After the shelter-in-place order was lifted this morning, I walked down to Brown’s campus in the snow. The Catholic chaplain, Fr. Justin, had announced a Mass for the two students killed yesterday during a pre-exam review session. A middle-aged woman stopped me as I was walking and passed a homemade cake pop through her car window. She drove a few blocks farther before stopping for another lucky pedestrian. She was heading in the direction of Barus & Holley, the academic building where a gunman opened fire yesterday shortly after 4 p.m. Eight injured students are still being treated at Rhode Island Hospital.

Despite having been a PhD student here for five years, I’ve never attended Mass at the Brown-RISD Catholic Community. I struggled to figure out which door to use; an undergraduate graciously welcomed me in. Fr. Justin and another student were finalizing tabernacle logistics as I entered. Friends formed little circles in a perimeter around the plastic folding chairs where we would sit for Mass. I hovered awkwardly over a table featuring brochures, colorful plastic rosaries, and prayer cards. I picked up a card featuring a Franciscan cross. On the back, it read:

Lord make me an instrument of Your peace.

 

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

 

Where there is injury, pardon

 

Where there is doubt, faith,

 

Where there is despair, hope,

 

Where there is darkness, light,

 

And where there is sadness, joy.

We were not entirely without ordinary joys before this Gaudete Sunday Mass. A tall young man in a leather jacket introduced two pals: “Your name precedes you!” I hugged a friend. As we took our seats, we could see the snow swirling gorgeously through the windows.  

Fr. Justin began his homily with three words: “I’m so sorry.” One of the students who had died, I learned, was an active member of the Catholic community on campus. Fr. Justin shared a message from her father: “She loved Jesus. And she had faith in the Resurrection.”

Saturday night was chaos. A barrage of conflicting text alerts went out to students, faculty, and staff. First: the police have someone in custody. Then: it was the wrong guy. Now: more shots have been fired several blocks away from Barus & Holley. Later: earlier reports of gunshots were unfounded. Donald Trump mistakenly declared the suspect’s arrest, forcing Brown police to send out an alert correcting the president of the United States. Tuning into the police scanner was not reassuring: the cops seemed just as confused as the rest of us. Six hours after the initial 911 call, Brown’s president bizarrely claimed that she had no idea what the targeted classroom was being used for. 

I was among the lucky folks holed up off campus. My wife Zoe and I spent the night in our bedroom, listening to sirens and helicopters chopping overhead as hundreds of law-enforcement agents flooded the campus. A couple blocks away from the shooting, some friends were working at the political-science graduate offices. Told to shelter in place, they didn’t get home until after 3 a.m. Buses transported hundreds of students studying at libraries to an athletic facility where they milled around for hours on an indoor track. The graduate students in my department took a headcount over WhatsApp to make sure everyone in the program was accounted for.

Student journalists at the Brown Daily Herald, themselves in the middle of final exams, dropped everything to provide exemplary reporting on their classmates being attacked. They are worthy of far more than a donation, but I donated nonetheless.

Throughout the evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that it happened at an exam review session. One can hardly imagine a less remarkable academic setting. A dark lecture hall on a gloomy Providence afternoon, weary teaching assistants, anxious undergraduates trying to squeeze some last-minute economics prep in between their other exams. Then, the doors opened and gunshots rang out.

By the time I fell asleep, just after midnight, the public remained almost entirely in the dark about the suspect. I was certain the city would be shut down for days, not hours.

This is the only country where this happens regularly. This happens so often that one runs out of things to say. One can only repeat oneself, with increasing anguish: This is the only country where this happens regularly!

When I woke up this morning to the news that a suspect was in custody, a flood of questions immediately came to mind. What was his motivation? Did he have a manifesto? What kind of gun did he use? Did he have help? How did he get away? 

After this morning’s Mass, these questions have begun to recede. The only thing I want to occupy my mind is that moment during Mass when we turned to each other and repeated words that most of us have said thousands of times: Peace be with you. So we greeted each other in Providence today, before turning back toward the altar, and, behind that, the snow falling gently on the living and the dead.

Editors’ Note (December 15, 9:13 a.m.): Late December 14, state law enforcement officials announced that they were releasing a person of interest from police custody. The search for the shooter remains ongoing.