all. I was so blasé, in fact, that, ten minutes later, I drove my four-year-old daughter to a friend’s home, in the opposite direction to campus, where she would stay that evening while my wife and I threw a holiday party.
Still, out of caution, I took a winding route away from campus, down Providence’s steep College Hill, which is crowned with Brown at the top, and the Rhode Island School of Design a block below. As sirens yelped in the distance, I made the mistake of processing the situation out loud to my daughter, V., who was strapped in a car seat in the back. “We’ve got to go a different way because there’s a problem at Brown University,” I told her.
“What’s the problem, Papa?” V. asked.
“There’s a man with a gun there.”
“What does he do?”
“Well, a gun can hurt people, so we want to be far away from that.”
“Can you think why he would do that?” V. asked.
I said, “Well, sometimes people aren’t O.K. in the head, and they want to hurt other people.”
“So he’ll hurt other people because he’s not O.K. in the head and then his head will feel better,” V. said.
I tried to change the subject.
When I got to my friend’s house, he was dressed spiffily for our “festive attire” party, wearing salmon pants, a long brown-leather jacket, and a checked shirt, and was refreshing social media on his phone, looking for updates.
It seemed that twenty people had been injured. (The figure was later revised down to nine.) We expressed our shock and sadness, but none of it was hard to believe. This is America.
Then we got an alert informing us that a suspect was in custody. My friend and I discussed whether we should go ahead with the party and decided that, if the threat had been neutralized, we may as well be together. Our daughters would be at his house with a babysitter.
I went home, but when I arrived, I got another alert, saying the first alert had been false, and no one had been apprehended. My phone swelled with messages from friends who were unsure about whether to come to the party. “Will streets be shut down?” one asked. With my apparent faith in small-town America, I assured him they wouldn’t. “Hey unfortunately our babysitter just canceled because of the active shooter,” another friend texted.
From there, the night unfolded stutteringly. After we debated the appropriate language, my wife and I sent out a mass e-mail cancelling the party (“We obviously don’t want anyone to unnecessarily venture out today”) but welcoming anyone who was already en route and wished to hunker down with us. An architect friend of mine who teaches at RISD was hiding out in his home on Governor Street, where another shooting incident was said to have occurred—this was later revealed to be false—and had told his wife and two young kids not to come home. We heard helicopters ripping overhead and police cars from up the hill. It was a pitch-black winter night. The shooter was still at large.
Surrounded by bottles of undrunk Campari and vermouth, we put blinds up on our front windows, which look onto a major street near campus, and tuned into the fire department’s live radio feed. As friends e-mailed and texted, I was struck by the frequent and unself-conscious invocation of the phrase “shelter in place,” the shelters of the nuclear era having given way to something equally queasy but more domestic. A grad student who’d been planning to attend the party messaged me from an open-to-the-public arts building on campus, where she was hidden in a tech closet. She wasn’t sure how she would make it home to the campus-adjacent Fox Point neighborhood, and asked if she could come to my place when she got out. I said yes, of course, though eventually she was escorted to her home by police, around 1:10 A.M. Later, I was shocked to learn that the student had also been in a lockdown thirteen years ago, as a fifteen-year-old, during Sandy Hook, in a neighboring town. “I had been telling people it was a matter of time,” she told me, sounding distraught.
Slowly, as the night went on, a picture of the shooting emerged: a teaching assistant and Brown senior had been leading a review session for Principles of Economics, an introductory course that many students take, often in their first year. Around sixty students, eager to do well in their exams, took notes in the tiered amphitheatre-like classroom. As the session ended, around 4 P.M., shots and screaming were heard in the hallway. A gunman dressed in black and wearing a face mask opened the door in the back, shouted something incomprehensible, and started firing a gun. Students surged toward the front of the class; some escaped out the side doors. At the end of it, two students were dead, and seven others were injured. According to one student, it was only when the gunman fled the room that the students began screaming. The T.A., Joseph Oduro, held the hand of a first-year who had been shot twice in the leg as they waited for help to arrive.
These impressions were in my head as, at 8 P.M., I drove back to my friend’s house to fetch V. The shooter was still at large. Pulling out of my driveway, I saw a white Providence Police cruiser, lights flashing, speeding in the opposite direction. After I picked V. up, on the road home, I stopped briefly to let another police cruiser pass. The air was throbbing with the sounds of helicopters coming close and pulling away. When we got home, I ran with V. to our front door and hurried in. A friend whose son is at Brown messaged, “I hope you guys stay inside.” She had told her son that “what seems dangerous now is getting shot by accident by law enforcement.”
The next morning, we woke to a city blanked out by unexpected snowfall. Another acquaintance who’d planned to attend the party texted, “And I woke up to a mass shooting in Sydney, where I’m from. What a fucking weekend.” We learned that two other students on campus were survivors of previous school shootings. To our relief, Providence police reported that they had a “person of interest” in custody.
It was the first snowfall of the season, which is usually a cause for jubilation among students, but Brown’s main green was mostly deserted in the afternoon, except for three or four knots of quiet undergraduates. The trees were bare and crystalline and white. The American flag was at half-mast. Five snowmen, built overnight and in the morning, sat in random locations; one, shaped like a cat, had the labels of Bigelow tea bags for eyes. Two students were rolling a gigantic ball of snow and ice on the green to make a new snowman, and I stopped to chat with them. One, a sophomore, said that he had barricaded himself on the top floor of the Brown Center for Students of Color building with others, and they had stayed there from four-thirty until one-thirty at night. Luckily, they had access to snacks but, the other student told me, many on campus were afraid to even go near a hallway to get water.
“It made me start to rethink how safe I actually am,” the first student said. The second added, “It was weird hearing about it from the news, because it felt like hearing about any other shooting.” He remembered the first snow of his freshman year, and the way it had brought the students out together. Now they were being united “in a very different way,” he said. “I was in one dining hall, and you walk in and everyone’s giving each other hugs and pulling people a little closer.”
The streets around the engineering building were partially blocked off by police cruisers, their backs showing stuttering bars of orange-red and electric-blue light, but I was able to drive past the front of the brutalist structure, which has a student-designed stainless-steel infinity-symbol-shaped sundial sculpture out front. The building was marked off from the road by police tape and I realized with a start that it was only a block from my daughter’s pre-K, and a block from where I had lived when I first moved to Providence.
Late on Sunday night, as the snow melted, Providence police released the person of interest, citing a lack of evidence. The shooter, as of my writing this, is still on the loose. Many students have left campus.
I teach in Literary Arts—the creative-writing department—but many of my students also take Economics, and I am still waiting to learn whether anyone I have taught has been hurt. This void of knowledge is part of the unreality of my grief. Still, I am thinking about what one of the students on the green had said when I asked him why he was building a snowman. “I felt I wanted to do something productive,” he told me, his cheeks flaring red from the extreme cold. “There’s only so much of sitting and talking that can get done. I wanted to feel like I’ve done something.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of gun used in the mass shooting at Brown.
Karan Mahajan
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