At 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, students at the Rhode Island School of Design received an emergency alert informing them of an active shooter present on Brown’s campus. The notification came over an hour after the Brown Department of Public Safety sent an alert informing Brown students of the shooter.
Around 4 p.m. that day, a masked gunman shot and killed two students and injured nine others inside a classroom in Barus and Holley — a Brown building located about a ten-minute walk from some RISD residential buildings.
RISD first sent an alert at 4:28 p.m. informing students of “police activity reported in the area of Brook and Thayer streets.” The alert did not mention an active shooter.
The last day of RISD’s fall semester was Dec. 12, but several students said they remained on or near RISD’s campus during the shooting.
Juan Leonard, a sophomore at RISD, told The Herald that he had returned to his dorm around 4:30 p.m. and was cooking when he first heard about the active shooter. The information did not come from the RISD notification system, but from his friend in Taiwan, he said.
Leonard said he was “constantly texting” his friends who were closer to Brown’s campus for updates on Saturday.
Yasmine Hassan ’17, a technical assistant at RISD and studio monitor at Brown, was in Warwick at the time of the shooting. As a staff member of both institutions, Hassan received notifications from both Brown and RISD.
She said she reached out to members of the RISD community who were still on campus to notify them of the active shooter. People “didn’t know (the shooting) was going on, because RISD still hadn’t reported anything,” she said.
A 6:53 p.m. RISD alert directed students to the Brown University Emergency Updates page. The alert noted that the situation remained ongoing.
“Our focus is keeping our community informed as this situation continues to unfold. As much as this event was unthinkable for all of us, it is something we must learn from,” RISD spokesperson Jaime Marland wrote in an email to The Herald.
“In the days ahead, RISD will assess our emergency response plans and evolve as appropriate,” she added.
The director of the RISD Department of Public Safety did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Following the shooting, Sabela Chelba, a first-year student at RISD who was not on campus at the time of the incident, launched a petition calling on Brown and RISD to coordinate their emergency alert systems.
As of Wednesday night, the petition has amassed over 2,800 signatures.
“It struck me as a huge surprise that we were even on different systems,” Chelba said. “RISD had let out for the semester, but on pretty much any other day, you will find RISD students in the Brown library. You will find Brown students studying at Carr House.”
When deciding to sign the petition, RISD senior Zoe Vaspol told The Herald that she thought that a unified alert system “would have been helpful for not only students who live around campus, but staff and faculty that also live near Brown campus.”
RISD spokespeople did not respond to additional requests for comment.
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Emily Feil is a university news and metro editor covering staff & student labor and RISD. She is a sophomore from Long Beach, NY, studying English and international & public affairs. In her free time, she can be found watching bad TV and reading good books.
Michelle Bi is a sophomore and metro section editor at The Herald.
