Snow fell overnight on Brown University’s campus, quiet and untouched. It softened the brick walkways, erased footprints, muted the sounds of a place still holding its breath after tragedy. By morning, students stepped outside into white — a visual reset that felt almost wrong after the night’s events.
Because less than twelve hours earlier, two students had been killed.
At 4:05 p.m. on Dec. 13, a gunman opened fire with a 9mm handgun during a final exam review session inside the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building. Students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were killed on the scene. Nine others were injured and transported to Rhode Island Hospital, where they remain in critical condition.
In the hours that followed, campus dissolved into confusion. Alerts warned of an active shooter, then mistakenly reported a suspect in custody, then walked that claim back. Official reports of additional gunfire nearby spread and were later retracted. Students sheltered wherever they could — dorm rooms, libraries, stairwells, basements — waiting for clarity that came slowly and unevenly. The shelter in place order remained until the following morning.
For WHS Class of 2025 graduate Calvin Woodruff, now a student at Brown, the proximity was beyond unsettling. Not three hours earlier, he had taken an exam in the room across the hall. “You always think it can’t happen to you until it does,” he reflected. “In these moments, small differences in time can be the difference between life and death. I am one of the lucky ones.”
In the precious minutes before the university sent out its first active shooter notice at 4:22 p.m., students had already begun warning each other. Even as they ran from the building, students texted friends and posted on SideChat, an anonymous, campus-wide messageboard.
“Students beat the university by five or ten minutes,” Woodruff said. “In those moments, every second counts. If students didn’t have access to their phones, more people could have died. Many lives were saved because the community immediately came together to warn each other.”
The Brown shooting was the 75th school shooting this year, included in the 391 mass shootings and 13,929 shooting deaths nationwide reported by Gun Violence Archive.
In the days after the shooting, some students and commentators criticized Brown’s response, arguing that the university did not act quickly or clearly enough in the critical hours after the attack. Multiple messages over Brown’s alert system were later corrected, fueling confusion and frustration among students and observers.
Woodruff disagrees with the criticism. “They were just great. They sent continuous alerts throughout the night. As soon as they got confirmed information, they would send out text alerts.” He noted the scale of the response: more than 400 police officers and campus security on site as fast as possible, with dining halls opened to support students when the threat was resolved and President Christina Paxson walking through dining halls to talk with anyone who needed it.
“She has so much going on that just not knowing what the students were in the building for is not something to blame her for,” he said. “She did everything she possibly could.”
The hunt for the shooter ended on Thursday when the suspect, 48-year-old Brown alum Claudio Valente, was found deceased by apparent suicide. Providence Police Chief Colonel Oscar Perez began the manhunt at a Tuesday news conference, identifying the suspect as a 5-foot-8 stockily-built male dressed in black. The FBI released footage indicating that the suspect had been casing out the scene for hours before pulling the trigger. Investigation is ongoing into a connection between Valente and the recent murder of an MIT professor on Tuesday. Overnight snowfall hampered evidence collection and fingerprint retrieval according to CNN, but the suspect was located after police identified his rental car based on information from a Reddit post.
The hours and days that followed the tragedy proved that the Brown community could rally around each other in unforgettable ways. Students reclaimed the greens, starting snowball fights and leaving kind messages in the field. Student groups organized food drop-offs and carpools to ensure every student returned home safe and fed. Friends across campus gathered to sit, talk and be with one another. “It was the most incredible display of community I’ve seen in my life,” Woodruff said. “Everyone is there for each other. We all really showed that we were still a strong community and that this would not put us down.”
Morning found a campus that looked unchanged. Snow blanketed the ground where students had run just hours before, smoothing over the urgency, the fear, the broken timeline of alerts and unanswered questions. Classes were canceled. Doors reopened. Life, outwardly, resumed.
But in the quiet was the absence of two students who would not return to class, of the now-lost certainty that a place of learning is safe. For those who hid in stairwells and basements, who refreshed their phones waiting for clarity, who learned survival depended not on official systems but on one another, the night did not end when the shelter-in-place order was lifted.
Tragedies like this now arrive with a cruel familiarity. They are followed by statements, timelines, debates about response times and responsibility. But beneath all of it is a simpler truth: students warned each other because they had to. They trusted one another because seconds mattered.
The snow will melt. Footprints will return. But the memory of that night — of fear shared, of lives lost, of a campus holding its breath — will remain long after the ground is bare again.