Spencer Yang, 18, who was shot in the leg in his Brown classroom on Saturday afternoon, described helping a fellow student who was seriously injured as they hid behind seats.
“To keep him conscious, I just started talking to him, so he didn’t close his eyes and fall asleep,” Mr. Yang said in an interview from the hospital, where he was being treated for a wound in his leg.
“I handed him my water,” he said. “He wasn’t able to respond that well. He was just there nodding and making noise.”
“He’s stable now, thankfully,” Mr. Yang added.
Mr. Yang, a first-year student at Brown, is from New York City, where he graduated from the Dalton School, a private school. He said he was being treated at the Rhode Island Hospital in Providence along with other victims of the shooting on Saturday.
Mr. Yang described a dramatic scene in the Brown classroom, where students had assembled for a final review in preparation for an economics exam that had been scheduled for Tuesday.
Mr. Yang said he recalled little about the shooter, who entered at the rear of the auditorium-style classroom.
As the shots rang out, students began running toward the front of the downward-sloping classroom, cowering near where the instructors normally stand.
“I didn’t make it all the way to the front — I just laid down between some seats,” Mr. Yang said, describing it as “chaos.”
He said the most seriously injured students were those who, like him, had not reached the front of the room.
“After the shots rang out, it was kind of silent,” he said. “Once he was gone, I just remember a bunch of people started screaming.”
Mr. Yang said he called his parents to tell them he was OK, and then managed to pull himself into a chair. When the police arrived, he walked out to the street, but began to feel dizzy. A police officer drove him to the hospital in his squad car.
Mr. Yang, who plays club volleyball and manages the women’s volleyball team at Brown, had planned to spend the winter break learning to ski. “This was not something I expected to have to deal with,” he said.
Doctors told him that the bullet, which is lodged in muscle, does not need to be removed, and he expects to be discharged from the hospital within a couple of days.
He will require physical therapy before returning to sports, according to his father, James Yang, a Brown alumnus.
“It’s distressing for our family,” said James Yang, who, along with his wife, was at his son’s bedside on Sunday.
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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