A Shooting at Brown

“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 1:1src 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 rifle. 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.