The man said he was hunting rats on Wednesday with a pellet gun. The police said doing so was unsafe and charged him with damaging property.
Ordinarily, that would have been that, a minor criminal justice matter.
But these are not ordinary times. The man is a visiting professor at Harvard, and he fired the pellet gun near a synagogue during a Yom Kippur service, when the Jewish community was on edge over a rise in antisemitic violence.
The Trump administration has accused universities, including Harvard, of failing to tackle antisemitism. One key Trump official quickly weighed in on the pellet-gun matter, based on news reports.
“Do NOT mess with houses of worship or people of faith in our country,” Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote on social media. She also wrote that she was “on it.”
It is unclear what contact the Trump administration may have had about the matter with Harvard, which the federal government has pummeled ever since the university rejected a series of intrusive demands the administration made in April.
The visiting professor, Carlos Portugal Gouvea, who is a law professor in Brazil, has been placed on administrative leave as the school investigates the matter, a Harvard Law School spokesman said.
The police said they did not believe antisemitism played a role in the incident.
“If the responding officers had believed that antisemitism had been a factor in Mr. Gouvea’s actions, they would have charged him with a hate crime,” Paul Campbell, a spokesman for the Brookline Police Department, said in an email. “Based upon their investigation, they did not submit any bias-based charges.”
The synagogue, Temple Beth Zion, is a couple of miles south of Harvard in Brookline, Mass. When private security guards heard a loud noise outside, the synagogue went into lockdown.
One of the guards saw a man with a rifle behind a large tree, and went to investigate. It was Professor Gouvea with his pellet gun.
He placed the gun against a tree and then, when one of the private security guards tried to arrest him, engaged in “a brief physical struggle” and ran off, according to a police report.
He was arrested without incident by the Brookline police shortly afterward at his residence. He faces several charges, including illegally discharging a pellet gun, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and damage to personal property. The damage charge, a felony, refers to a car that the police say was damaged by a fired pellet.
Professor Gouvea did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Leaders of the synagogue put the incident in perspective. “From what we were initially told by police, the individual was unaware that he lived next to, and was shooting his BB gun next to, a synagogue, or that it was a religious holiday,” Benjamin Maron, the synagogue’s executive director, and Larry Kraus, its president, wrote in the statement.
They added, “It is potentially dangerous to use a BB gun in such a populated spot, but it does not appear to have been fueled by antisemitism.”
The police say that Brookline does, in fact, have a rat problem. A local news article in 2023 described an explosion in the town’s rat population during the pandemic, with a 300 to 400 percent increase in complaints in one year.
At a ceremony at Harvard Sunday night, held to mourn the victims of the Hamas-led attack on Israel two years ago, Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad tried to reassure the crowd that the Brookline synagogue incident was not motivated by antisemitism.
“This man is married to a Jewish woman and has Jewish children, and it’s absolutely nothing to do with targeting the Jewish community,” he said of Professor Gouvea, according to The Harvard Crimson.
“We can all take a sigh of relief,” he added.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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