When Safety Failed: A Brown University Student’s Account Of The December 13 Shooting

It was 4:05 p.m., December 13, 1925, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, when the first shots rang out at the Barus and Holley Engineering building. Two people were killed, and nine were injured. At 4:22, the notification was sent out to all the students and faculty: “BrownUAlert: 1st, Urgent: There's an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering. Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice. Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover;  FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself.  Stay tuned for further safety information.” Students hid in buildings, barricading doors, thinking this would last one or two hours, but little did they know this was only the start.

On 12/14/25, authorities announced that they had caught a “person of interest” whom they believed to be the shooter. It was later discovered that this individual was not the shooter, and he was released that night. Authorities have since begun another manhunt in search of the suspect.

On December 18, 2025, we were informed that authorities believed they had located the person of interest in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. A few hours later, it was announced that it was the shooter and he had taken his own life. He was found in the same exact clothes as in the camera footage, and with two guns in his possession. It is believed that he might have also been responsible for the murder of the MIT professor. The shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, was a former Brown PhD student in physics and was believed to spend most of his time at the Barus and Holley building, where the shooting occurred.

This is an exclusive interview with Collin Liang, a Marie Curie Middle School 158 alumni, Stuyvesant High School alumni and current Freshmen studying medical at Brown University, to find out an in-depth experience with the shooting.

Brown freshman Collin Liang

Q: How did you find out about the shooting?

A: “I was in a building about 2 blocks away on the 5th floor, and it’s a big glass room, so we heard sirens going past us, and then we saw like a sea of red lights and sirens. So, we decided to Google what was going on, and we found out about the shooting.”

Q: What were you told to do during the shooting?

A: “We actually didn’t get any official alert from the university until what had to be about 40 minutes after the actual shooting. But when we did get alerts, they were text messages and emails, but we didn’t think that they were too reliable.”

Q: Where did you hide during the shooting?

A: “The building that we were in originally was the mail room, but because it is the mail building, it's open to the public, and they don’t lock the doors. Inside, none of the doors locked, and they swung outwards, so we couldn’t just barricade them, so we knew that we weren’t safe there. We stayed there for a little bit to just process what was going on and plan what we were going to do. We ended up getting lucky and getting a ride by a graduate student to a med school that was far away from the campus, so we hid in the Cadaver lab there.”

Q: Did you feel like you were prepared for this situation/Did you feel like you could have been better prepared for the situation?

A: “I think that obviously there was a shock in the sense that there is a shooting going on, and no matter how well you prepare your students, there is going to be an active shock like these things are actually happening, I could die. But we were prepared in the sense that we referenced what to do after the active shooter drills that we had in school, where we turned off the lights, we closed the shades, and we stayed in a place that wasn’t visible from the glass doors. So I think that we were prepared in the best way we could have. I was just mad about the fact that the buildings weren’t secure and the alarm system was so off.”

Q: What are your takeaways from this experience?

A: “I don’t think that this triggered anything, but I’ve always been against gun violence and talking about control in our country. But this sort of felt more real because you always hear about this type of stuff on the news but i remember almost thinking like ‘oh only 2 people died and 8 people were shot but alive’ and that gave me relief that it wasn’t more but then in recent times hearing about the actual people that were killed and the actual individual stories and like these are actual people and I know people that know these people it feels a lot more real and a lot more of an urgent issue that we need to address.”

Q: Did you feel safe during the lockdown/did you feel like it was handled well by authorities?

A: “I didn’t think that it was handled well by the authorities. As I said, the alarm system was very delayed, and there were multiple times when the Providence police said that the shooter was in custody. It gave people a false sense of security, so the fact that they told everyone that they had the shooter, and everyone dropped their guard, and the shooter could very well be still out there, and they were out there, so I wasn’t very happy about that. Also, I didn’t like how that night, the mayor and the police said at a press conference that you can carry on with your normal activities, and it should be safe even though it could not have been. I mean, people can do whatever they want, but I think that it was a stupid idea to say that when they haven’t caught the shooter. I was happy about the fact that the community supported each other, though. I hear a lot of stories about cafes opening up their basements for people to hide in and restaurants giving away free food to students because all of the dining halls were down. My friends got very lucky meeting that grad student who brought us to the med school, and then the med students that we met who sheltered us at the med school and eventually brought us to their own home for the night. So my biggest thing was realizing how strong the community was."

Q: If you could go back in time, would you do anything differently?

A: “Well, I think that I would say that we got really lucky, but we weren’t very informed well so just to not let my guard down during those moments because I felt like I was more concerned to tell my family and friends that everything was ok and to check up on my fellow Brown students to see if they were still ok. Because I truly thought that everything was okay and resolved because of misinformation. I just trusted the authorities way too much, and if I hadn’t gotten so lucky, I could’ve just been shot on the side of the road because the shooter was still out there.”

​Q: About how long did you hide for?

A: “Well, we didn’t let up our guard for a while because it happened on Saturday at 4 o'clock-ish, and we didn’t let up our guard until Sunday morning around 9 or 10. Because we weren’t super confident about the person that the authorities had in custody, and that the shooter could still be out there. So, we were sheltered in with all of the windows closed until about 10. But on Sunday night, when they realised that they had the wrong person and the shooter was still out there again and then people heard a lot of thudding noises that they thought were gunshots but weren’t, but it got a lot of people scared. It was such a drawn-out process and got a lot more people scared than it needed to be.”

​Q: What advice would you give to people who are in a similar situation if you could?

A: “I guess my biggest thing would be to remain calm and to take as much caution as you can in the moment. Like, even if there are easy things like sheltering in, you just need to secure yourself physically, and then once you’re sheltered in and you’re safe, then you can secure yourself emotionally. When the ordeal is over with, then you should start healing and stuff. I don’t think that they should have vigils to memorialise the victims and other things until the shooter has been caught, because what if the gatherings were to be attacked? I was just so worried that the shooter would just go attack it just to make a point and kill people. I wasn’t even there anymore, but I was just really scared about that.”

The Brown shooting serves as a harsh reminder of how quickly a normal day at college can turn into a period of mourning, fear and grief because of the tragedy of gun violence. This event emphasizes not only the need for authorities to show better preparedness, safety measures and communication to prevent another tragedy like this from happening again. But it also signifies the importance of communities coming together to help each other out. The significance is shown from the ride from the graduate student to med school, the help from a teacher to hide and the generosity from the med students to take Collin and his friends into their own home for the night. Everyone needs a community like in Providence.