Brown University is set to begin a new semester on Wednesday, but the campus is still reeling from a tragic mass shooting that claimed the lives of two students and left nine others injured.
There are ongoing concerns about campus security, as the incident exposed flaws in safety measures. The shooter managed to execute the attack and evade immediate arrest, only to later kill an MIT professor in a separate incident.
Jack DiPrimio, a graduate student at Brown, expressed the emotional difficulty of returning to campus for the new semester.
“Coming back to the place where this tragedy happened just a month ago feels incredibly raw,” DiPrimio shared with Fox News Digital. “The memorials are touching, yet it’s heartbreaking to walk past them and see the faces of Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook. It’s unsettling to see a friend’s face in a memorial.”
Visitors pause at a makeshift memorial for shooting victims at the Van Wickle Gate at Brown University, Dec. 15, 2025, in Providence, Rhode Island. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
The alleged shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a 48-year-old from Portugal, is said to have orchestrated the attack. The Department of Justice released a transcript of a recording made by Neves-Valente, indicating that the assault had been premeditated.
“It’s done. It was, it was six months, man. Not six months, six semesters. Uh. I had already planned this for a little more,” the transcript reads. “It was all a little incompetent but at least something was done.”
Nuno Loureiro, a professor at MIT, and Brown University students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, were victims of Neves Valente’s multiple attacks.
Brown University faced intense scrutiny over how the shooter escaped local authorities, and how his identity was mainly discovered due to an interaction with a homeless man who was living on campus.
On Dec. 13, at about 4 p.m., a man with a gun entered a review session in Barus and Holley Room 166 and opened fire, shooting 11 students. (Kenna Lee/The Brown Daily Herald)
The homeless man, known by the pseudonym John, had been living in the basement of Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering building. When police could not identify him themselves, they asked the public via social media to help locate someone who had been near the actual person of interest.
It is unclear whether the man is still living on the Ivy League campus.
The security policies put in place by Brown were criticized by the Trump administration.
“Brown’s campus surveillance and security system may not have been up to appropriate standards, allowing the suspect to flee while the university seemed unable to provide helpful information about the profile of the alleged assassin,” a Dec. 22 press release from the Department of Education reads.
“Additionally, many Brown students and staff reported that the university’s emergency notifications about the active shooter were delayed, raising significant concerns about their safety alert system. If true, these shortcomings constitute serious breaches of Brown’s responsibilities under federal law,” the statement continues.
Brown University president Christina Paxson issued a statement the week after the shooting with details on updated security measures, and the university said it plans to implement a stricter ID card policy.
“In addition, Barus & Holley lecture halls 166 and 168, eight immediately adjacent and proximate classrooms (155 through 165), and the immediately adjacent hallways, restrooms and entrances to that area of Barus & Holley will be closed and inaccessible to everyone,” the school’s administrative officials wrote to the Brown community in a Jan. 16 email obtained by Brown Daily Herald.
Brown University President Christina H. Paxson speaks during a press conference after a mass shooting prompted a lockdown on campus on Dec. 13, 2025. (Getty)
Paxson said there would also be a rapid response team designed to focus on safety, an after-action review to assess the events leading up to the shooting, and an external security assessment of the “perimeter of buildings, access points, cameras and technology, and other infrastructure conditions,” in a statement made the week after the shooting.
DiPrimio hopes the university will learn from the previous incident, and noted he has seen changes on campus.
“There’s a lot of new emergency resources, emergency buttons on campus. I’m seeing a lot more security, physically on the ground,” said DiPrimio. “I hope Brown can learn and move forward from this. I hope that we come together as a community, and we don’t tear each other apart.”
Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts released this image showing the man identified in deadly shootings at both Brown University in Rhode Island and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. (Justice Department)
As Brown University students return to campus, some have decided to organize a new group called “Students Demand Action at Brown University.” The group will gather for its first meeting of the semester on Wednesday, Jan. 21, according to the group’s social media.
“I want to understand the strategy moving forward to piece together what specific actions can be taken in Rhode Island or New England,” said DiPrimio. “I want to see changes federally on magazine capacity laws, but I think we need to start with piecemeal. Changes we can actually accomplish in a bipartisan way.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Brown University but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Preston Mizell is a writer with Fox News. Story tips can be sent to Preston.Mizell@fox.com and on X @MizellPreston
