Reunification

My only child is a student at Brown, and yesterday at 4pm the campus had a mass shooting. A gunman opened fire in a classroom during a final exam review session. I found out before law enforcement responded and before any alerts were issued because I am in a Facebook group for Brown parents, and parents started getting dire texts from their kids from inside the building. I immediately texted my own child and found that they were safe in their apartment with their people. They locked down and a very long night ensued. As we approach noon on the following day, lockdown has just lifted and it there is a “person of interest” in custody. Nobody is breathing easy yet, but it seems to be almost over. I have been in the field of education my whole life. As an academic, I have many thoughts about all of this. This post is not about those thoughts. This post is a constellation of feelings. Maybe writing them down might help me out somehow. I think these feelings matter and should be recorded. I am not going to spend time thinking about why they matter. Here they are, random as they come.

• I spent the morning yesterday before the shooting at a training on pediatric respiratory emergencies. I am studying to be a first responder. It was a really fun training, interesting and great people there. We laughed a lot as we worked with the lifelike kid mannequins that are capable of breathing and bleeding. To go from that training to a situation where all I could imagine was my own child on someone else’s stretcher was awful, yes, but also deeply surreal. I was getting ready to take a nap after the training when the word came through. I still think I might be dreaming all of this as a result of being at that training.
• I listened all afternoon to the Providence police scanner. I just finished my FEMA Incident Command trainings for my first responder studies. They set up an Incident Command at Brown and I could recognize the patterns they were using to address the emergency. My husband could not bear to listen. He was destroyed with– not quite worry, but something darker and more debilitating. But for me, I couldn’t get enough info. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to help. I wanted to be there. I didn’t feel numb. I felt physically activated and calm. I was struck by the calm voices of the first responders on the scanner. Interesting that that calmness and coping does not seem to equate (for me) with not being deeply gutted at a cellular level. I feel calm, ready to cope and help, and deeply, deeply gutted.
• The video of kids (college students are adults, but I hope you will forgive me in this post for using “kids” throughout. My kid was there. I was talking all night to other parents. These are our children.) being cleared from buildings after hours of lockdown are horrifying. These are the lucky kids. The survivors who were not directly in the line of fire. But you see their terror when the police enter and they don’t know if it’s the gunman (who was at large all night long). You see the police having to be firm and even intimidating as they try to sort out whether anyone in the room could be the gunman. You just see the trauma everywhere you look. And these are the lucky kids. The lucky ones.
• My child’s socials are full of people posting pictures of their friends that are not answer their phones, asking for info. My child reports that classmates are posting about high school shootings that they lived through, who have now suffered through two school shootings. One parent had a child studying abroad in Australia who was at the beach where the Australian shooting took place on the same day; it’s like that kid survived two mass shootings in one day. Now that I bear witness to all of this, it is so clear to me that the “survivors” are going to be carrying such a load for the rest of their lives.
• Brown set up a reunification center at the gym for those who had to be evacuated from buildings. Many parents started traveling to bring their kids home, or making arrangements with transportation services to get their kids out. My child was safe in an off-campus apartment so stayed there and is still hunkering there. But I was so close to having to go to a reunification center to pick up my child from a mass shooting event. I just don’t know why that particular detail smacks me in the stomach so much.
• The review session where most of the shooting took place had about 60 kids finishing up a review for an Econ final. The TA was running the session. The TA was a kid. A 21-year old kid, a senior at Brown. He huddled with his students under a desk and 10 of his pupils were shot. My stomach turns over with all of it, but thinking about the teacher being a young person like that–it just feels unbearably cruel.
• Brown has never fully locked down all of its buildings. Dorms are swipe-access only, but many others are unlocked during daylight hours. My own kid has become more of a member of the Providence community than the Brown community in many ways. The fact that the campus was not as gated as other urban campuses was one reason my child has excelled there, and all their best friends are PVD locals, not so much Brown students. It’s already clear that Brown will be locking down its buildings– petitions are circulating, and even my child is absolutely clear that this is what they want to happen, and I get it. But I don’t think this will stop mass shootings, not even mass shootings at Brown. We don’t even know for sure that this was not a Brown student who did this (it looks like no, but of course we could imagine it could have been yes). I just have an overwhelming sadness to see libraries and theaters and elite learning spaces close themselves off even more. This is the sad world we have built for ourselves.

