Breakdown at Brown

Brown University’s response to the tragic and horrific mass shooting on its Providence campus on Saturday, December 13, revealed reported breakdowns in crisis communication, operational execution and real-time situational awareness within university leadership as the emergency unfolded.

 

At approximately 4:05 p.m. EST, during final-exam week, a gunman opened fire inside the Barus & Holley engineering and physics building, killing two students and wounding multiple others.

Victims were identified as Ella Cook, 19, a sophomore from Birmingham, Alabama, who served as vice president of Brown’s College Republicans and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, a freshman from Brandermill, Virgin

ia, who immigrated with his family from Uzbekistan and aspired to become a neurosurgeon.

University communications did not keep pace with events

Alerts lagged confirmed developments, included information later retracted, and provided less specificity than the moment required.

Brown’s first campus-wide alert was issued at 4:22 p.m., roughly 17 minutes after the shooting began. It warned of an active shooter near Barus & Holley but offered no guidance beyond shelter-in-place instructions and did not clarify whether the threat was localized, mobile or contained.

At 5:27 p.m., more than an hour after the initial attack, the university sent an alert reporting gunfire near Governor Street. That information proved incorrect and was retracted at 6:10 p.m. as unfounded – a correction that, during an active emergency, risked amplifying confusion rather than restoring clarity.

During the emergency, Brown struggled to provide consistent, authoritative direction to the campus and surrounding community. Corrections to earlier alerts during the active-shooter situation added avoidable confusion at a moment when precision was critical and trust in institutional leadership was paramount.

Guidance remained limited, leaving uncertainty about safety conditions, evolving risks and the status of the manhunt from the perspective of students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni and other stakeholders, as well as an awaiting nation seeking information and direction from university leadership.

Public statements emphasized grief and institutional solidarity but initially offered little actionable detail about protective measures or real-time developments.

Clear directives – where danger persisted, what had changed and how individuals should respond – were largely absent, leaving the campus community without a coherent operational picture from the institution charged with their immediate safety.

As events progressed, Brown’s leadership updates frequently followed external developments rather than setting the pace, forcing many to rely on police scanners, social media and news coverage to determine whether the threat had passed instead of authoritative university channels.

During early press briefings, Brown University President Christina H. Paxson was asked about what the students had been doing in the room and why they were there. She twice acknowledged that she did not know. Local political leaders fared no better, offering visibility without clarity and commentary without command.

For a top university with extensive security infrastructure and an $8 billion endowment, that

lack of real-time situational awareness at the presidential level exposed a breakdown in internal information flow at the most critical moment.

For the university community, the deeper failure was the absence of a visible, empowered campus command authority directing response, coordination and communication in real time.

The gap in leadership was most visible in the handling of the shelter-in-place order.

It remained in effect for hours without explanation of whether the threat environment had changed, whether any portion of the campus had been cleared, or what specific conditions would prompt an all-clear.

Reassurances were issued, but they were not anchored to verifiable operational updates, leaving the community to infer risk levels on its own, without institutional context or guidance.

From a university-governance perspective, the central failure was the absence of a clearly articulated campus incident command framework – one that integrated senior leadership, campus security, communications and student services into a single, authoritative operational posture.

No such command authority was evident, leaving responsibility to drift between administrative statements, security notices and external briefings without a single accountable leader explaining how decisions were being made.

That absence of command cannot be separated from crisis planning and training. Crisis communications only function when they reflect a rehearsed operational system; here, messaging gaps revealed failures in internal information flow and leadership access to a reliable operational picture during a fast-moving threat.

Brown University’s Department of Public Safety is led by Vice President for Public Safety and Emergency Management Rodney Chatman, who joined the university in 2021 after a career spanning municipal and higher-education safety roles, not police or crisis experience.

While his résumé reflects length of service, public reporting before the shooting documented internalvotes of no confidence from campus police unions, raising questions about leadership cohesion and preparedness well before the crisis unfolded.

In crises, experience is measured by whether command systems function under pressure.

Crisis leadership also requires defined decision thresholds that explain what leaders are monitoring and what conditions will change guidance. Those thresholds were never articulated. Shelter-in-place guidance was sustained without explaining what would end it or how campus safety assessments were being conducted.

Messaging remained fragmented. Under these circumstances – an active-shooter incident with fatalities, an unidentified suspect and a locked-down campus – university leaders were expected to impose structure quickly, define decision criteria and communicate forward-looking guidance at regular intervals.

As basic crisis communication and operational essentials, Brown University should have established a visible incident command led by a single accountable executive. That structure should have produced a shared, real-time operational picture for senior leadership based on verified building-level intelligence.

Campus movement and perimeter control should have been managed as a security operation, not treated as a messaging exercise. Communications should have reflected confirmed on-campus conditions, clearly stating what was known, what was not and what would trigger the next change in guidance. Leadership should have set and owned the operational narrative in real time.

What followed was a failure of crisis planning and execution.

At a moment when structure, clarity and authority were required, neither university leadership nor campus security imposed order on uncertainty. Best practice would have required a single command framework, predefined decision criteria and coordinated, forward-looking updates delivered by the institution.

The breakdown of those fundamentals left the community navigating a lethal crisis without confidence that the situation was being actively or coherently managed.

As of Wednesday, December 17 at 9 am no one has been arrested. However, I remained convinced that law enforcement would arrest the killer.

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Richard Torrenzano is chief executive of The Torrenzano Group. For nearly a decade, he was a member of the New York Stock Exchange management (policy) and executive (operations) committees. He is a sought-after expert and leading commentator on artificial intelligence, cyber and digital attacks; financial markets; brands, crisis, media and reputation. His new book is Command the Conversation: Next Level Communications Techniques.