Brown Students Return to Tighter Security After Campus Shooting

Brown University students resumed classes on Wednesday following a deadly shooting last month that shattered the typical sense of safety on the picturesque campus and spurred a review of the Ivy League institution’s security measures.

A shooter attacked an exam-prep session at Brown on Dec. 13, killing two students and injuring nine others. Brown swiftly canceled final exams and sent students home early for the winter break as law enforcement hunted for the person responsible. After a nearly week-long manhunt, the shooter — Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown student — was found dead in a storage facility in New Hampshire.

All of the injured students were discharged from the hospital by Jan. 5, according to a Brown University Health spokesperson. The university plans to hold a memorial service for Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, the two students who were killed, on Feb. 7. Shortly after the Brown shooting, Valente killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro in Massachusetts.

Brown’s campus is tucked into an affluent part of Providence, Rhode Island, itself a safe mid-size city with low rates of gun violence. The campus largely isn’t walled off, instead merging into the residential neighborhoods and local thoroughfares that surround it. That’s part of the appeal, both for Brown students and locals. But the university is now grappling with how to preserve that sense of community while taking steps to keep its students and faculty safe.

Brown President Christina Paxson commissioned an external review of the school’s safety protocols last month. The university had more than 1,200 cameras installed at the time of the shooting but faced criticism over the lack of clear footage that could help identify the shooter. More cameras have now been mounted and Brown has also installed additional “panic buttons.”

Most Brown academic buildings can now only be accessed with a university swipe card. The school has doubled the number of public safety officers on its campus. Paxson placed the school’s police chief on administrative leave and named Hugh Clements, Providence’s former police chief, as interim public-safety leader.

“I’m not scared to go back,” said Joseph McGonagle, a freshman studying applied mathematics. “I will say, I think there are going to be certain parts of campus that are really hard to go to.”

Read More: Mystery Motive Baffles Brown, MIT With Shooting Suspect Dead

McGonagle had brunch with Umurzokov and another friend the morning of the shooting and barricaded himself along with others for at least five hours in the science library until law enforcement officials told them they could leave. He texted Umurzokov and his other friend to check on them. The friend eventually responded to say he had been shot but survived. McGonagle learned overnight that Umurzokov had died.

In a transcript of video recordings released by federal officials this month, Valente said he planned for “six semesters” before the attack on Brown’s campus. He expressed no remorse for his actions but also gave no clear explanation for why he targeted the university and Loureiro, who led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Valente studied physics at Brown in the early 2000s and also attended the same university in Lisbon as Loureiro, officials have said.

At the Barus & Holley engineering building where the shooting occurred, two lecture halls and eight classrooms remain closed indefinitely. But the thousands of personal items left behind during the investigation can finally be retrieved by their owners. Psychologists and other trained personnel will be posted on campus to offer counseling.

“The road to recovery for some will be long, and there will be steps forward and steps back along the way,” Brown President Paxson wrote in an open letter on Tuesday. “We are a community that feels loss, while at the same time reclaiming all that it is to be Brown.”

To help faculty prepare to welcome students back, Brown administrators shared materials from Michigan State University and the University of Virginia, two other schools that have experienced mass shootings. Their recommendations included cutting back on in-class activities and offering students the opportunity to re-take or re-write their work.

Many in Brown’s community say they’re eager to get back, even as they express a sense of dread about walking past Barus & Holley or returning to the classrooms they barricaded themselves in during the campus lockdown. Some are channeling that energy into efforts to reduce gun violence.

Tommy Medlin, a junior who serves as gun reform caucus director for Brown’s College Democrats, said he’s been flooded with emails in recent days from students wanting to attend the group’s next meeting.

“I never had a personal connection to gun violence until now,” Medlin said.

Looming over the revamp of Brown’s security measures is an investigation by the Trump administration into the university’s compliance with the Clery Act, a 1990 law that requires colleges to uphold certain safety standards. Brown agreed to pay $50 million to support workforce development in Rhode Island as part of a July settlement with the White House that ended an investigation into the school’s handling of antisemitism on campus and restored its federal research funding.

Brown will “assess and adjust” security measures “as necessary in the coming weeks” and is also committed to “sustaining and restoring the sense of belonging, joy and possibility that defines who we are,” university officials said in a letter last week.

“Historically, it’s been an open campus that takes its ties to the broader community quite seriously,” said Bradford Gibbs, a finance professor and a Brown alumnus who lives a few blocks from campus. “What trade-offs does one have to make? How far do we take it?”

Top Photo: A memorial outside the Barus and Holley building at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island on Dec. 19. Photographer: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe/Getty Images