
A night huddled in lockdown at Brown: ‘It could’ve been any one of us’
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Tristan Keyser-Parker, a senior at Brown University, was in a workshop inside the school’s Barus & Holley engineering building Saturday afternoon when he heard someone yell “Intruder!" Keyser-Parker sprinted with about 30 students out a side entrance as police converged on the building. The students fled to the third story of a nearby dorm, where they sat, stunned, on the floor.
“What’s going on?,’" Keyser-Parker asked. At 4:22 p.m., an alert with the answer no one wanted flashed across campus cellphones. “There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering," it warned.
“Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice." The gunshots that exploded in an Ivy League lecture hall Saturday afternoon took the lives of two students and injured nine others. Terrified undergrads bolted for safety, huddling for hours inside barricaded campus buildings while police scrambled to evacuate students and launched a manhunt for the killer. Authorities said on Sunday that they have detained a person of interest in a hotel room in Coventry, R.I., about 20 miles from campus.
Less than 24 hours earlier as the sun was setting on Providence, where the university has stood for more than two centuries, students were cramming for final exams, taking their tests and getting ready to head off on winter break. Stores lighted for the holidays were bustling. At around 4 p.m., Nathaniel Russo, a junior and teaching assistant for the popular Principles of Economics course, walked into his dorm room to study for finals.
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