Watching Providence retreat into itself after the Brown shooting

It has been four days since a man entered a finals review session inside a building at Brown University—two miles from my house in Providence, Rhode Island—and started shooting.

The FBI, US Marshals, and police from across the state have descended on my neighborhood in a manhunt for the gunman. He killed two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, injured nine more, and then walked out of the building and into the city. For now, the best clue the public has is a video of someone who might be him, peering over the fence of the Rhode Island Historical Society on quaint, cobblestoned College Hill. How very New England.

I have lived in Providence for nearly a decade—first as a Brown student, and then when I returned in my 30s to make it my home—and I have never seen it like this, the energy sucked out of it by fear.

The city is suspended in a state of grief and unease, blanketed with snow and an eerie silence. Shops and restaurants are emptier than they should be during the holiday season. Some schools and daycares are still closed. The ones that are open, like my child’s, are sending worried parents reminders of security measures and not letting children play outside. There are whirring helicopters. There is a growing pile of flowers in front of the Van Wickle gates, which Brown opens just twice a year, in ceremonies meant to mark parallel transformative moments—when freshmen enter to begin their learning, and when seniors leave to make their mark on the world. I can’t stop thinking about how Ella and Mukhammad will never get that second walk through the gates, and how it shouldn’t have been this way.

Like millions of Americans, I’ve watched with growing despair as hundreds of children have died in school shootings and the country has repeatedly chosen to do nothing about it. Now I have a front-row seat to the latest chapter in this uniquely American horror. I am lucky to know a lot about this place—to have had the immense good fortune of going to Brown and to have ended up living in Providence, which I’ve long called New England’s best-kept secret. And as I sit here typing down the road from news crews and federal authorities walking our streets, I don’t think these beloved homes of mine will ever be the same, joining a long list of places, from Newtown to Parkland, forever transformed by gun violence.

For me and thousands of others, Brown changed my life. In 2005, I got into Brown in the first class of a new scholarship that covered full tuition for low-income kids. The place blew open my world and created paths that would never have otherwise been available to me.

When I was a student, I internalized a way of thinking that is rampant at Brown: that idealism is good and that you really can become anyone. I’ve lived some more life now, and I could write a dissertation poking holes in that utopian idea. But it was imperative that I, a first-generation college student and child of immigrants who spent her early life worrying about stability and achievement, be surrounded by this slightly delusional positivity and allow it to propel my choices. It empowered me to take the risks that have defined the best parts of my life: Sure, I’ll quit my stable government job and be a barista while I try to get a journalism job in the middle of the Great Recession. Why yes, I will date the sweet guy I met at Brown over thousands of miles while we build careers in different cities.

Now I have a journalism job, and I’m married to that guy from Brown, with a house and a kid. I’m confident none of that would be true had I not been steeped in the idealism of College Hill.

Critically, though, this sort of dreaming and striving can only happen in a place that is safe, inclusive, and supportive. Brown embodies that. And it’s not just an intellectual safety or openness, but a physical one: The gates to campus are always open, and anyone can stroll through, attend a lecture or event, or pop into one of several libraries and buildings that are accessible to the Providence community.

In the wake of the shooting, I’ve been struck by the repeated interviews where current students who survived Saturday’s shooting have said something similar. Mia Tretta, a Brown junior who was shot in the stomach in 2019 by a gunman at her high school, said in an interview that “a big reason I chose Brown was because of the safety I felt on campus.” A master’s student told The Brown Daily Herald, the university’s student paper: “One thing that makes Brown unique in the world is its openness.” Annelise Mages, a freshman, said something similar to the New York Times: “I would say that Brown is the institution I would have thought least likely to have a school shooting.”

That safety and openness have long extended to Providence. The city’s nickname is “the Creative Capital,” because it is a place that embraces difference.

It is bursting with enormous murals and artist communities and underground music. Providence is one of the most ethnically diverse midsize cities in the country. Most weekends in the spring and summer, there is a huge festival celebrating a different one of the city’s immigrant communities, from Cape Verdean to Dominican to Armenian. Parks and institutions around the city are named after Roger Williams, a Puritan minister who founded Rhode Island and Providence as a refuge for “liberty of conscience” and a rebellious experiment, a defection from the strict Puritans in Massachusetts, and made it the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom.

On Saturday, as the details of the shooting were only just trickling out, I found myself wondering how much Providence and Brown will hold onto this openness in the future.

My dear friend’s son, a Brown sophomore, sheltered in a coffee shop in the Fox Point neighborhood next to the university. Her housemate was in the building where the shooting happened. I heard from a friend who was hiding in her basement with her kids, and others who were sitting in their apartment three blocks from the shooting in utter darkness. Federal agents walked my street.

How does a city forget all that? How do you forget thousands of terrified students locked down in libraries and bathrooms, or running around your house turning off lights and closing blinds while your toddler sleeps because what else should you do when a gunman might be strolling by? How do you forget two promising young kids, just beginning to live out the idealistic spirit of this school and the city around it, snuffed out?

The answer is: You don’t.  

What I see now is a city trying to find moments of action and control when most feel helpless. To accomplish something as simple as leaving the house feels like a risk. City residents and alumni have been circulating forms and spreadsheets to coordinate aid to students who are trying to leave Providence—rides to the airport or the train station, food, and more. Locals have offered to house students who might need it.

I think back to the vigil I went to on Sunday at a local park, when it seemed like the authorities had the suspect in custody. In that moment, I saw what looked like the very beginnings of a community healing. Hundreds of bundled-up people stood in the park, snow flurries drifting off the trees, listening to speeches, a few singers, or simply hugging or standing quietly.

But now the city has retreated back into itself. Downtown looks like an empty movie set. Parking anywhere is a breeze. The governor canceled the annual event that opens to the community the state house and its holiday decorations, and additional police were sent to local schools. Everywhere from the mall to the convention center and even the zoo are adding security. There is virtually no one on the sidewalks in my neighborhood, save for the occasional dog on a bathroom break or a person scurrying from their car into the house.

With people unable to gather to process and heal, they’re instead congregating online, watching city officials’ daily press conferences and obsessing in text threads about the crumbs of information the public has about the shooter. Everyone is trying to find meaning when there isn’t any, about why this happened, who is responsible, and what the future holds.  

“I go into the classroom to teach in the morning and try to reassure my students that they are safe,” texted one friend, a fellow Brown alum living in Providence and a teacher at a local school. “But I don’t fully believe my own words.”