The unthinkable happened in Rhode Island this week, as Gov. Dan McKee said. There will be a lot of ripple effects, and healing will take a long time.
Thanks for stopping by for my weekly column. A quick note: I’m taking some time off, so my next column will appear on Jan. 9. You can follow me through the week on Bluesky, threads and X. Here we go.
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1. STORY OF THE WEEK: Rhode Island this week joined the states that have suffered a mass shooting. It was clear from shortly after 4 pm last Saturday that the shooter targeted Brown University, even if his initial escape set him apart from what is typical with these things. Students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, already accomplished and full of promise, were killed, and 9 other people were injured. Within 24 hours, a person of interest was detained and then released – sparking heightened anxiety and impatience for resolution. On Monday, MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was fatally shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts – a development initially said to be unrelated to the violence in Rhode Island. A key development came the same day when “John” posted on Reddit about a car that merited scrutiny from investigators. That broke the case open after John spoke with police. On Thursday night, officials announced that the body of the shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, was found in a storage space in Salem, New Hampshire, following what was believed to be a self-inflicted gun wound. Valente studied physics at Brown – likely in the Barus and Holley Building where the shooting took place – as part of a Phd program from 2000 to 2001. He had been a college classmate with Loureiro in their native Portugal, according to prosecutors in Massachusetts. Why he traveled to southern New England from his last known address in Miami to kill people remains under investigation.
2. THE TIMELINE: Based on affidavits from Providence police and the FBI, here is a timeline of the events leading up to and after the Brown shooting, and how the post on Reddit helped solve the case.
3. THE CITY: Violent crime in Providence and most other American cities has trended down over time, even as mass shootings continue apace. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley manifested a calm sense of leadership at the center of regular news briefings after the initial shooting. In an email to the community on Friday, he acknowledged that while this moment offers some relief, “I know that it will never diminish the heartbreak we all feel for the loved ones of Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, two amazing young people whose lives were senselessly cut short. They chose to make Providence their home, and they will forever be in our hearts. We have a difficult road ahead. But we will walk that road together, we will begin to heal, and we will continue to draw strength and resilience from our community.”
4. WHAT IS TO BE DONE: In an interview on Tuesday, Attorney General Peter Neronha expressed frustration about the difficulty of stopping mass shootings. “We live in a world today where our time on the planet is driven in part by national forces and luck, and luck in the manner of your being in the wrong place at the right time. You could be, as happened recently in Rhode Island – you could be walking your dog down the street and be hit by somebody who doesn’t belong behind the wheel, but they are because the way our criminal justice system works is you don’t get life without parole for drug offenses and shoplifting offenses and traffic tickets, no matter how many there are …. You have to put your faith either in good luck or whatever god you pray to and hope that your friends and family stay safe. But we know we live in a world and a country where, given the level of gun violence, it happens, that we are only a bullet away from the worst possible outcome. And it’s really a sobering thing to think about. Sometimes you just have to push that out of your mind and just keep going.”
5. ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE: Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, whose son, Ben, is a student at Brown, in an interview with PBS NewsHour, said the focus should be on finding common ground to reduce the threat of mass shootings: “I’d love to see some steps at the federal level, even if they’re just small steps. I understand the politics of issues around guns, but let’s take some small steps to say, everyone, regardless of what political party you are, we all want to reduce the amount of gun violence. So let’s take some steps that we know the American people support. American people support background checks for everyone who’s buying a gun. They support waiting periods. We all wait right now at this holiday season. We all wait to get the products and gifts that we have purchased in the mail. Or even, when you’re using Amazon Prime, there’s still a little bit of a waiting period. The same should be true for guns. Let’s ban Glock switches in even more states that convert legal firearms into illegal automatic weapons. Let’s ban the use of 3-D printers to make guns. Let’s support more mental health initiatives. There’s so much that can be done.”
6. THE STUDENTS: For most of us, the Brown shooting, in time, will be a bad memory. But returning to campus next month will be more difficult for students. It will be impossible to walk by Barus and Holley without being reminded of what happened. The shooting will probably spur an effort to bolster the sense of safety at Brown and other public institutions. At least two students survived previous mass shooting attacks. As one of those individuals, Mia Tretta wrote in TIME, “We should not have to survive school to graduate from it, and I refuse to accept a future where surviving is the best America can offer its students.”
7. THE ADMINISTRATION: In a letter to the Brown community on Tuesday, President Christina Paxson mourned the loss of the two slain students and extended her condolences to their families and everyone who interacted with them. She also called for keeping in mind the others injured in the attack and urged people to take advantage of counseling services. Paxson added, “Many members of the Brown community — including support staff in Campus Life and student leaders of the Undergraduate Council of Students — are contributing ideas for how we will join together as a community to memorialize Ella and Mukhammad after we have resumed classes for the spring semester following the Winter Break.”
8. THE INTERNET: It used to be said that you don’t pick an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But that was before the advent of the internet, where everyone is free to pop off (and often does) regardless of the quality of the information. Some posters floated conspiracy theories or identified the wrong people as suspects. As Col. Darnell Weaver of the Rhode Island State Police said during one briefing, “Criminal investigations are grounded in evidence, not speculation or online commentary. The endless barrage of misinformation, disinformation, rumors, leaks and clickbait were not helpful in this investigation.” U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse made a similar point on the Senate floor on Wednesday: “There is simply no need from an investigative point of view for people who have no idea what they’re talking about to offer their stupid and ill-informed views about what happened all over the internet. So I would please, just from a law enforcement perspective, ask anyone who sees this to just shut up until we know who did it and why. We will find out. Give it some time.” People who don’t like Whitehouse responded by saying they didn’t appreciate being told to shut up. But there’s a big difference between sharing potential intelligence in an investigation and elevating AI-generated images, for example, that pose a distraction.
9. HOW TO HELP: Lots of efforts are underway to assist the Brown community, ranging from t-shirts and sweaters being hawked by Frog and Toad to fundraisers and utilizing resources for responding to difficult events.
10. THE FUTURE: Lisa Pina-Warren, executive director of the Nonviolence Institute in Providence, talked with me Tuesday on One on One about how the institute was offering emotional and other support to hospitalized students. Like AG Neronha, she is hard-pressed to identify steps to counter the unpredictable quality of mass shootings. Asked how the Brown shooting will affect Rhode Island, Pina-Warren told me, “I think for a long time this is going to be really heavy on our hearts. I have a lot of friends in the community [who] are saying children are expressing fear. I don’t know how it will change us, but I know that this is going to affect us for a very long time. There is gonna be a long healing process for all of us. I have seen in the last few days the community coming together, no matter what your beliefs are. [People are] coming together to support those impacted by this horrific violence. I hope it doesn’t take another act of violence or mass shooting for the community to come together the way they are right now.”
Happy holidays to all celebrating. My column will return Jan. 9.
