Like a lot of doctoral students on a wintry Saturday afternoon in December, 32-year-old Chiang-Heng Chien was working. He was in an engineering lab at Brown University when the alert sounded on his phone: Shooter on campus. Shelter in place.
“We closed the door, had the lights off, and went under desks,” he said. For hours they waited in the dark, a block away from the Barus & Holley building, where an unidentified gunman killed two people and wounded at least nine. Police said the shooting took place inside a classroom on the engineering building’s first floor.
Within minutes after the shooting, the elegant East Side of Providence around the Ivy League University, tastefully decorated with Christmas wreaths and candles in windows, transformed into a nightmarish blare of sirens, flashing emergency lights, and dozens of ambulances stacked up and waiting.
Police officers in armor and helmets and armed with shotguns and rifles spread over the neighborhood. Armored vehicles lingered on many street corners. Roads were barricaded by police cars and yellow crime tape. Multiple helicopters loudly droned from above, flying concentric circles over the scene. More than 400 law enforcement officers were in the area.
At 11 p.m., the gunman was still at large.
“An unthinkable nightmare,” Gov. Dan McKee of Rhode Island said of the shooting.
The streets around Brown normally would be bustling on a Saturday evening with students and residents jostling to get into the many restaurants and bars. Instead, on this Saturday evening, a few residents lingered outside, swapping stories about what they had seen, and reading social media posts to each other. Mostly, the streets were empty of people, in accord with a shelter in place order for the university.
Police officers roamed in pairs and in sets of four, shining lights into alleys and into parked cars, in a search for a suspect that stretched on for hours. Unverified videos shared online showed students lining a hallway, holding their hands up, while police forced open doors, searching for the shooter; another showed police escorting evacuees onto a bus.
A medical examiner for the state of Rhode Island said he had never seen anything like it. A life long Providence resident call the scene “surreal.”
The shooting took place on the eastern edge of Brown University’s campus, where college buildings are interspersed with elegant Victorian homes and several elite private schools.
For the students toiling through the mundane chores of studying for their semester’s final exams suddenly they were sheltering in place for hours, waiting for a sign or an email that they found leave.
But as they watched social media all they found was misinformation, some said, including from President Trump, who said on Truth social that the shooter had been apprehended only to walk back his statement minutes later.
After about two hours in hiding, Mr. Chien and his friends were discovered by the police. The officers searched them, and then sent them out so the search of the building could continue. They left without coats into a dark and frigid evening. “We don’t know where we’re supposed to go now,” Mr. Chien said. “We brought nothing with us.”
Michelle Cheng, owner of Ceremony Tea, said she was able to find lodging for several students at a nearby apartment complex as the shelter in place continued. “This is so messed up, “ she said through tears. “I left everything at home to my husband and raced over because we need to be here for our customers.”
Mayor Brett Smiley of Providence said on CNN that the exterior doors of the Barus & Holley building — where the shooting was reported to have taken place — were unlocked because of multiple final exams. “Based on what we heard from officials at Brown, anybody could have accessed the building at that time,” he said.
Kevin G. Andrade contributed reporting.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a national correspondent for The Times, covering gun culture and policy.
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