CNN
By Alaa Elassar, CNN
(CNN) — For nine hours, students at Brown University crouched under desks and behind locked door, making panicked phone calls and sending “I love you” texts that felt dangerously close to goodbyes.
An active shooter was on campus — and police were still searching for a suspect.
Late Saturday night into Sunday morning, they listened for footsteps, for sirens, for anything that might signal the end of another American nightmare.
It is a kind of story Americans know too well, and one that repeats with numbing regularity — again and again and again.
By the time Brown’s campus lockdown lifted at 5:40 a.m., two students were dead and nine others had been injured, according to the university. One victim remains in critical condition, another is listed as stable and one person was treated and released.
So far in 2025, there have been at least 391 mass shootings and 13,929 shooting deaths in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Each number represents a shattered family, a traumatized community, another generation learning too early how to survive gunfire.
At the private university in Providence, Rhode Island, the nightmare began on a winter afternoon just two weeks before Christmas. Students were studying for finals at the library or taking exams. Others were attending review sessions, and some were hanging out with friends visiting the Ivy League campus when the first alert reached their phones at 4:22 p.m.
“Urgent: There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering,” the alert read.
Students should lock the doors, silence phones and hide until further notice, it said, adding to run and evacuate safely if you could.
“FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself,” the alert said.
Ten more alerts would follow, reminding the community to stay sheltered in place and keep doors locked, letting students know where police were and which buildings were being evacuated, and, finally, telling them the shelter-in-place order had ended.
Saturday’s shooting came on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sandy Hook school massacre, which claimed the lives of 26 people, including 20 elementary students.
At least two students at Brown had survived previous school shootings.
Zoe Weissman was in middle school when she witnessed the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.
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