PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Inside a lecture hall on a darkening winter afternoon, dozens of Brown University students gathered Saturday for a two-hour economics study session, full of urgent questions and pre-exam stress.
Around 4 p.m., the teaching assistant wrapped up with some reassurance: Just try your best on the final, he told the students, many of them in their first semester of college. And even if you fall short, he joked, the consequences won’t be life-altering.
Moments later, there was screaming outside the room and several loud bangs. A door opened at the top of the auditorium-style classroom in the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building.
A man dressed all in black, his face covered, burst in. He yelled something unintelligible. He was carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Joseph Oduro, the teaching assistant.
Oduro, 21, locked eyes with the shooter. A single thought went through his mind: Get down.
The assailant opened fire, turning a place of learning into a scene of bloodshed. The attack left two students at the Ivy League school dead and nine others wounded, officials said, spreading terror across campus and around Providence, Rhode Island.
Students spent all night locked down in dorms and university buildings, barricading themselves and trying to find out if anyone they knew had been shot or killed.
Early Sunday, a person of interest — 24-year-old Benjamin Erickson, originally from Wisconsin — was taken into custody, according to two people briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the probe publicly.
For Oduro, a senior from New Jersey, it was his third time as a teaching assistant in the Principles of Economics course, a hugely popular introductory class with more than 400 students.
When Oduro saw the shooter, he immediately ducked behind the lectern where only moments earlier he had been offering 60-odd students words of encouragement. He heard shots, dozens of them, and screams.
Just before the shots rang out, Annie Johnson, a sophomore from Ohio, had raised her hand to ask Oduro a question: How many points was the multiple-choice section worth on the exam? Oduro told her to come toward the blackboard so they could discuss. That’s when Johnson heard the crack of gunfire.
Johnson ran for an exit, falling three times as panicked students sought safety. She helped up a fellow student who was getting trampled in the melee. Johnson kept going until she reached her dorm room.
While some students escaped through the side doors at the bottom of the classroom, others huddled with Oduro near the blackboard, all trying to stay as quiet as possible.
One of them was a first-year student from Massachusetts who had been shot twice in the leg. Oduro gave her his hand and told her to squeeze it. “I told her to put all the pain on me,” Oduro said. “I just kept telling her, ‘You’re going to be okay.’”
Oduro doesn’t know how long it took for police to arrive. As they waited, Oduro spoke with the wounded student’s parents on the phone since she was in shock and struggling to answer questions. He texted his own parents and told them he loved them.
When police escorted Oduro and other survivors out of the lecture hall, he got his first real look at the scene. There were other victims in the classroom, and he didn’t want to describe what he saw.
Oduro stayed with his wounded first-year student in the back of a police car all the way to the hospital. He wanted to make sure she would be all right. It sounded corny, he knew, but he truly loved the students in the class, where he has been a teaching assistant since his sophomore year.
It hurt, he said, “to see them all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”
Across the hallway from Room 166, where Oduro held his study session, Drew Nelson and several friends were studying for finals in a different classroom. Nelson, a 19-year old freshman from California, said they heard 10 to 15 gunshots. They briefly hid, then ran out the doors and sprinted down the block.
“At first, we were confused,” Nelson said. “Then reality set in, and we realized what happened, and we just ran as quick as we could.” As Nelson ran down the street, he called his mother. He and his friends spent the next 14 hours huddled in a building a half-mile away.
After spending hours at the hospital and recounting what he saw to the police, Oduro went to stay at a friend’s place who lives off campus. Late Saturday, law enforcement officials released an 11-second video clip of the person they believe is the gunman leaving the area, dressed all in black, wearing a backpack and walking quickly. The man turns a corner on a street dividing Brown’s campus from downtown Providence and disappears.
On Sunday morning, a light snow was falling in Providence. It was exactly 13 years to the day after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, where 26 students, teachers and staff were killed.
At 4 a.m., armed federal agents descended on a Hampton Inn hotel about 15 miles south of Providence. They took a person of interest into custody and recovered two firearms as well as several magazines, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.A “person of interest” is a term investigators use to refer to someone whom they wish to question and believe has relevant information.
Brown announced Sunday that most remaining in-person exams and classes are canceled. Many students were making plans to leave for home as soon as possible. Oduro’s voice was quiet, full of exhaustion and sorrow.
He had no idea what would come next. “Everyone has their own different ways of dealing with it,” he said. “I’m just trying to be a resource to anyone who needs it.”
Slater reported from Williamstown, Massachusetts. Jeremy Roebuck and Emily Davies in Washington contributed to this report.
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