WESTFORD — WestfordCAT recently spoke to a Brown University student from Westford, who was on campus during a mass shooting on Dec. 13, which killed two students and injured nine others.
Students, faculty and staff at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island are still shaken after the gunman opened fire in the Barus and Holley building, which houses the School of Engineering and the Physics Department, while students were attending a review session to prepare for their second day of final exams for the fall semester.
Sophomore Irene Zheng, who is originally from Westford, is a Brown University Applied Mathematics-Economics and Classics student, an analyst in the Brown Derivatives Investment Group and a member of the university’s ski team.
Zheng said she was studying for her final exams in the library on campus when she first heard police sirens, followed by texts from her friends and an alert from the university.
“I was in so much shock,” Zheng said. “I was not processing what was happening to me, to my community, to my school. Obviously my first thought was ‘do I know anyone in that building? Are all of my friends okay?’ And after checking in with my teammates, checking in with my closest friends, I realized that I didn’t know anyone who was in Barus and Holley, the engineering building, but I had friends that were in the science library, which is just one block away, so I made sure they were okay. About like 15-20 minutes after the initial shooting, Brown finally sent out a notice that was like an alert system. It was just a text message that said ‘there’s an active shooter on campus, run, hide, shelter and then fight if that’s your last mean of resort.”
Zheng said she was told by university faculty to shelter in place in the library, before police officers showed up and escorted her and other students out of the building and to the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center, where they spent hours before they were finally cleared to return to their dorms.
“On initial thought, I thought we were spending the night there,” Zheng said. “Just because I didn’t think that they would think that it would be safe to let us go back to our dorms. But they ended up shuttling students back to their dorms, building by building, or area by area, starting at like 1:30-2:00 a.m. By the time it was time for me to shuttled back to my dorm, which is on Brown’s main green, it was like 4:30 a.m. already, so it was a whole big process the whole entire night.”
The shooting triggered a five-day manhunt by the FBI and local police across Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with officials releasing surveillance footage of the suspect, whose identity was initially unknown.
However, on Dec. 15, just two days after the shooting at Brown, police were informed that Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor Nuno Loureiro was killed in his Brookline, Massachusetts home, which officials later suspected was the same suspect as the Brown shooter.
Three days later, on Dec. 18, police found the suspect Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, dead inside a storage unit in New Hampshire, after he allegedly shot himself.
Despite learning about the suspect’s death, Zheng said the shooting has left a major toll on students ahead of the spring semester, and also greatly impacted her college experience.
“I think campus is going to be forever changed by the horrors that have happened,” Zheng said. “I think it’s going to continue affecting the rest of my time at Brown, because this just isn’t something that you’re going to forget. I feel like amongst the Brown community, a lot of people, especially in the months that are going to follow, are a lot more on-edge, taking greater safety precautions in their personal lives, and as students on campus, are going to be more aware of their surroundings as well.”
WestfordCAT then asked Zheng what people from the Westford community could do to help support her and her peers at Brown, who are recovering from the aftermath of the shooting
“I think that first of all, most importantly, you can support the victims who have been personally affected by this event, by knowing their names, knowing their stories, knowing who they are as a person before they were affected by this tragedy,” Zheng said. “You can support the victims who are in the hospital right now by donating to their GoFundMe’s, because they’re journeys to recovery are going to take a long time. Many of them are going to have to go to months, maybe even years of rehab to walk again, and their lives will be forever impacted by these events. You can also take action to ensure that this doesn’t happen again in the future, by supporting causes that mitigate and control gun violence, especially in universities. But I also think that in the future, many schools are going to reflect on their own systems and think of ways to make campus a safer place for all students to prevent a tragedy like this.”
Following the discovery of Neves Valente’s body, Brown University President Christina H. Paxson issued a letter to students, faculty and staff expressing relief that the suspect had been found, and declaring that the university will begin a “path of repair, recovery and healing” in order to support the families and friends of the students who were killed, and to support students on campus who were injured or dealing with the mental impact of the shooting.
