The children on the sidelines, clad in red and white, ducked as a string of gunshots blasted through the hockey rink. Players who had been gliding around the puck raced off the ice. The referee blew his whistle to stop the game.
Within seconds, the benches at the neighborhood skating rink in suburban Rhode Island were empty. A high school game during a holiday weekend had become the scene of a shooting.
The gunfire that erupted on Monday afternoon at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, R.I. left three people dead, including the shooter, the authorities said. Three others were in critical condition as of Monday evening.
Tina Goncalves, chief of the Pawtucket Police Department, said Monday night that the shooter’s birth name was Robert Dorgan. She added that the person also went by the name Roberta Esposito.
A motive for the shooting was not known, though it appeared to arise from a family dispute, the authorities said. But while the shooting may have been a “targeted event,” as Chief Goncalves called it, that didn’t spare the community the terror of a family-friendly sports match ending in deadly violence.
“It’s very tragic,” Donald R. Grebien, the Pawtucket mayor, said at a news conference. “These are high school kids. They were playing with their families watching, a fun time, and it turned into this. So it’s got to be traumatic.”
Gov. Dan McKee said in a statement that “as governor, a parent and a former coach, my heart breaks for the victims, families, students and everyone impacted by the devastating shooting at Lynch Arena in Pawtucket.”
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said on social media that it was sending agents to the scene of the shooting. The police in Providence said they sent officers to the scene to provide help.
The shooting underscored the painful regularity of gun violence in America, taking lives at grocery stores, concerts, churches.
Pawtucket, just outside of Providence, is a town of roughly 77,000 people, and the rink — a staple in many New England towns — is in a neighborhood with squat residential homes built amid the Industrial Revolution. It has a mural on one side celebrating the growth of the American textile industry.
Monday’s game had been scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. The teams, Blackstone Valley Schools and Coventry Public Schools, comprise players from several area schools, and they were celebrating senior night, according to Chief Goncalves.
Around 2:30 p.m., the two teams were on the ice, one of them trying to break out of its defensive zone with the puck, when the staccato reports of gunshots echoed inside the arena, a video stream of the game showed. Players on the benches began ducking for cover.
Some hopped over the boards and skated toward exits on the other side of the rink.
Timothy Senn, a resident who had skated at the rink the day before with his son, was shaken up. He wasn’t inside during the shooting, but a parent sent him video footage of the shooting.
“This kind of stuff doesn’t happen at ice rinks,” said Mr. Senn.
But shootings are everywhere. Over past six months, there have been gun killings at a church in Michigan, a restaurant in New Orleans, a rural neighborhood in Mississippi, and university campuses in South Carolina, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
On Monday, the Walgreens pharmacy across the street from the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, where people fled immediately after the shooting, had closed. The manager at the Wendy’s next door handed out free chicken nuggets.
Don Cowart, the superintendent of the Coventry Public School District, said in a statement on Monday that all of the students on the hockey team who were at the rink during the shooting were safe and had been accounted for.
By sunset on Monday, police still ambled up and down the streets around the rink. Helicopters circled overhead.
The manager of a nearby Wendy’s left to get home to her son, floored that violence had erupted so close to where she had worked for the past 11 years.
She swore, with the world this scary, she was never having children again.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
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