A community member looks at flowers, notes, and mementos in a makeshift memorial display sitting in front of Brown University's Van Wickle gates.Lily Speredelozzi/The Sun Chronicle/AP

It has been four days since a man entered a finals review session inside a building at Brown University—two miles from my house in Providence, Rhode Island—and started shooting.

The FBI, US Marshals, and police from across the state have descended on my neighborhood in a manhunt for the gunman. He killed two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, injured nine more, and then walked out of the building and into the city. For now, the best clue the public has is a video of someone who might be him, peering over the fence of the Rhode Island Historical Society on quaint, cobblestoned College Hill. How very New England.

I have lived in Providence for nearly a decade—first as a Brown student, and then when I returned in my 30s to make it my home—and I have never seen it like this, the energy sucked out of it by fear.

I can’t stop thinking about how Ella and Mukhammad will never get that second walk through the gates, and how it shouldn’t have been this way.

The city is suspended in a state of grief and unease, blanketed with snow and an eerie silence. Shops and restaurants are emptier than they should be during the holiday season. Some schools and daycares are still closed. The ones that are open, like my child’s, are sending worried parents reminders of security measures and not letting children play outside. There are whirring helicopters. There is a growing pile of flowers in front of the Van Wickle gates, which Brown opens just twice a year, in ceremonies meant to mark parallel transformative moments—when freshmen enter to begin their learning, and when seniors leave to make their mark on the world. I can’t stop thinking about how Ella and Mukhammad will never get that second walk through the gates, and how it shouldn’t have been this way.

Like millions of Americans, I’ve watched with growing despair as hundreds of children have died in school shootings and the country has repeatedly chosen to do nothing about it. Now I have a front-row seat to the latest chapter in this uniquely American horror. I am lucky to know a lot about this place—to have had the immense good fortune of going to Brown and to have ended up living in Providence, which I’ve long called New England’s best-kept secret. And as I sit here typing down the road from news crews and federal authorities........

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