Two students were killed and nine others were injured in a mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday. Christina H. Paxson, the university’s president, described the incident as “a tragedy for which no university community was prepared.”
“The past 24 hours have truly been unimaginable,” she said in a letter to the greater Ivy League community on Sunday morning, adding that most of the injured students remained hospitalized in stable condition.
Shootings occurred in the Burroughs and Hawley Engineering and Physics Buildings just after 4 p.m. The Providence, Rhode Island, campus remained under lockdown until Sunday morning, when local law enforcement officials ended the order, saying they had identified and detained a man in his 20s as a suspect.
Officials later said the suspect was a 24-year-old man from Wisconsin, but no further information about the shooter or the hospitalized student has been released. State police and FBI agents remain on campus.
Brown University President Christina Paxson leaves a news conference on Sunday.
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
according to brown daily heraldIn a student newspaper, many of the affected students were revising for a Principles of Economics exam. One freshman, Spencer Yang, tells us herald He was shot in the leg, but others near him were “seriously injured.” He said he tried to help them and keep them awake.
“While we are always prepared for major crises, we also pray that a day like this never comes,” Paxson said in the letter. “We know that students and families have a long road ahead of them as they deal with the events of the past day and the consequences of ongoing emergencies.”
Joseph Oduro, a senior from New Jersey and a teaching assistant in the economics class, tells us boston globe The review meeting had just ended when the gunman came in with “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life.” Oduro crouched behind a podium at the front of the auditorium, huddled with a first-year student who had been shot twice in the leg. He stayed with her until she arrived at the hospital, Globe reported.
Oduro did not want to describe what it was like as first responders evacuated the classroom, but he said it was heartbreaking to see his students “all in a state of agony of panic and despair.”
University Provost Francis Doyle III announced Sunday morning that all undergraduate, graduate and medical courses, exams and final projects will not proceed as planned this semester “out of deep concern for all students, faculty and staff.” Doyle said students are free to leave campus if they are able, but will still be able to use on-campus services if they are not able to. He added that more guidance on the status of outstanding courses will be released in the coming days.
Saturday’s incident sparked anger and frustration among gun control advocates and impacted students as the number of documented mass school shootings continues to climb. One student, Zoe Weissman, a college sophomore who survived Saturday’s shooting of Brown, was rocked by a similar incident eight years ago in her hometown of Parkland, Florida.
Weisman, 20, was a student at Parkland Middle School when 17 people were killed and 18 injured at nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“Mentally, I feel like I’m 12 years old again. That’s exactly how I felt in 2018. But honestly, I’m really angry,” Weisman said in an interview with MS NOW (formerly MSNBC). “This is not a new phenomenon, we’re going to get to a point where: [more] People like me who have been through two such disasters have survived. “
Another Brown University student, Mia Tretta, was shot and killed in a 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita that left two people dead, new york times reported.
“People always think, well, that’s never going to be me,” Tretta told the outlet era. “I thought the same thing until I was shot at school.”
President Donald Trump addressed the shootings at a holiday reception at the White House on Sunday but did not directly address public concerns about gun control or the number of incidents on college or K-12 campuses.
“Things can happen,” he said. “I therefore offer my deepest regards and respect to the speedy recovery of the nine injured, and to the families of the two men who are no longer with us.”
School shootings also draw attention from reality show fans survivor. Season 48 runner-up Eva Erickson, a doctoral student at Brown University, shared on social media how she left the engineering building minutes before the shooting.
“I’m very, very lucky that I’m not very productive today,” she said in a video eight hours after the lockdown began. “I was in Barus and Holley’s office just before 4 p.m. and I was like, my code is not doing anything, so I randomly decided to go to the gym… I left, and about 20 minutes later we got the alert.”
Erickson added that while she’s grateful for all the thoughts and prayers she’s received, it’s not enough.
“We need more than just thoughts and prayers,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that as college students in America we have to worry about someone shooting into our classrooms.”
