CCTV footage of Brown University shooting suspect.

Let’s begin with the fact that I have zero interest in glorifying this coincidental moment where my brother just so happened to be an ambulance tech at a mass shooting which occurred at Brown University on December 13, 2025. In reality, that relationship is its own story and it distracts from the larger point that I want to make here: regardless of whether or not my brother is enrolled in your university, he was present in an active crime scene and there was a legitimate question about his safety in those circumstances while the perpetrator was still at large.

We still know nothing about the perpetrator, or even if it might have been plural.

Let’s observe a few things, however, that are very obvious and useful. For instance, this didn’t happen at the Masjid, chapel, Hillel, or other location of religious observance, which does not suggest religious bias/animus.

So how to explain Brown University and Rhode Island…

Look, in the 1600s and 1700s, the WASP slave-owning founders decided to create Providence Plantations on College Hill. The closer to the bottom of the Hill you got, the lower the class standing. At the top of the Hill was…Rhode Island College (before it was renamed Brown). And right next to it was the Brown Brothers Incorporated and their Bank of Rhode Island, which was a giant pot of cash earned from slavery. (That’s right, the entire endowment is built of slavery…)

This is all to say that Brown has a very strict amount of segregation between its student body and the rest of Providence. The student body of Brown lives on top of a very tall hill with all the accoutrements required located within the campus. There’s Starbucks, CVS, Avon Movie Theater, burger joints, absolutely everything an undergrad could need is enclosed within the campus, a kind of foreshadowing of Disney World’s wraparound services. This is contra the state schools I went to, URI, RIC, and CCRI, which are integrated into the wider Rhode Island landscape as commuter campuses.

So we’re going to have a class question underwriting this tragedy. What pressures, dynamics, and inclinations led to this terrible explosion of violence? More pointedly, the first question for the investigating cops will be whether this was a student or a local, and likewise whether it was students, locals, or both who have been impacted by this?

Please understand that this is not a proprietary statement but this did actually involve a member of my immediate family. A friend posted the police scanner website link on Facebook.

About ten minutes into the broadcast, I heard that unmistakable brogue.

“Cúnaí!”

The progression of the police commands and their deployment of forces made it........

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