• My child spent their last two years of high school in Covid lockdown. They missed out on so much, and it took a toll. They took a year off after high school to recover themselves before going off to Brown with so much hope for a brighter day. During Orientation, they got Covid and got dangerously ill. They recovered, but missed weeks of socializing and classwork. It took years to fight their way back and finally integrate at Brown and feel at home. Most of these kids went through challenges with Covid that were far-reaching and long-lasting. I was just saying a few days ago to a friend that I feel like the teen Covid generation is finally getting its feet under itself. Just ugh. Just fucking ugh.
• I am grieving for parents all over the world who lost their kids to gun violence yesterday. I grieve for the kids who died (two at Brown so far) and were injured (8 critically at Brown fighting to survive right now), but having now run up against a very tiny edge of the reality of losing a kid this way, my heart is especially with the parents today. What a world our children have inherited.

I might add more to this post as it comes. I might not. I guess we will see what “moving on” looks like. Please keep these kids, and their parents, in your heart. If you haven’t lived through this yet, I wish you strength when your turn comes.

UPDATE, December 15th: It’s been so hard to hear that the person of interest in custody has been released and they do not have any suspects in custody at this time. It is especially hard because though many Brown students have gone home, mine is still there, a block or two from the shooting site. My child lives with their significant other, who is not a student. He has a job driving a delivery truck locally, and (obviously) can’t afford not to keep working. So they are staying put. Brown is an urban campus, and there are many residents on College Hill who live there permanently and aren’t flying away to safety right now. We have no idea if the threat has passed, and Brown students have been reporting hearing gunshots several times since the original shooting, including just a couple of hours ago; all of these have proven to be totally unfounded (likely cars backfiring and other city noise), but there have been several buildings locked down here and there and it speaks to the level of fear that so many are facing. I don’t think “catching the guy” will make the fear go away, but it might help. While I am at it, I might just pause and blame Kash Patel, who since early this fall has reassigned more than half of FBI officers in major offices to immigration enforcement (look it up). I wonder what connections that might have to the fact that they detained the wrong guy for so long, and still haven’t caught the shooter?

UPDATE, December 29th: We are relieved that the shooter was identified and is no longer a threat. He took his own life after also traveling down to Boston to kill an MIT professor, who had been a student with him years ago. The shooter was a disgruntled physics scholar who spent a year as a Brown grad student decades ago. As many Brown parents ratchet up pressure on the administration about how the campus needs to beef up its security and lock down its buildings, I am reminded again that shooters are not “outsiders.” They are us. I don’t think lockdowns will solve this. In fact, surveillant culture seems to be part of the police state climate that makes violence feel so natural in our country. I don’t think “gun control” can solve this when we have already propagated such a gun-loving culture (we have 500 million guns in the United States right now, almost two for every adult). But evidence suggests that stricter gun laws reduce mass-casualty events like this, and I just can’t imagine anyone living through this nightmare and thinking that we need fewer gun restrictions. My own NH legislature followed up this Brown shooting with a new bill in the house permitting conceal/carry on our state’s college campuses. As a professor, and now a mom of a kiddo who went through this trauma, I could not be more disgusted or afraid for the future. I think about all the times over the last thirty years when there was tension in a classroom I was in; at no point did I think, “I am sure this would be safer if some of us in here had guns.”

All that being said, our family is resting easier, and my kid is walking by the site each day and finding a way to be. I don’t know if we are “closing out” this chapter, as much as realizing we just have to go on and live with the horror of it. But for the the students who are truly scarred for life by this, for the kids still in the hospital with injuries, and especially for the parents whose brilliant children didn’t make it out alive…my heart just continues to break.