Another campus, another night of terror: Brown University shooting traps students in a familiar nightmare

By Alaa Elassar, CNN

(CNN) — For nine hours, students at Brown University crouched under desks and behind locked door, making panicked phone calls and sending “I love you” texts that felt dangerously close to goodbyes.

An active shooter was on campus — and police were still searching for a suspect.

Late Saturday night into Sunday morning, they listened for footsteps, for sirens, for anything that might signal the end of another American nightmare.

It is a kind of story Americans know too well, and one that repeats with numbing regularity — again and again and again.

By the time Brown’s campus lockdown lifted at 5:40 a.m., two students were dead and nine others had been injured, according to the university. One victim remains in critical condition, another is listed as stable and one person was treated and released.

So far in 2025, there have been at least 391 mass shootings and 13,929 shooting deaths in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Each number represents a shattered family, a traumatized community, another generation learning too early how to survive gunfire.

At the private university in Providence, Rhode Island, the nightmare began on a winter afternoon just two weeks before Christmas. Students were studying for finals at the library or taking exams. Others were attending review sessions, and some were hanging out with friends visiting the Ivy League campus when the first alert reached their phones at 4:22 p.m.

“Urgent: There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering,” the alert read.

Students should lock the doors, silence phones and hide until further notice, it said, adding to run and evacuate safely if you could.

“FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself,” the alert said.

Ten more alerts would follow, reminding the community to stay sheltered in place and keep doors locked, letting students know where police were and which buildings were being evacuated, and, finally, telling them the shelter-in-place order had ended.

Saturday’s shooting came on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sandy Hook school massacre, which claimed the lives of 26 people, including 20 elementary students.

At least two students at Brown had survived previous school shootings.

Zoe Weissman was in middle school when she witnessed the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.

The sophomore said she is overwhelmed not just by grief but 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 told CNN.

“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.”

‘We all just wanted to survive’

Students were hustling around campus, coming and going on the penultimate Saturday of the semester. Many were entering the engineering building at Barus and Holley where final exams and review sessions were underway. The exterior doors were unlocked.

In room 166, one of the largest classrooms in the building, Joseph Oduro, a 21-year-old teaching assistant, was holding his final review session of the year. The session ended just after 4 p.m., a little later than planned.

Oduro, who helps teach economics to undergraduates, was delivering closing remarks to his class and watching his students stand up to leave when the sound of gunfire cut through the room.

Then came the screams.

Moments later, Oduro said, the gunman entered the auditorium from the back 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 shots ripped into the chalkboard, exactly where 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 front of the auditorium, the only refuge available, and called 911. There wasn’t much space behind the desk, Oduro said. He estimated it to be about 10 feet long.

“We made do,” Oduro said. “Because at the end of the day, we just all wanted to survive.”

It “felt like an eternity” before the gunfire stopped, Oduro said. He didn’t lift his head until campus public safety officers entered the room and told them it was safe to leave.

Sophia Holman was searching for a classroom to study in at the engineering building when she heard gunshots.

At first, she thought it was sound from the school’s woodshop, or an “experiment gone wrong,” she told CNN.

But then she saw someone run past her — so she started running, too. She ran one block east and then called police.

Police searched the engineering building but couldn’t find any suspect. Over 400 local, state and federal law enforcement officials fanned out across the Brown campus, searching for the gunman they believed exited the building on Hope Street.

Law enforcement later said the suspect was dressed in dark clothing and believed to be in his 30s. The figure’s face, officials said, was obscured, and witnesses told police he may have been wearing a gray camouflage mask.

An early alert from the university initially said police had a person in custody. But the person was later determined not to be the shooting suspect, the school said, and students were urged to remain vigilant.

Ethan Schenker, who was studying in the basement of a campus library when the lockdown began, described the hours as startling. Everyone in the library, he said, was “very on edge” as law enforcement cleared every classroom and patrolled the building.

“It didn’t seem real,” Schenker, a former CNN intern, said.

Students sheltering in a library huddled on the ground as police banged on the door, video shows. Officers in tactical gear with long guns entered and cleared the room and escorted the students out.

About 160 students were in lockdown in the gym, according to Lydell Dyer, a Brown student and former CNN 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 said. They were eventually moved to the school’s track facility building, he said.

“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 said.

By early Sunday morning, about 12 hours after the shooting, the school sent another alert, saying the shelter-in-place order had ended.

Investigators, meanwhile, had zeroed in on a person of interest — and a Hampton Inn — about 20 miles from Providence.

A person of interest is released

At a Hampton Inn in Coventry, Rhode Island, unsuspecting visitors and travelers were jolted awake shortly before dawn.

Law enforcement banged on one hotel door, ordering the man inside to open up, sources said. At least 20 officers — including local police, US marshals and FBI agents — filled the hotel corridors as they entered the room, CNN witnessed. Once inside, they asked where he had been that day and evening.

In the hotel the whole time, he responded.

“We have a warrant for your apartment,” one officer said. Moments later, the man inside was told he would be taken “back to the cruiser.”

But late Sunday night, officials released the man. The evidence “points in a different direction,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.

“It’s fair to say that there is no basis to consider him a person of interest,” Neronha said. “So, that’s why he’s being released.”

There are still a “lot of steps left to take” in the investigation, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee said.

“After 30 years in law enforcement, there were a lot of twists and a lot of roads that I’ve walked down,” McKee said. “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’ families had been notified, a delay made more painful by timing and distance, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said.

For survivors, the horror of what unfolded inside the building is still coming into focus.

Mia Tretta knows the cost of gun violence in ways few people ever should.

A junior at Brown University, Tretta survived the 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, California. Tretta was shot in the stomach and lives with lasting physical complications.

When it came time to choose a college, Tretta deliberately sought out a campus that felt small, contained and safe, a place she believed might finally put distance between her and the violence that had already marked her life, she said.

So, when her phone first buzzed with an alert warning of a shooter in Brown’s engineering building, she initially dismissed it.

“I didn’t really think it was real,” she said.

That disbelief shattered as message after message flooded in.

As authorities searched for the gunman, panic spread across campus, and confusion ruled the night, Tretta said.

“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 said.

The night, Tretta said, carried brutal familiarity and proof that survival offers no immunity.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “gun violence doesn’t care if you’ve already been shot in a school shooting.”

Smiley noted the generational impact 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 said.

For Oduro, the teaching assistant, the weight of what happened has barely begun to settle. He is now a survivor and a part of a generation all too familiar with mass shootings.

“Unfortunately, that’s just part of the society we live in today,” he said.

His 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 said.

For Weissman, the Parkland high school graduate, the Brown attack reopened wounds from 2018. She immediately called her mother after Saturday’s gunfire, just as she did years ago.

“It feels like I’m 12 again,” she said. “It feels like it’s 2018 again for my family as well. We’re going through the exact same emotions.”

CNN’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.

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