Students describe 'surreal' aftermath of deadly Brown University shooting
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Yellow barrier tape remained outside Brown University's Barus and Holley Engineering building on Monday morning, the scene of a deadly shooting on Saturday that left two students dead and nine others injured.
Flowers and candles were laid outside the building as students braved the bitter cold to pay respects to the victims of the shooting that shocked the tight-knit university community.
Some students on campus were seen carrying luggage or rolling suitcases as family members arrived to pick them up. Some waited for ride-share cars to take them off campus on Monday morning as temperatures hovered in the upper teens and lower 20s.
A helicopter flew overhead across the clear blue sky as authorities continued to search for the shooting suspect. Authorities released a person of interest from custody late Sunday , and the manhunt continues, leaving a sense of uncertainty on the Providence campus.
A helicopter flies over Brown University campus on Monday, Dec. 15, 2025.Luis Fieldman
Members of the Providence Police Department walked through the city's neighborhoods as part of the ongoing investigation on Monday afternoon. Police visited businesses and homes to request any available footage, according to a statement issued shortly before 1 p.m.
Quiet on campus as remaining students prepare to leave
A few blocks away from campus at the Meeting Street Cafe, a freshman at Brown studying psychology and economics sat at a table with her father, who flew in from California.
Paulina Oscar-Ramirez, 18, and her father, Christopher Oscar, 54, were grateful to be reunited and planned on flying back to Sonoma, California, later on Monday.
They sat in a nearly empty restaurant near Thayer Street, where most of the shops were either closed or eerily quiet.
"I'm OK, I'm happy to be with my family, with my dad, so that feels good," Oscar-Ramirez said. "I've definitely been around friends and support the entire time. I can't imagine what it's like to have been alone through it. So I'm very grateful for that. And that's definitely allowed me to feel OK and feel the support network."
Oscar-Ramirez was in her dorm room with her roommate when the shooting broke out in the engineering building at about 4 p.m. on Saturday — roughly a 10-minute walk away.
A recorded call from the university alerted her to the shooting on campus.
"I couldn't register it as real at all," Oscar-Ramirez said. "I didn't process the active [shooter] part of the message. And I just feel so safe here. And throughout my life, I have felt very safe at my campuses, even though it can happen anywhere."
Her phone lit up with text messages from friends who were in dining halls or at libraries and forced to shelter in place for hours, hiding under desks as the campus went into a shelter-in-place that lifted early Sunday morning.
"So getting all those updates and checking in on people was definitely scary," Oscar-Ramirez said.
Oscar-Ramirez originally planned to leave campus this upcoming Friday. Brown University officials cancelled classes and exams, so Oscar-Ramirez decided to leave on Monday.
She said that the campus community has felt shaken by the shooting, but she's seen students coming together and supporting one another. Last night, she went to a campus dining hall known as "The Ratty," and expected to find a quiet scene.
Instead, the dining hall was full of students. Maybe hundreds, she estimated, that were hugging one another, sitting together, and staying there until late at night. The university announced Sunday morning that it would offer students free meals.
"There's so much love, so much support," Oscar-Ramirez said. "It's really heartening to see."
For Oscar, as soon as he learned about the shooting at his daughter's school, he called campus police to learn more. He was told Saturday night that law enforcement had a person in custody and that the shelter-in-place would end soon.
"So it went from panic to, 'OK, they got somebody,'" Oscar explained. Then he learned that the authorities let the person of interest go.
"And I was back to like freakout mode," he said. The whole scenario played out once again between Sunday morning and Monday morning when authorities announced they detained a second person of interest, only to release them late Sunday night.
"I feel really bad for the victims," Oscar said. "It's a horrible, senseless act."
'It's just surreal'
A bouquet of flowers rests on snow, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025, on the campus of Brown University not far from where a shooting took place, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)AP
Simon Nirenberg, 20, a sophomore, waited outside for his ride-share to pick him up on Monday morning.
He looked over at a building across the street, only yards away from the engineering building where Saturday's shooting took place.
"I was just in that building, right there in my lab, working, and then I heard about everything," Nirenberg said. "I basically just locked all the doors and went into the back ... Originally, I was by myself, but my girlfriend was actually walking right here, so I called her and just told her to come in with me."
Nirenberg said he spent about a third of his time studying in the Barus and Holley building, where all his physics classes take place.
"I kind of just chose randomly to work" in a different building, he said. "It was just kind of lucky."
A car pulled up, and Nirenberg checked his phone. "I think this is my car," he said, and got into the car bound for the airport for his flight to Indiana.
Near Barus and Holley, two PhD students, Akshay Nagar, 26, and Eric Barrett, 28, were walking by.
Both described the surreal feeling of learning about a shooting taking place on campus.
"Even though we were OK, we were up late, checking in on our friends and seeing how everyone was doing. It was really stressful," Barrett said.
"It's just surreal," Nagar said. "I don't feel patently unsafe right now. I would guess that it's fairly unlikely that (the suspect) would come back exactly here and try again, but it's also kind of just shocking that ... we're in the middle of a city, and somehow, there's just no footage.
"Right now, it feels equal parts disconcerting and stressful," Nagar said.
Officials released a 10-second video clip on Saturday of a male dressed in black turning a street corner, but the person's face is not visible.
The Providence Police Department released a 19-second video clip on Monday afternoon of a person dressed in all black walking down a street on Saturday at about 4:06 p.m. The video appears to be taken on Waterman Street and officials said the video is of a person of interest .
Mayor Brett Smiley said authorities continue to canvass the neighbourhood and asked community members with security cameras installed to come forward, according to The Washington Post .
"The videos at Brown in the building have been examined, and at this time, we have no additional actionable information from the video that has been reviewed from the building," he said.
Students killed identified
The two people killed in Saturday's shooting were identified on Monday.
The Brown University College Republicans posted on X Monday that Ella Cook, the organization's vice president, had been killed in the shooting.
The other victim was identified as Muhammad Aziz Umurzokov, according to NBC News , which cited the Uzbekistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The gunman opened fire inside a classroom in the engineering building, firing more than 40 rounds from a 9 mm handgun, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
Investigators were not immediately sure how the shooter got inside the first-floor classroom in a seven-story complex that houses the School of Engineering and the physics department.
One of the nine wounded students has been released from the hospital. Seven others were in critical but stable condition, and one was in critical condition.
Brown, the seventh-oldest higher education institution in the U.S., is one of the nation's most prestigious colleges, with roughly 7,300 undergraduates and more than 3,000 graduate students. The school cancelled all remaining classes and exams for the semester.
Brown University Shooting, Dec. 13, 2025
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